ROAD PAVING MATERIAL. 245 



ROAD PAVING MATERIAL * 



BY JOHN T. CAMPBELL, SUKVEYOR AND CIVIL ENGINEER. 



When we consider the great importance of good roads, and the many things that 

 can be made available for paving them, we are almost struck dumb with wonder at 

 the meagre use that is made of the fair to good material so lavishly furnished us by 

 Nature. So many people have no conception of anything they have not seen done 

 — so many people prefer to trudge along over the steep, winding and muddy road 

 over which they have once successfully traveled, that it is too often much easier 

 for those of broader concejitions and greater enterprise to follow the roads of thtir 

 stupid neighbors than to*make the effort and endure the vexation of leading them 

 into better paths. Mankind, in the mass, progresses and moves forward much like 

 the waters; crowding and jostling each other, moving only because those who are 

 ahead are trying to keep out of the way of those who are following, and those who 

 are following are trying to keep up with those who are ahead. Thus moving, they 

 wander like the running water along the most roundabout courses, making their 

 channels more crooked by erosion, until two bends are worn into each other, making 

 a "cut off," and by pure, stupid luck, find a shorter road, while apparently trying 

 to make a longer one. 



How often have we labored and worried both our teams and ourselves, along a 

 muddy road, when near by, and parallel with it, a clever stream had piled up gravel 

 in tantalizing heaps. 



Coal slack, coal ashes and coal cinders make fair to good roads. Yet, in many 

 parts of the coal belt of the State, the people are pulling through the mud, in 

 plain sight of great heaps of that material, sufficient to pave all the roads of their 

 neighborhood, and are heard to lament the condition of the roads and the scarcity 

 of gravel. 



The best piece of road in Parke county is a section two miles long, going west 

 from Rockville, which was the first we built under the present gravel road law. 

 Owing to the supposed impossibility of getting gravel, I, as the engineer making 

 -the survey and estimate, and afterward superintending the construction, used coal 

 slack for the under two-thirds of the paving material, which Ave obtained from the 

 Sand ('reek coal mines, two and a half miles northeast of Rockville, and covered' 

 this with the upper third of such gravel as we could get. Last winter and spring 

 thi^ piece of road was noticeably the least cut into slush by the travel during the 

 frequent freezings and thawings, of any of the eight roads then leading from the 

 town. The west end of this same road was made of excellent gravel, but with les& 

 travel than on the east, or coal slack, end, but it went all to slush and had to be re- 

 graveled in the spring. I have forgotten the cost of the coal slack, but remember 



*Read before the Indiana Association of Surveyors and Civil Engineers, at Indianapolis, 

 January 21 and 22, 1885. 



