The commercial. (Union City, Tenn.) 190?-193?, 1911-03-10
The Good Roads.

i The Good Roads.
4 The good road to the lake had rathe
cold reception last Monday. The trud
is there was a very good crowd 10 town
but most o. the people were interested
in the election Of road commissioner.
ard gaze very little attention 10 the
meeting upstairs. The committee was
not present to report and there was
nothing on hand except the address by
Mr. G. G. Ahles, representing the Z. S.
Division Of Public Highways. The COM
missioners should have by all means
heard this talk. II they had no inter-
est in the lake road at all this talk
would have been not only instructive
but highly edifying from a viewpoint
OF handling their work Mr.. AhIes is
no novice in the work. He is familiar
with the good roads legislation and work
that is being done in all the States and
above all he knows the soils and how
70 treat them in the making Of good
roads. Mr. Ahles said that it is prac-
tically impossible to inaugurate a hard
road movement here-we are not pre-
pared for it in many ways. The cost is
approximately $4,000 a mile and that
almost makes it prohibitive in a coun-
try no more advanced than ours. He
further added that we could have prac-
tically good roads by mixing sand with
our road bed, half clay and half sand,
and then its should be ploughed and
narrowed thoroughly until the bed was
perfectly loose and soft. He said that
this would make some of us doubtful,
but when the rains came the bed would
pack and cement together perfectly
firm and solid. The cost Of sand and
for this purpose would
be about two or three hundred dollars
a mile. This would be in addition, OF
course, to the leveling and grading Of
the roads, and would give us as good |
roads as we would want probably for
ten years or more.
In this connection we want to say that
the sand-clay roads leading out from
Jackson, Tenn, did not prove a sue
,ess, according to reports from that
country. The hard freeze caused them
% break through and destroy in large
measure the good work done on them.
these roads were built exactly
IS prescribed by the authorities we do
lot know We should like to have
ONE information along that line.
)bion County, with one or two rare
has never had any good
Dads. The money collected as a
Dad tax has been squandered and
gasted, and unless there is some better
ystem of handling this fund we will
ave another era of bad roads The
eople were very much interested in
he election OF road commissioners last
Ionday, but we hope this interest will .
ssume a more definite shape in the |
Of good roads. If the
Magistrate does his duty no road in the
ounty will be approved and no war :
Ints issued until the roads are i'm y
roved and kept in an improved con- .
tion. Unless Obion County has bet :
r roads in the futare the tax payers ?
e going to raise noise and this will =
J the undoing of number of officials g
they don't do their duty. The tax g
Iyers are getting tired of an everlast- q
6 road tax without any roads and they u
9 not going to put up with it much !"
niger Last Monday the court raised =
e merchants ad valorem for roads y
I'M to 10 cents on the hundred and, y
Squire King says, they will never u'
lrmur complaint if this money is ~
operly used on the roads, but if it is ie'
posed Of like it has been done for 70
my years, there will be cause for COM
lint and just cause.