Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 8 · column 4 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
Lee hwy
From Page A7
approved by the Board of Supervisors, these taxes were used to pay for work done on the dirt roads and on the few bridges in the county. Work was contracted out to the lowest bidder. Petitions from the citizenry for new public roads or bridges went though the local circuit court, the applicable Road Board, and were then approved by the Board of Supervisors.
The forerunner of Lee Highway, the Warrenton Turnpike, might serve as an example of how the ordinary citizenry became intimately involved with the county’s dirt roads. The road passed through three Magisterial Districts: Piedmont, Hampton, and Jackson (the Town of Washington took care of the portion within its boundaries). The Road Board within each District would divide their length of the Warrenton Turnpike into sections. Road Acts over the years had sections varying in length from three miles to four miles to ten miles to “as the county sees fit.”
Each road section had an overseer. He organized the various men, teams of horses, plows, scrapers, and drag units to take care of his section. He worked his men ten hours a day. They received 65 cents a day; he received $1.25 a day.
Work was usually undertaken in the spring and early fall: mid-April to mid-June, and mid-August to midOctober. Freezing and thawing of road beds, rain, the constant beating the dirt roads took from wagon wheels and hooves of draft animals, rocks rising to the surface, manure accumulating on the roadways, turned roadbeds into a soupy mess. Look at muddy areas in fields along current roadways after a heavy rain to see what travelers had to pass through and what the local road crews had to deal with.
There were not too many bridges in the county in 1900. Use was made of fords, low and shallow places that allowed animals and wagons to pass from one side of a • stream or river to the other. People walked on logs or rough-hewn bridges across the waterways.
This then was the setting in Rappahannock County in 1900. However, a new phenomenon was about to appear on the county’s dirt roads, including the Warrenton Turnpike (eventually Lee Highway). The phenomenon? The automobile and the truck.
98.3%