No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 543 



a road that is smooth, well crowned, hard, and that will carry us 

 without any difficulty during the mouths of spring; and we also 

 know what it means to go over a road that is full of ruts, large, 

 deep sink holes, and with dangerous deep spots that you cannot 

 sometimes get through at all. \Yhat we are particularly interested 

 in, is how are we going to get them any better. 



Now, there are quite a number of ways by which this matter might 

 be considered. The other day a bill was introduced into our Legis- 

 lature providing for a great sum of money to be appropriated, and 

 for quite a radical reorganization of our State Highway Depart- 

 ment. Well, now, gentlemen all these things are very important, 

 and verv valuable, but 1 don't think we want to wait until the State 

 is going to do all of it for us. I think we can do a great deal for 

 ourselves, and I am going to sketch in just a few words exactly 

 what I did, and you can draw your own conclusions as to what 

 you can do in your own township. 



I live about seven miles east of Lancaster. The township is i'.ast 

 Lampeter. I am a practicing country doctor there, and T used to 

 have four horses, and seven years ago I got an automobile, and I 

 followed one automol)ile with two automobiles, and there was a road 

 that I used three, four or fives times a day, yellow, soggy clay in 

 the springtime after every heavy rain. It had been neglected. There 

 had been no attention y^aid to its drainage, and the first principles 

 of road construction had been absolutely ignored ; but there was 

 the road. It had its ruts and had great big depressions, and the 

 water after every rain would stay in the middle of the road, and 

 every time we had a freezing spell there it would be, and in some 

 places that road as it would come out of the springtime weather 

 would be at least one and a half feet deep with nothing but yellow, 

 soggy clay. 



Everybody knows Avhat that means. I used to drive this road be- 

 cause I had too, but I thought there was certainly some better con- 

 dition we could bring about. I was paying my road taxes like any- 

 ' body else and I was paying pretty heavy, and I appealed to my super- 

 visors, and said : "Gentlemen, this road is quite heavily used and 

 as a farmer and tax payer of this community and taking into con- 

 sideration the professional interest affected, I respectfully ask if 

 you won't do something to help me out." "Well," they said, "it is 

 just as good as before; we always fix it in the Spring, and we will 

 fix it next Spring." Well, things went along and nothing was doing, 

 and I requested these supervisors to let me take them out over the 

 road personally. I wanted them to get stuck in that rut with me 

 and them help me dig myself out. No, they would not do that; they 

 did not feel that it was their public duty to be particularly inter- 

 ested in going over the roads at bad seasons of the year, so they re- 

 fused. Then I got a camera and took a number of photographs of 

 the road in different weeks and in different seasons, and I ran the 

 photographs over a period of a year, and the outcome of it was that 

 as I got interested in this road subject T heard about a split road 

 drag invented by a man named King out in Missouri, so I put the 

 drag to work, and gentlemen, that drag worked a revelation in a 

 few hours. I could not get anybody to drive it for me; everybody 

 was skeptical ; the drag is no good ; it is a cranky contrivance, and 



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