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By Don Audette
Rappahannock News
Contributing Writer
Since Fall is the time of year for the annual revision of the county’s Six-Year Plan for Secondary Road Improvements, let’s look at a little history to set things in perspective.
For example, the word “improvement,” in the sense of making something better, has a long lineage, going back to the middle 1600s, and its use in connection with roads became common sometime afterwards. Back in 1791, a United States Senator from Pennsylvania, William Maclay, mentioned in his diary for Thursday, Feb. 3, 1791, that in the evening he attended a “meeting of a society formed lately for promoting the improvement of roads and inland communications.”
The term rolled forward and about 100 years later, in January 1896, the Virginia Assembly passed an act to “improve” 85 miles of road in Rappahannock County. In 1896, that meant to do some grading work. The term “improvement” is still in use today, another 100 years later, for road work, but it now means to put a surface on a road, either asphalt, concrete, gravel, or some other surface treatment.
; One hundred years ago, all roads in the county were dirt. There were no paved roads, no cars, no route numbers. People rode horses and haul things around in horse-drawn wagons. The dirt roads were hard, bumpy, and dusty in the summer and a sea of mud during the rainy seasons. People desperately wanted improved roads. They would be stunned to learn that in 1998 people drove cars and trucks along magnificent roads to get to where they could drive “offroad,” over rough terrain, through mud holes, up steep slopes. They’d think things were upside-down, backwards.
The push for better roads 100 years ago received its m^jor 1 impetus from bicyclists in the
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