1902.] GOOD ROADS. 4I 



whatever the case, they have followed in small, but equally 

 as bad, errors in the management of highways, but perhaps 

 on a little different line than that pursued in the cities, and it 

 is quite true that the mistakes, folly, and waste, in matters 

 ■of construction or improvement, either in the city or town, 

 are about equally divided. Both the cities and the towns 

 have made serious blunders in their public improvements. 



I want to say a word now about construction. The State 

 of Connecticut has in its care six particular features or prin- 

 ciples of construction under which the Highway Commis- 

 sioner's department is working. The first is earth roads ; the 

 second is gravel roads ; the third is Macadam ; the fourth, 

 Telford ; the fifth is the question of grade reduction ; and the 

 sixth is the taking care of the surface water and under drain- 

 age. During the last storm, as Mr. Seeley, your President, 

 rightly said, it was attended with a great loss of money, 

 thousands of dollars, because of the manner in which 

 some of our earth roads have been built. Down in one 

 little town I was called to treat eight miles of road, and I 

 found a loss of $30,000 in a downfall of rain that lasted only 

 two and one-half hours. I found, when I looked at the 

 bridges, fourteen in number, that there wasn't one that had 

 a good footstone. The construction was very poor, and as a 

 result the roads were gullied out in many places forty feet 

 deep and fifty feet wide, when a little care, with the addition 

 of a little more money, would have made a construction suit- 

 able to have withstood the onset of the elements and saved 

 the major portion of this loss. I think it is only fair to say 

 that the selectmen in charge of this town at this time were 

 not responsible for the work that was done by their prede- 

 cessors. Some of our towns work under a series of disad- 

 vantages with regard to the improvement of their roads ; some 

 of them are so situated that it is impossible for them to import 

 materials, access by rail being denied. In addition to this, 

 the town treasury is not able to respond to a very large out- 

 lay, so that the only recourse they have very many times is 

 to lay an earth road. My department, however, can be of 

 great assistance even here by removing boulders from the 

 road, by straightening the watercourses, and by taking out 

 these twelve-foot toy bridges and making them eighteen feet 

 wide, and in numerous other wavs their unfortunate condition 



