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The Nineteenth-Century Evolution of Local-Scale Roads in Kentucky's BluegrassAuthor(s): Karl Raitz and Nancy O'MalleySource: Geographical Review, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Oct., 2004), pp. 415-439Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30034289 .

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The Geographical Review

VOLUME 94 October 2oo04 NUMBER 4

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY EVOLUTION OF LOCAL-SCALE ROADS IN KENTUCKY'S BLUEGRASS

KARL RAITZ and NANCY O'MALLEY

ABSTRACT. In the nineteenth century, local-scale roads in central Kentucky were built subject to local knowledge and cultural tradition but within the context of legal authority and folk- or science-based engineering precepts. This study demonstrates how legal and engineering standards-though conceived as transcendent and objective--were in fact contingent on the region's physical attributes as well as its cultural traditions and character. Thus local road alignment and construction have been influenced by and contingent on local knowledge, dialogue, and debate since frontier times. Keywords: Kentucky, local roads, road engineering, road history, road law.

On 3 December 200oo3, state transportation officials gathered beside U.S. Highway 27-68 in Lexington, Kentucky, the county seat of Fayette County, to dedicate the newly reconstructed federal road that links Lexington to Paris, the county seat of adjoining Bourbon County. The highway is 12.5 miles long and is locally known as the "Paris Pike." The ceremony marked the culmination of a complex, thirty-seven- year-long vetting process that included engineering plans and proposals, protests and lawsuits by abutting landowners, public hearings and debates, and finally in- tensive consultation between engineers and landowners before and during road reconstruction. The remarkably altered roadway cost more than $93 million, or about $7.5 million per mile, nearly double the cost of any comparable road in the state. What had been a narrow, shoulderless, two-lane asphalt track laid atop a nineteenth- century turnpike had been transformed into a four-lane parkway built to inter- state-highway specifications and carefully engineered to preserve historic landscapes (Figures 1 and 2). Horse farms line long sections of the route, their road frontage demarcated by rock fences that required removal and reconstruction by expert masons (Schneider 2003, 9-13).

The Paris Pike reconstruction process illustrates vividly that legal statutes and engineering standards are not universally applicable-though conceived as objective and transcendent--but are subject to local conditions and concerns; as David Livingstone affirms, the authority of legal and "scientific knowledge is produced

S DR. RAITZ is a professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506, where Ms. O'MALLEY is the assistant director of the William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology.

The Geographical Review 94 (4): 415-439, October 2004 Copyright c 2005 by the American Geographical Society of New York



416 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

FIG. 1--This section of the realigned U.S. Highway 27-68, or the new Paris Pike, runs just south of Paris, Kentucky, in Bourbon County. This is a view of the southbound lanes, with the more-than-loo- foot-wide parkway center strip to the left. Note the broad, compacted grass shoulder on the right. Completed in 200oo3, the new highway has won numerous design and engineering awards. In some places, the new road incorporates short sections of the original alignment. Here the southbound lanes represent a new grade, and the original road, now widened, serves as the northbound lanes (not visible here) beyond the treed median. (Photograph by Karl Raitz, February 200oo4)

differently in different spaces, [and] it is confronted differently in different arenas" (2oo4, 140). The process whereby local-scale road networks evolved, in the context of mutually contingent local traditions, legal statutes, and engineering precepts, is complex. How historical local-scale roads were established along given alignments and subsequently adjusted or otherwise modified is, for many places, either un- documented or contained in fugitive records-difficult to find or a trial to decipher. Consequently, historical local road building is often enigmatic, its rationale wistful speculation at best. In his edifying study of the evolution of the Niagara Peninsula road network, Andrew Burghardt found in the historical record satisfactory expla- nations for the construction of most primary roads. But he was exasperated by the dearth of information about the local-scale roads that webbed the region, many of which were relict. "Some unknown value of felt need is required," he wrote, "before a road is constructed, but once it is in existence that road will remain in use" even if it is not heavily traveled (Burghardt 1969, 439). In part, the documentary opacity of Burghardt's "unknown value of felt need' the rationale for and method of road establishment, is the basis for Carlyle Buley's lament that a systematic study of road development has yet to be written but that its sources likely lie not in federal or state statute books but in county-level records (1950, 449).



