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77 9 State and Federal Highway In 1912 the Kentucky legislature authorized the creation of the Department of Public Roads, which was initially responsible for advising the counties in road and bridge construction and maintenance. Although the department’s formation marked a new era in the conceptualization of roads as developmental elements in state and regional transportation networks—rather than as matters of local travel convenience—and in the application of evolving engineering principles, legislators were reluctant to provide the financial resources required to adequately fund the hiring of departmental personnel. Road building now required technical expertise, a professional cadre of engineers, surveyors, draftsmen, and trained administrative staff. Nevertheless, state legislation provided a personnel budget of only $25,000, funded by a license tax on automobiles, and required that all hires be approved by the governor, which implied, of course, that Public Roads jobs were also patronage jobs.1 Though grossly underfunded, the highway engineers did begin to instill a new science-based discipline in the state’s road construction enterprise. They standardized bridge specifications and circulated to county-level officials standards for macadam road construction that included blueprints of road cross sections and model forms for contracts, bonds, fiscal court proposals, and advertising construction jobs to road contractors. Bridge construction had previously been the purview of county officials ; they delegated the task either to master carpenters, who erected wooden trusscovered bridges, or bridge-building firms such as Champion Bridge Company and King Bridge Company, both of Ohio, that erected bridges made from manufactured prefabricated iron components.2 Department engineers decried the traditional practice of road maintenance performed by the old “militia” or corvée labor system, which compelled local residents to work a set number of days per year on the county’s roads. The state highway engineer saw that system as “absolutely worthless and while some counties pretend to enforce the system there is usually more yarn spinning, tobacco chewing, and resting, done than work on roads.”3 The road surface of choice continued to be the venerable broken-stone macadam road, although engineers experimented with coverings of gravel and rock asphalt obtained from deposits in western Kentucky . New equipment began to replace the hand tools and wheelbarrows that were common in nineteenth-century road repair. Steam-powered rock crushers supplied 78  Overland Roads and the Epic of Kentucky’s Settlement macadam stone, and laborers used horse- or steam-powered plows, graders, scrapers, rollers, and water wagons to create level, low-gradient roadbeds. Though trained nineteenth-century engineers such as Sylvester Welch had been keenly aware of the relationships between efficient road design and transportation costs, road economics became a priority for engineers in the new Department of Public Roads. Surveyors and road builders had long believed that the best road was the shortest distance between two points, yet this rule of thumb failed to recognize the costs associated with running the line of a road directly across rough topography, which resulted in steep road gradients on hills that reduced significantly a horse’s tractive power. State engineers were able to demonstrate that by contouring road alignments to the topography, road gradient could be substantially reduced, thereby allowing both horse-drawn conveyances and motor vehicles to haul heavier loads, without significantly increasing road length. Moving freight on poor roads, be they inordinately steep or impassibly muddy, cost upwards of three times as much as moving freight on a high-quality road surface. In making the case for better roads, Department of Public Roads engineers sought to remove road building from the purview of county-level political officials. They did this by broadening substantially the argument for quality roads, advocating for acceptance of proven engineering standards, hiring qualified road engineers in each county, and fostering the use of large-scale machinery. Engineers also argued that the modern state needed to concern itself with the complex linkages among long-term investment in transportation infrastructure, planning at a regional and statewide scale, and the beneficial economies that movement on quality roads produced. The department’s advocacy for road improvement included a governor’s proclamation declaring October 24 and 25, 1913, as “Good Road Days”; a state traveling exhibition of a model road; and a state fair pictorial exhibit of twenty-three different road-construction models as examples of good and bad roads.4 Until 1914 the Department of Public Roads acted in an advisory capacity to the counties, but new legislation in that year authorized the department to establish a road...

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