544 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



the fall these underground drains continue to draw moisture from the road 

 bed and as no more water is able to penetrate the soil through this frozen 

 covering till spring thawing takes place the result is a thorougly drained 

 road bed and by virtue of the very dry condition in which this ground is in 

 the water that finds its way into the soil at the time of the spring thaws is 

 very soon taken care of. 



Permit me to relate an incident which took place on my farm near 

 Cedar Falls last spring. I have a small pasture forty rods wide and sixty- 

 five long. This field has a low place running across each end about fifteen 

 rods from the ends and both have tile clear across the field, discharging into 

 the highway adjacent. Last spring just as the snow was going off and 

 before the ground had thawed clear out we took the broad tread wagons 

 and hauled seventy-five or eighty loads of manure from the cow harn and 

 spread on this pasture. This stuff was as wet as such manure usually is in 

 the spring when the pile thaws out. I think most farmers are posted on this 

 point. In coming into this field we drove in at the ends and crossed the 

 lines of tile at right angles. The ground at this time being thawed out a short 

 depth, as soon as we struck the field the wheels of the wagons sunk into the 

 sod from one to three inches till we came to within forty or fifty feet of the 

 drain, then the ground began to hold up the wagons till they were over to 

 the other side, when they went down again. A week after we had finished 

 the job you could not tell where the wagons had crossed the tile, but the 

 deep wagon tracks were still in the other ground last fall. I think they are 

 there yet. 



We had a piece of road some thirty rods long a mile or so out of town 

 that three years ago was simply impassable. It had a clay quicksand sub- 

 soil, and when the spring thaw took place the bottom fell out. Two years 

 ago Mr. Phelps, overseer of highways for that district, put in a course of 

 tile right in the middle of the road. I passed over this highway last spring 

 when the thaw was at its worst and this piece of ground was dry and fine 

 while the other parts of the road were one continuous mudhole. 



Give me a free hand in putting in tile with a good outlet and I would 

 like to see the piece of highway that I could not make passably passable. I 

 am told that two courses of tile would be very expensive. Let us examine 

 the cost of what I am pleading for and what the roads have cost us under 

 the old regime. The piece of road eighty rods long I spoke of in the first 

 part of my paper, running from Grundy county to Cedar Falls, has been 

 under improvement more than thirty years to my certain knowledge, and in 

 the meantime there has been expended in work thousands of dollars. Last 

 spring the only passable part of this road was a stretch of about twenty 

 rods which had been tiled the previous year. Now at a cost of one dollar 

 per rod, which is a large estimate for labor and tile, we would have ex- 

 pended two dollars per rod, which is a mere bagatelle to what has been spent 

 on this stretch of road. Our overseer of highways has completed the tiling 

 of this roadway, graded it up and now we think that the problem of this 

 slough of despond is solved. 



