120 
The charges in this case are about 88 cents per ton-mile. The average cost 
of transportation in the United States by wagon is 23 cents per ton-mile. 
The old law that every man must work on the roads six days annually 
is enforced feebly. By a statute passed in 1894, road taxes can be levied by 
the county and a road commissioner appointed. But this new law is 
proving a failure in the mountains and is giving way to the old custom 
because the mountain county is too poor to pay the commissioner’s salary, 
and because the mountain man May pay the tax in work, a fact which 
introduces again the old problem of road-work enforcement. In 1904 the 
total expenditures upon the highways in a number of rugged mountain 
counties amounted to about $24 per mile. The average expenditure for the 
State, much less dissected, was $48.57. The history of the mountain roads 
emphasizes the inability of the people to provide themselves with efficient 
highways, and manifests the great need for outside help, state or federal. 
In general, road material would haye to be imported at great expense. 
The costs of roads steadily increase as the forest retreats towards the 
headwaters. 
In 1907 the United States Department of Public Roads, as an object 
lesson, built and macadamized in Johnson County, 5,780 feet of road, and 
constructed through Cumberland Gap, 12,300 feet of macadam pike, and 
graded 900 feet more, at a total cost of $7,050 per mile. This work demon- 
strates again that the construction of good highways in the mountain 
region, while possible, cannot be done without outside help. Besides the 
government routes there is a short stretch of macadam road (1 to 20 miles) 
in five marginal counties, of which, however, Boyd County alone lies 
strictly within the mountain region. The coal company at Jenkins has 
surveyed and built six miles of well-graded dirt road connecting Jenkins 
and McRoberts. Owing to the enforcement of the road laws in Knott 
County, a fairly good ungraded dirt road extends thirty miles between 
Hazard and Hindman. Immediately west of Pine Mountain in Leslie 
County, no wagon roads were attempted till 1890, and few exist now. 
Before the advent of railroads, highway improvements were negligible, 
but the past twenty years have seen progress. Numerous stretches of road, 
eight to ten miles in length, afford somewhat fair transportation for 
wagons to the railroads. Where the development of coal and timber has 
increased the wealth of the community greatly, substantial bridges have 
been built. Progress has been slowest in the rugged, extreme southeastern 
