[AT] OT: Flashback - Early Farmers Building County Roads

[Chuck Bealke]

On 1/24/2006 at 6:07 PM Bill Bear Hood wrote:

>Wayne S should have remembered that there is an older County "Ford" at the
>Temple TX show every year....That tractor was used by a County Road and
>Bridge crew in Texas to pull scraper and packers.  

Bear,

Your comment reminds me of what an old time neighbor told me when I was a kid about farmers helping build early county roads.  It seems back when the farmers in my boyhood area of St. Louis County, MO, still had horses and mules that the county (or state?) decided they needed help building country roads where none existed.  I think this was between WW1 and the depression (mostly pre-tractor times for our area) . They offered the farmers payment (contracts?) for delivering rock with teams to be used in the road bed.  I know the German family that owned our farm before us (since the late 1800's) had long ago removed a wall of rock from a place in our woods near a creek to build our farm road before my grandfather bought the place, so there must have been quarry method smarts in place.  As I recall, the neighbor said that the tricky part of getting the limestone rock delivered and prepared was crushing it, and that for main road building, the county provided a crusher near road construction sites.  So the farmers were paid to bring big rocks to the crusher - and perhaps to haul rock from there to the roadbed.  Don't know all the details, but was wondering if farmers helped on roads here in Texas.  Sounds like it would have been a country-wide practice.

Chuck Bealke