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Of all changes brought about by increased mobility, the need for good highway construction and maintenance was perhaps the most immediate concern for local and state governments. A primitive transportation system did exist, accommodating horses, mules, and horse-drawn carriages, but early motorists spent much of their time mired in mud.
A.L. Lillard of Flint Hill, who worked in highway maintenance in Rappahannock County until his promotion in 1951 took him to Loudoun County, remembers some of the old “corduroy” roads that were in existence when he started road work in the ’30’s.
The roads, so named because they had the uneven texture of a piece of waled cloth, were built by placing small logs side by side along a cleared path and covering them with dirt for smoothness. “The trouble was,” Lillard remembered, “after a while they were just like washboards. We didn’t have equipment heavy enough to level them out so maintenance was just filling the ruts with more dirt.”
“And I built many a bridge,” Lillard said. “We’d get logs from farmers who were just glad to have a bridge. We’d go in the mountains and get a lot of slim trees, build a crib on each side and fill it with rocks. Thpn we’d build a deck with logs leveled off with an ax. We’d drive spikes down to hold it and call it a bridge.”
What to do if the river was too wide for the available logs? “We built a log pen in the middle of the river and filled it with rocks,” Lillard said. “Then we built each span to the pen. I tore up some of those old bridges in Prince William County not so very long ago. -They lasted longer than you’d think.” t*
Improvements to the old construction and maintenance techniques still sound primitive today. Later, Lillard drove a modem truck with a crank-type windshield wiper. His “defroster” was a lantern that he strapped to the windshield, allowing a tiny peephole through which to see the unlit road. “And we got one pair of glass curtains every fall,” he said. “We were only allowed one set for the season. Of course, they’d shatter right away, but that was all we were allowed.”
For snow removal there was a big crawler type tractor pulling a blade and teams of horses. The highway department didn’t maintain stables, though. “We hired them from farmers,” Lillard said. Before the snow removal system was well developed, folks along the roads maintained their own stretch of highway. “But lots of times the snow just lay there until it melted,” Lillard said. “Almost everyone still had horses and when it snowed, they just
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