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1. The Case of the Laborer from Louisa
- University of Virginia Press
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Reverend Littleberry James Haley (1832–1917) wrote in mid-January 1882 that he had stayed at home in Louisa County on both Wednesday and Thursday that week: “The roads are too awfully muddy to travel.”1 He is one of three central Virginians whose stories illustrate how people traveled before the twentieth century and how the coming of the horseless carriage and hard-surface roads transformed the traditional patterns of life and work in the region. These three men involved themselves in three major developments in the law between the 1890s and the 1910s that led to Virginia’s highway system: a court case in the 1890s; state legislation in 1906 following a formal amendment to the state constitution; and federal legislation in 1916. Pastor Haley’s Muddy Sundays L. J. Haley spent fifty years, beginning in the late 1850s, as a Baptist preacher in various churches, mostly in central Virginia’s Louisa area, where his eight children grew up. To fulfill his obligations at South Anna, Trinity, Hopeful, and elsewhere, he knew that he could not count on good weather or good roads, and he could not always wait for the weather, or the roads, to get better. In addition to preaching Sunday sermons, he had to visit the faithful and officiate at baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Moreover , as county superintendent of education for a while, he had to go to Louisa Court House from time to time to take care of school business. Writing of one of his churches in February 1888, he noted, “I go to Hopeful. What a ride thro the mud!” Two weeks later he found the “roads utterly desperate” and “traveling almost impossible except on horseback and that bad enough.” The next February proved no better. He went to Hopeful on a “very rainy day”; his riding horse, Old Fred, got him home 1 The Case of the Laborer from Louisa Conscripts, Convicts, and Public Roads, 1890s–1920s again that night, but the reverend found it “a very disagreeable ride,” with “mud and slush everywhere.” When it came to longer trips, trains sometimes proved Pastor Haley’s salvation. One time he reported contentedly: “I go to Richmond with my little boys, Littleberry and Bunny, and they see the city. A Big Thing with the little boys. Go down on an excursion train, one dollar round trip. Boys half price. Spend the day in Richmond.” On a spring day in 1882, he performed a marriage in the morning—“$5.00”—and then took a train from Fredericks Hall to Warrenton for a meeting that evening of the Baptist General Association. The years passed, and Haley’s reports about travel by horsepower during the winter months remained as bleak as the weather. In 1908 a January thaw came to Louisa. On the twenty-fourth, he reported that he had found a “good congregation” when he got to Little River, but “the roads are very bad, as muddy as I ever saw them.” During the first third of the twentieth century, nevertheless, transportation —in Louisa and Albemarle Counties and across the nation— embarked on as great a change as the railroad had brought in the middle third of the nineteenth century. In the year 1893, two brothers, bicycle mechanics in Springfield, Massachusetts, developed the first successful American automobile powered by gasoline, and by 1896 they were producing and marketing cars at the rate of one a month. Also in 1893, Congress established the Office of Public Road Inquiry in the Department of Agriculture.2 Thus began both the age of automobiles in America and the era of the Good Roads movement. Both would find their way to central Virginia and begin their transformation of life there before the 1920s. Like Pastor Haley, two more people, one each from Louisa and Albemarle , exhibited Virginia’s system of transportation in their daily lives. And each took actions that worked directly to facilitate the changes. Judge Duke’s Sunny Everydays Richard Thomas Walker Duke Jr. (1853–1926) lived on Park Street in Charlottesville, where he and his wife Edith raised five children. A lawyer, he served for a time beginning in 1888 as judge on the city’s court. Judge Duke, like Pastor Haley, kept a diary, commented on the weather, and traveled a lot.3 Duke had a sunnier disposition than did Haley. His diary for the year 1892, for example, is sprinkled with entries like that for February 13, “beautiful aurora at night,” or...