The Abbeville press and banner. [volume] (Abbeville, S.C.) 1869-1924, 1915-11-24
GOOD ROADS.

roads, we have before US a letter
from the American Highway Asso-
ciation, of Washington, D. c., which
so well states the facts with regard
to the subject of highways in gener-
al, that we are copying it at length
here. 1t says:
"Before the war in Europe af-
fected the rates at sea it cost the
American farmer more to haul a
bushel of wheat nine and half
miles to the railroad station for
shipment than it cost the buyer to
ship the same bushel of wheat from
New York to Liverpool, distance
of three thousand miles. The aver
age cost of hauling ton of farm
produce, or ton of anything else,
over the average country road is
about twenty-three cents a mile;
seventy years ago the cost of the
same service was seventeen cents.
The cost of hauling over the rail-
roads is less now than one-ninth as
much as it was sixty years ago. The
cost of hauling by railroad has al
most reached the vanishing point;
the cost of hauling on the country
roads has gone up as the roads have
gone down.
A Half Billion Charge.
"By careful calculation, Logan
Waller Page, Director of the U. S.
Office of Public Roads, has reached
the conclusion that with wise and
equitable road laws and good bust
ness management it would be en-
tirely practicable for the people to
save themselves on the two items
of hauling and administration the
enormous sum of S290,0O0,OO0 year
ly. The railroads in the United
States carry about 9O0,000,000 tons
Of freight annually and of this vast
tonnage at least 2O0,O00,0OO tons
are hauled over the country roads
to the railroad station or to the
canals for shipment. The immense
volume of mining products aggre-
eating millions of tons is not in
cluded in this estimate but only the
agricultural, forest and miscellane-
Gus products hauled by wagon over
the public roads, nor is the cost of
hauling back and forth between the
farms and the mills. 1t is an un-
derestimate rather than an overesti-
mate to place the cost of hauling
ovel the country roads at not less
than $5OO,OOO,OOO yearly, and no
other business but the business of
farming could stand such a strain
without bankruptcy.
The Drain of Marketing.
"The main cause of agricultural
distress, a subject of perennial
alarm to popular favorites" is not
so much the wages of the workers
or the infertility of the soil or the
prices of the products, but the enor-
nous drain of getting the stuff to
market, the waste of the roads in
the wear and tear of machinery, the
sacrifice of teams, the ineficiency
of service compelled by impossible
Tributary to every mar
ket town or railroad station there
are what Mr.. Page calls "zones of
From the first of
these zones all products can be de-
livered to market at profit, and
from the rest one class of products
after another must be eliminated
because of the prohibitive cost of
hauling; and beyond lie vast terri
tories that cannot be cultivated
without the building and constant
of roads suited to
whatever traffic there may be devel-
oped. 1t has been demonstrated
that as the roads from the market
towns have beer improved there has
been a great increase of their busi-
ness and corresponding improve
inert in the condition and opportuni-
ties of the rural population, larger
of the individual farmer,
greater traffic for the railroads, bet
ter supplies and lower prices for the
consumer. 1t does not pay to
raise crops that cannot be marketed
readily and cheaply. Millions of
dollars worth of field and orchard
crops have been utterly wasted be-
cause of expensive and inadequate
facilities for marketing. This is one
of the hard problems with which the
L. S. Department of Agriculture is
trying to deal through the greatest
experts in the land and they have
found that the building of good
+bo e,,oooee of