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

[Ralph Goff]

Farmers building roads was a common practice here in Sask. in the thirties 
according to stories my Dad used to tell. "Road work" was a way of paying 
off your land taxes, or portions thereof. A farmer might supply his own team 
of horses to use on the equipment. Now I am trying to remember the name of 
the scraper type implement they used to dig the ditches and build up the 
grade. Sort of a big scoop shovel shaped thing with two handles and pulled 
by a team of horses as I recall. I've heard there was quite an art to making 
it work and not getting hurt in the process.
As years passed and machinery got bigger there were municipal "maintainers", 
basically a pull type grader on 4 steel wheels. It took a man on the 
platform to work the big wheels controlling cutting depth and angle. And I 
believe farmers would put their own tractors on the maintainer to grade the 
roads in their local area.
I've posted a pic before of one of the later maintainers with a Wisconsin 
engine powered hydraulic system that was used here in the 40s and 50s. Being 
pulled by a big old crawler tractor, not likely owned by a small farmer.

Ralph in Sask.
http://lgoff.sasktelwebsite.net/
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chuck Bealke" <bealke at airmail.net>
To: <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 6:04 AM
Subject: [AT] OT: Flashback - Early Farmers Building County Roads


>
>
> 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
>
>
>
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