LOCAL-SCALE ROADS IN KENTUCKY 417

FIG. 2-The old Paris Pike's original alignment in Fayette County, near Lexington, is shown here in 2002 before reconstruction began. The narrow, two-lane federal highway followed a turnpike track surveyed in 1827 to replace the original organic Maysville Road that ran a mile or more to the right, or southeast. During the 1930s the road was widened and hard surfaced but left shoulderless. The roadside rock fences to the left and distant right date from the 1850s; the fence on the immediate right was likely built in the 1920s. (Photograph by Karl Raitz, March 2002)

Our purpose here is to demonstrate the form and extent of local contingency in the jurisdictional application of legal statutes and engineering standards through a case study of the evolution of local-scale roads in central Kentucky (Livingstone 2oo003, 10-11). We contend that, within the context of prescriptive legal statutes and engineering standards, road construction has been influenced, even shaped, by local contingencies-that is, local people acting in their best self-interest-since frontier times. We also believe that similar processes affected local-scale road construction in many Atlantic Coast and trans-Appalachian states.

CENTRAL KENTUCKY ROADS IN CONTEXT

Paris Pike is the modern incarnation of one of the oldest routes in trans-Appala- chian America, and its historical development, at least in general outline, is well documented. It is the southernmost section of the 67-mile-long Limestone Road that linked Maysville-originally Limestone-an Ohio River port in northeastern Kentucky, to frontier Lexington. Since its inception as "Smith's waggon road" in the 1780s, it has also been known as the "Lexington-Paris-Washington-Limestone Road" and the "Maysville, Washington, Paris, and Lexington Turnpike" (Coleman [19351 1995, 27).




FIG. 3-Jackstown Road traverses the Inner Bluegrass topographic surface east of Paris in Bourbon County, Kentucky. Local relief rarely exceeds too feet, although dissection near major streams can yield steeper slopes. Beef-cattle and burley tobacco farms prosper on the fertile, limestone-derived soils. The road alignment follows original property boundaries laid out according to metes-and-bounds surveys. (Photograph by Karl Raitz, May 2004)

The road's earliest landscape expression was probably as a skein of loosely braided tracks, not a single path. Eventually a primary, albeit rudimentary, road evolved that traversed the three physiographic subdivisions that constitute central Kentucky's greater Bluegrass Region-the Outer Bluegrass, the Eden Shale, and the Inner Blue- grass. Each division is distinct; the transition from one to another is topographi- cally emphatic (Figures 3 and 4). The shale section's friable rocks readily succumb to incising erosion that has sliced the surface into a dendritic maze of spatulate ridges, steep-sloped valleys, and local relief that exceeds 200 feet-a challenging place to build low-gradient roads. The robust Ordovician limestones that undergird the other two sections, except where dissected by Ohio River tributaries, are mildly karstic with gently rolling surfaces well suited to surveyor-engineers intent on building straight-line, shortest-distance roads.

An 1817 legislative act designated the Limestone Road as a turnpike, and, when formally incorporated a decade later as the Maysville, Washington, Paris, and Lex- ington Turnpike Company, formal road building, supported by toll collections, began in earnest. Company stockholders underwrote the reconstruction of a 4-mile- long section from Maysville south to Washington with a broken rock or macadam surface in 1830, the best rock-surfaced road in the state prior to the Civil War and the first stage of road paving that required several years to complete (Kentucky Gen- eral Assembly 1817, 197; Coleman 1935, 233). Kentucky began to provide state aid for




