392 FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



should be doue under the direct supervision of one officer, and under con- 

 tract ; that there should be but one road district in a township, and that 

 tile drainage should be a part of the process of all road drainage. 



Mr. Hollenbeck : Foot passengers are neglected in all these discussions. 

 School children have to walk to school and have rights to be considered, 

 and provision should be made for them. In Canada they underdrain by a 

 central tile with laterals from it every three or four rods. 



Mr. Perry: The papers do not note the difficulty of obtaining stone 

 in this region. One in four is too much crown for roads, and three-inch 

 tile is too small for tile at the side of the road. 



Dr. Miles : It is better to place the tile for underdraining the road bed at 

 the sides, a little inside of the line of the open ditches rather than under 

 the center of the road, for when they are so placed, if the surface of the 

 road is hard enough to be impervious and sloped enough to throw the water 

 to the sides it is always dry under the road bed itself, which will not be the 

 -case where the water has to go under the center of the road bed to find its 

 -outlet. 



The advice to make the cross section of the road a gentle oval is wrong. 

 The surface of the road should slope both ways gently and uniformly away 

 from its center line to the side ditches. 



Mr. Hollenbeck : All these papers propose to centralize power and increase 

 taxation to make roads for posterity. 



Mr. Eosencranz : I was raised near Ann Arbor and my father was path- 

 master for years and I have worked roads for 35 years, and I know nothing 

 of holiday road working. Roads can't be made in a day. 



We have many hills that are sand on top, then quicksand and then blue 

 clay, and whenever we grade down to near the clay level we get detestable 

 roads. In such case how are they to be drained? 



Prof. Carpenter: The only way is to build stone drains in the cut with 

 ^d itches along the sides of the top of the cut. 



As to paying tax in money or labor, the former has the arguments and the 

 latter the facts. Our road work is well done, what there is of it. There is 

 so little of it that even if it were applied as money it would amount to but 

 little. 



Pres. Billings: Our law allows towns to vote money tax and no town in 

 the State has done it. 



Dr. Wilson : Kersey street was a sandy soil but with a top surface that 

 made a fair road originally. This was graded out and filled in with clay and 

 then gravel, but not underdrained in the center, and it has been veryb&d ever 

 since. 



Pres. Willits : It strikes me that we often sacrifice more than we gain in 

 sticking to the section lines for our roads. Prof. Carpenter has shown us 

 that it may be actually as many rods over a hill as around it, while on the 

 level road around the hill we may be able to haul two or three times the 

 load that we could haul over it. Another consideration against the section 

 line roads is, that it is always further from one point to another to go 

 around a corner than to go directly, or, as with our section line roads, we 

 have to say "across lots." The prime consideration in locating a road 

 should be, where will it best serve the purposes of a highway? Not, where 

 ■can it be placed so as to leave the squarest fields? 



Mr. Pierce: I have noticed in the north woods, the method of getting out 



