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AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



February, 1910 



Monthly Comment 



Public Improvements in the Country 



T IS quite natural, in this age of improve- 

 ments, that the country itself be improved. 

 It may be a bit staggering to those who 

 have learned to contemplate nature in her 

 most natural moods, and to love her, to 

 be brought to realize that the country, 

 like the town, is in need of betterment; 

 yet nothing is more true than this, and the great wave of 

 demand for improvements and betterments that is sweep- 

 ing over the land has its zealous army of supporters in the 

 rural regions. To such an extent is this true that in some 

 districts there is scarce a foot of countryside that does not 

 expose an "improved" surface to the, as yet, unimproved 

 sky. 



To THE rural mind, and perhaps to some others, the 

 question of public improvements offers no difficulties. You 

 simply improve, and all sorts of beneficial results happen. 

 There is the beneficent and fundamental effect of the im- 

 provements themselves; there is the great proportionate in- 

 crease in the valuation of your own property, an increase you 

 first note in the swollen size of your own tax bills — but a 

 mere detail; there is the additional attractiveness of the 

 region for new settlers — who likewise help to increase valua- 

 tions and hoist up taxes; there are advantages you offer to 

 people who do not live in your community, pay no taxes, 

 assume no part of your burdens — the people who go joy- 

 ously skimming over your roads, raising perpetual dust and 

 endangering the lives of your family and your stock. 



For public improvements in the country begin, as a rule, 

 with the roads and end at precisely that point. The coun- 

 try is as yet too unsettled for matters of general sanitation 

 to be considered, and that perhaps is unnecessary; the road 

 remains the prime theme for rural improvement. And the 

 roads are the salvation of the country. They both take 

 people into it and they permit them to come away from it 

 — both blessings of very different kinds. A good road is a 

 valuable asset to any community, and a beautiful road is a 

 pearl beyond price, a prize of the first rank, a possession 

 that sums up and embodies both profit and beauty. It is 

 without doubt the most advantageous of all things rural 

 made by man. 



Unlike plants and trees and shrubs, roads do not merely 

 "grow"; they require to be made; they need to be scienti- 

 fically made; they demand care and knowledge and atten- 

 tion and imagination in their construction. If they are new 

 roads they must be laid out with some regard to the rights 

 of the property owners whose land is taken or by whose 

 territory they pass. If they are old roads made over, 

 the matter is one of positive delicacy, since the habits and 

 customs of a hundred years — or less — are wedded to defi- 

 nite landmarks and all sorts of animosities may be aroused 

 by well-intended advances. 



The making of a road is begun with the engineer, and 

 in many quarters is supposed to be completed with his en- 

 gagement. A good road needs more than the services of 

 a good engineer; it needs the imagination of the artist. 

 All roads have a scenic and artistic value which is actually 



of more importance than their adherence to a straight line. 

 They have, moreover, an aspect to-day that they will not 

 have to-morrow or twenty years from now. They have a 

 relationship to the landscape that is really more important 

 than serving as a gage for tax valuations. All these mat- 

 ters enter into the construction and determination of a road 

 in a manner quite as important as the structure of the road- 

 bed and the question of repairs. Yet every one of these 

 most important things is often overlooked in the construc- 

 tion of a road. The simple truth is, the road must be 

 designed with the care and the imagination that any work 

 of art is designed with. Its design is infinitely more im- 

 portant than its construction, because the latter can always 

 be bettered; whereas if the former is neglected or faulty, a 

 fundamental error has been committed for which there is 

 no remedy. 



Rural public improvements, like everything else of im- 

 portance, require to be carried out in a competent way by 

 competent people. The man with an axe can clear a path 

 through a forest, but he is clearly not the one to carry out 

 the construction of a modern road. The proof of com- 

 petency is the attainment of competent results. Local im- 

 provements everywhere throughout the United States are 

 in the hands of local bodies, the constituent members of 

 which have been lifted into office without any regard to 

 their competency for carrying out rational schemes of public 

 betterments. Having always managed their communities 

 in everything else, why not in the making of roads? Yet 

 there is no phase of country life that so urgently calls for 

 the services of the specialist. It is no exaggeration to say 

 that he is not only needed, but is needed at once in at least 

 a million places. And needed very greatly. 



If public improvements in the country sometimes fail 

 by reason of the incompetency of the persons who assume 

 to carry them out, there is another group of betterments 

 coming directly within the purview of the owners own 

 rights, which he himself can perfect and which constitute, 

 in most cases, the most notable contribution of all to rural 

 improvements. These are the individual betterments that 

 one carries out on one's own property. Most private prop- 

 erty improvements are made with a view to the owner's own 

 advantage, and they are apt to be of a personal character, 

 that is, not related to the betterments of one's neighbors 

 and having a distinctly personal and individual character. 

 This, however, is no detriment. There is no finer public 

 improvement, so far as roads are concerned, than a succes- 

 sion of handsome places handsomely treated, developed, 

 planted and arranged on their border lines. Nor, indeed, 

 does a place need to be handsome or gaudy to contribute 

 its quota to the public betterment, for a succession of small 

 places, artistically treated, are as much a contribution to 

 public art as the most grandiose of estates. And the per- 

 sonal note in this private work is often of a greater value 

 than the more uniform undertaking carried out with rod 

 and line. At all events the border line of a property is the 

 precise spot where the individual owner may make his per- 

 sonal contribution to the vexing question of public improve- 

 ments in the country. 