FIG. 4-The Eden Shale Hills, near Little Rock in southeast Bourbon County, Kentucky. Readily erodable shales have been strongly dissected into a heavily rolling topography. Most farmland is in beef-cattle pasture or trees. Early organic roads in the Eden Shale tended to follow ridge tops or valley bottoms. Realignments along property boundaries often resulted in very steep road gradients. (Pho- tograph by Karl Raitz, September 1984)

road construction in 1912, and in 1916 the federal government inaugurated a program of identifying and financially supporting federal roads (Kentucky Depart- ment of Public Roads 1912-1913). The Limestone Road became part of federal highways U.S. 27 and U.S. 68 in 1926. During the 1920S, state road engineers began a program of periodic road improvement still in force today whereby they deploy updated engineering standards to straighten and widen roadways in order to increase safety, efficiency, and carrying capacity and to comply with changing state and federal highway construction standards.

Because primary roads are regional-scale, or even national-scale, trunk routes, their rebuilding is often thoroughly catalogued and understood, especially for historic roads. The evolution of local-scale roads is less well documented, even though they eventually comprised the high-mileage web of local overland routes that con- nected hinterland neighborhoods to one another and to their county seats and provided multiple linkages to the primary cross-country road network.

One might infer, by reading county-level highway maps, that local roads have great longevity. Yet examination of local-scale road patterns on historic maps will reveal that road alignments change over time, often radically (Hewitt and Hewitt 1861; D. G. Beers & Company 1877; Blanton 1934). Far from fixed or stable, local- scale roads are often historically dynamic. Civil traditions, legal statutes, and engineering standards all potentially shaped local knowledge of road surveying and




construction, and they informed or directed the local discussions, debates, and agree- ments that necessarily accompanied road surveys and construction. This disquisi- tion saw cross-country tracks replaced by roads with fixed courses that determined which land parcels would have direct access and which would not, thereby helping to shape local landscapes and geographies. Roads activated rural communities by fostering the ready movement of people and farm products to markets and linking farmsteads, meeting houses, mills, and other social and economic interaction nodes. The tension between local knowledge and cultural tradition, on one hand, and legal statutes and engineering standards, on the other, suggests several questions that relate to choice of route, how route options were evaluated and weighted, rationales and procedures for modifying routes, and the degree to which legal statutes and engineering standards influenced or directed road construction and maintenance.

Regional differences in American settlement history, in legal and engineering traditions, and in physical landscapes provide varying contexts for the development of local-scale roads. On lands platted according to systematic state or federal surveys, the unit grid often directed the placement of local public roads, as was the case with the Holland Land Company of western New York and the Federal Rectan- gular Survey in the Midwest (Wyckoff 1988, 51, 78-79).

The Federal Rectangular Survey was introduced in Ohio and then carried westward to the Pacific states, and many states so surveyed required that local-scale roads follow each section line. A vast road grid spaced at 1-mile intervals north-south and east-west was the result (Thrower 1966, 86-1oo; Johnson 1976, 166-170). In areas where unsystematic metes-and-bounds surveys prevailed-all or large sections of eighteen states in the East from Maine to Georgia, as well as significant sections of Ohio and East Texas-local-scale roads had to be established by local effort and enterprise and according to whatever legal and construction traditions obtained. Establishing road alignments on lands surveyed in metes and bounds was a sub- stantially different undertaking from establishing them on rectangular survey lands, although routes in some areas with systematic surveys were established according to the metes-and-bounds tradition if settlement preceded a formal survey (Newton 1970, 136-138). For example, with elegant regularity a very high proportion of local- scale roads in northwestern Ohio, about 80 percent, follow township section lines that are also the basis for property boundaries. In Ohio's metes-and-bounds Vir- ginia Military District, on the other hand, only 8 percent of the roads follow original survey-unit boundaries (Thrower 1966, 92-93). If roads did not by legal default follow survey or property boundary lines, according to what rationale were they established, and by what principles or local contingencies were they aligned?

