50 
House 
6 ^ Garden 
OUR GASTRONOMIC HIGHWAYS 
Filling in One Form or Another Seems to be the 
Only Inducement Along Popular American Roads 
T here are two words in common parlance at the mention of 
which the mind is Hooded with pleasant and romantic thoughts. 
One is the word “coach” and the other is the word “inn”. 
You think of those picturesque travelers—Mr. Pickwick and 
the members of his club bowling along the English highways 
between hedgerows, of Dr. Johnson on his way to the Hebrides, 
Laurence Sterne on his Sentimental Journey, Cobbett on his Rural 
Rides, George Borrow on his tramp through Wild Wales. You 
think of horses ploughing through snow to reach, at last, the 
warmth and security of an inn. You think of the perils of the 
road—highwaymen, accidents to the coach and its horses, the 
abduction and eloping of fair maidens. Then the inn itself, with 
its portly, apple-cheeked host, its comely damsel behind the bar, 
its huge roasts, its beefsteak and kidney pies and draughts of ale. 
You think of an arched entrance through which the coach drove 
into a yard ringed about with picturesque galleries. You think 
of a tap room where travelers made merry after their long ride. 
You think of the candles that lighted them up to dark bedrooms 
in far corners of the inn. 
O NCE on a day travelers along the highways gazed at scenery; 
now they catch fleeting glimpses of billboards. Once they 
went leisurely to an inn; now they rush furiously from filling 
station to filling station. 
All you find on the modern American highway today are bill¬ 
boards and filling stations. The fine admiration of a tree in autumn 
foliage is broken by the suggestion to eat hot dogs, to buy So-and- 
So’s tires, wear Whosis’ clothes and use Whatsis’ gasoline. Tire 
vision of the open road is smeared with shanties at which you are 
induced to guzzle soft drinks and gnaw torrid poodles. A foreigner 
traveling for the first time along our highways would think that 
we Americans did nothing but eat. Eor on our roads today you 
either fill yourself or fill your car. Roadhouses, roadside lunch 
stands and gasoline tanks, all are the same—they are all filling 
stations. The highways of America have degenerated into gastro¬ 
nomic highways. 
For a long time now the warfare against billboards has been 
waged with more or less success. Local authorities restrict their 
use in towns, but the authorities who control the open roads 
between towns seem to have done nothing to arrest this deliberate 
destruction of countryside beauty. Every possible vantage point 
is seized to display some ware. You await anxiously the turn of the 
road, and the glimpse is blocked by a billboard. 
Even more an abomination to the eye is the average roadside 
lunch stand. Its heralded menus are revolting to the appetite. 
Cannot these, too, be restricted? Are all our country roads to 
become vast chains of hot dogs? If we must have such counters 
is there no way in which the people who erect them can be induced 
to make them less of an eye sore? The manufacturers of soft 
drinks might take a lesson from the great gasoline companies 
which are making a deliberate effort to give their filling stations 
in towns a presentable architectural appearance. 
There is another phase to the roadside lunch stand and to the 
roadside gasoline filling station which provides food for serious 
thought. The men and women and children who tend them were 
once occupied with country industries. The men farmed, the 
women had their household work and the children did chores. 
Today an appreciable part of the time and energy of these people 
is devoted to the lunch counter and the gasoline pump. You 
wonder, when a farmer’s wife grinds out your five gallons of gas, 
if she still has time to make apple butter and put up preserves. 
You wonder, as the farmer’s lad dishes up a plate of hot dogs, if 
he has yet been taught how to plough a straight furrow, if he still 
churns butter and splits kindling. 
It is true that in towns our gasoline companies are encouraging 
the erection of filling stations that will not be revolting to the eye, 
but between towns, on the open road, no such inducements seem 
to be offered. Here’s a chance for some extensive missionary work. 
Isn’t it possible for our gasoline companies to offer prizes for the 
best appearing and best maintained country road station? To hire 
an architect to design a number of such stations? And to provide 
roadside dealers with them? Surely this would be a step forward. 
A GREAT improvement has been made undoubtedly in the 
restriction of billboards and the appearance of filling stations 
in our thickly populated towns. It is now time that attention was 
given the wide stretches between towns. For the one filling station 
in town that is presentable there are scores along the road whose 
ugliness shriek to the skies. Beauty, like charity, begins at home; 
but it shouldn’t stay there. It is just as culpable to give offense on 
an open road as it is to give offense on a thickly populated road. 
Wandering down our roads today your mind is visited by 
unseemly and disturbing thoughts. You see Dr. Johnson and 
Laurence Sterne and Cobbett and Borrow faring along, and you 
wonder what sort of books they would have written had their 
highways been American highways of today, their inns American 
roadhouses. You wonder what Mr. Pickwick would say and 
Sammy Weller and all those other valiant men and fair women to 
whom the road spelled beauty and the inn at the end of it refresh¬ 
ment and content. 
