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

[Bill Bear Hood]

Good story Chuck
I had a great Uncle, that I did not meet until I was 30 and he was 85.  He migrated to the high plains of Texas, near Denver City/Plains, and farmed cotton.  The family story is that he got a neighbor girl in a "family" way and left the county--about 500 miles west.  

He had a fresno or slip up next to the house water well on his homeplace and I mentioned it and my father's use of it behind a tractor.  He said when he moved to Yoakum County and started farming dryland cotton, he paid part of his property taxes by working on the county roads.  Most of the roads were laid out along section lines and you could substitute time with your teams, wagons and equipment for a portion of your taxes. He said if you had time in the off season, the county would pay for your services by the day after you had paid your share of the property "road tax".  He later became a County Commissioner in the '50's--which in Texas at that time meant you were the road man for your precint (sp?).  Today some counties still have road commissioners and larger counties have a Unit System with one set of men and equipment for all four precints.  He remained single throughout his life and I never had the guts to ask him about his "forced migration west."
Later my middle daughter lived in Denver City and taught in Plains (county seat).  He was dead and gone by then, but lots of folks remembered him.  


--- "Chuck Bealke" <bealke at airmail.net> wrote:



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 bore 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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