Settlers on the American frontier established overland paths and tracks-or "natural roads," as some termed them-concurrent with initial settlement (Blane [1824] 1969, 104-105; Shaler 1896, 18; C. Brown 1929, 6-7; R. H. Brown 1948, 99-101;

Ferguson and O'Brian 1984, 164-168; Summerby-Murray 1992, 34-35; Peyton 1996,

124-127; Hofstra and Geier 200ooo, 53). They added habitation density to what had been scattered farms or "plantations" by claiming land grants or purchasing prop-




erty outright. Open-country neighborhoods depended on local trade and milling. If the soils were fertile and the climate benign, farmers could produce surplus commodities and livestock for town markets. Villages along primary roads grew apace; those at crossroads or river connection points generally increased in size more rap- idly than did open-country hamlets. The initial paths and tracks between farms and

villages soon formed a network of primitive wagon roads that persisted through increasing use (Hofstra and Geier 200ooo0, 56). Indian paths or buffalo traces were adapted as roads if they led conveniently in desired directions or to frequented destinations (Shane 1928, 108). But these routes, or "ways,' as they were often termed, remained "natural," unimproved and unsurveyed tracks "beaten" through grass- lands, brush, and woodland by pack animals or wagon traffic and marked by canaliculated ruts in dry weather and nearly impassible mires after rain (Michaux 1904, 38; Toulmin 1948, 69).

LOCAL ROADS IN BOURBON COUNTY, KENTUCKY

Bourbon County is situated centrally in Kentucky's Bluegrass Region. In Paris, the county seat, Main Street is the Lexington-Limestone Road. The county was formed in 1785, and the first federal census in 1790 tabulated its population at 7,837. Two decades of rapid growth brought the 1810 population to 18,oo009. Its pre-Civil War populace peaked in 1830 at 18,435, but the county subsequently lost population, so that by 1860 its total number of residents stood at 14,860 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1850, 1870).

Bourbon County provides a nearly ideal site for a case study of historic local- scale roads. Although relatively small at 292 square miles-as most Kentucky counties are small-Bourbon County is situated primarily within the limestone-floored Inner Bluegrass Subregion. About one-fifth of its lands lie in the Eden Shale, thereby presenting a topographic contrast across which one can examine historic road development. Two streams flow northwestward across the county: Hinkston Creek forms the county's northeastern border with Nicholas County and flows through Millersburg, another Limestone Road town; the second, Stoner Creek, flows through Paris, neatly bisecting the county. Though of comparatively low gradient, both streams, and some of their larger tributaries, offered waterpower potential and sites for gristmill and sawmill construction.

The county's native vegetation, springing from rich, phosphatic soils, was an open savannah of grasses and cane punctuated by hardwood groves of ash, elm, oak, hickory, and maple species. In the Shale section oak, beech, juniper, poplar, and sycamore were more common. By the mid-eighteenth century, the area's Edenic

largesse was known to and coveted by Virginians and others in the East who learned of this trans-Appalachian country from early explorers, hunters, and surveyors. The land rush to settle Kentucky, especially the Bluegrass lands, was under way by the

early 177os, fueled by liberal Virginia land-preemption policies and by military land warrants awarded to Revolutionary War veterans. Conflicting land claims, many of them based on superficial or incomplete metes-and-bounds surveys, were resolved, in part, by a series of court decisions between 1789 and 1795. The courts ruled that




BOURBON COUNTY, KENTUCKY circa 1785-1800

First-Generation Routes Inner Bluegrass

Eden Shale

Buffalo Trace

SLexington-Maysville Road

Salt-lick road

Iron road

Probable iron road

Millersburg

,country

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PARIS cou nty Paris

scott

Millersburg

buffio

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to Lower Blue Licks

county to ,Upper Blue Licks

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*Bourbon County

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0 5

FIG. 5-Bourbon County, Kentucky first-generation routes, circa 1785-18oo. Sources: Hewitt and Hewitt 1861; Beers 1877; Blanton 1934; County Clerk's Office n.d.a, n.d.b. (Cartography by Richard Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Cartographic and Geographic Information Laboratory, University of Ken- tucky)




land claims in dispute, and without clear and replicable boundaries, would be rec- onciled by configuring them as squares or parallelograms, even if one or more sides of a claim fronted a meandering stream or had other irregular sections. Although many properties retained their eccentric forms, this process yielded a substantial number of farm boundaries that approximated squares or rectangles-a geometry that would later influence local road alignments (Hammon 1980, 317-318).

