TOPSOIL STRIPPING 97 



are marked with red water-proof crayon. Stakes set to 

 grade are better than cut or fill stakes and should be used 

 wherever possible even though a slight hole may be required. 

 Laths may be driven alongside to indicate their positions. 

 Cut and fill stakes should be marked in feet and inches and 

 not in feet and tenths. For heavy fills long poles are 

 sometimes used with their tops at the finished grade, thus 

 doing away with the labor of setting more stakes after the 

 first have been covered up. Where the cut is considerable, 

 the first cut stakes set will not remain during the excavation 

 operations unless left on little hillocks, and to do this is 

 expensive. Therefore after the first cut stakes have been 

 plowed up or otherwise removed, other stakes in the same 

 position will be necessary. 



Topsoil Stripping. The first thing to be done is to 

 strip the entire tract of its topsoil, which may be from 6 

 inches to a foot in depth. The soil is piled in large mounds 

 with spiral drives up the sides in positions where there is 

 to be little cut or fill. It would appear to the layman 

 cheaper to excavate a certain part of the tract to the 

 proper subgrade and then to cover it with topsoil stripped 

 from an adjacent tract. This, however, may not be the 

 case, and to systematize the work and avoid confusion, the 

 entire site is stripped at the beginning of operations. In 

 large operations the topsoil is piled; in small ones the top- 

 soil may be spread direct, thus saving the cost of double 

 handling of the material. (Figs. 7, page 29, and 10, page 

 37.) 



Excavation by Pick and Shovel. The soil is broken 

 up by picks and shoveled into dump carts, skid wagons or 

 dump wagons by the use of round-pointed, short-handled 

 shovels. From the engineer's point of view this method is 

 the most satisfactory, because the subgrade can be dressed 