An active trade in salt and iron-two critical frontier commodities-developed in concert during the first decades of central Kentucky settlement. Early residents

produced salt from seven large brine springs, or salines, across the region. Three of these lay just east and north of Bourbon County at Upper and Lower Blue Licks and at Mays Lick (later abbreviated to Mayslick), the latter two linked to Paris and Lex-

ington via the Limestone Road (Blanton 1934; Jakle 1969, 699-702). Several other roads crossed Bourbon County to link rural neighborhoods directly to the salt

workings (Blanton 1934) (Figure 5). Iron masters from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and other eastern industrial areas

came into Kentucky by the 179os to work the extensive limonite iron deposits in

Kentucky's Hanging Rock Region-roughly from the Ohio River at Ashland in the east to Bath County in the west. The Bourbon Furnace on Slate Creek near Owings- ville in Bath County began operation by 1792, the same year Kentucky became a state, and, with two forges in production, produced pig and bar iron for local and regional markets into the mid-nineteenth century (Plaisted 2004). At least two "iron roads" linked the Bourbon furnace to central Kentucky markets by way of Bourbon

County, although hauling may have been principally in the summer and autumn, when roads offered the firmest surface (Lewis 1951, 281). One of them, still known as Iron Works Pike, ran to the Kentucky River near Frankfort, where iron equipment- especially for the War of 1812-was put aboard riverboats for transport to Ohio and Mississippi River destinations.

New counties formed adjoining Bourbon: Clark and Scott in 1792, Harrison in 1793, Montgomery in 1796, and Nicholas in 1799. Fayette County, established in 1780 as one of the three original counties in the western Virginia country, predated Bour- bon County by only five years. The new counties emerged with boundaries that formed a rough hexagonal lattice-many Kentucky counties have six sides and therefore six adjoining counties. Each had a county seat town roughly central to the county, and primitive roads linked Bourbon County's seat at Paris with the other seat towns

early on. By the late 1790os the main strands of the county's emerging road network-

primary wagon roads linking county seats, as well as salt and iron roads-were in place. Residents also established local roads to connect their open-country farms and neighborhoods to the primary roads and to stations (fortified houses), meeting houses and churches, and mills (Figure 6).

THE CONTEXT OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE AND CONTINGENCY

Creating local roads was not an arbitrary process but the product of many inter-

secting interests and priorities and an ongoing dialogue between neighbors, mill-




ers, distillers, county courts and their representatives, and, eventually, state and regional engineers and legislators (Schein 1997, 663). The dialogue included three general areas of local knowledge: social and political traditions, folk or formal engineering principles, and legal statutes. How these seemingly heterogeneous forms of knowledge interlinked and came to influence road construction is recorded, in part, in the County Clerk's Office in Paris, in court petitions that specified the rationale for new and adjusted roads. The records also include large-scale, hand-drawn maps for most road petitions between 1818 and 1885, images that illustrate existing roads, proposed roads, property boundaries, and important landmarks.

Early Bourbon County's white residents shared many social and political traditions and particularities. These included freehold landownership, an economy cen- tered on livestock grazing and in part predicated on presumed rights to open range, resistance to taxation, protection of property rights as expressed in legal statutes pertaining to boundaries and trespass, a self-interested work ethic as evident in ubiquitous resistance to communal road-improvement work, and a general belief that political or social influence should be brought to bear to realize economic gain. This latter condition was manifest in the 1797 road law that prohibited surveyors, on pain of imprisonment, from accepting bribes from landowners whose road petitions they were surveying (Littell and Smith 1809-1810, 1: 634).

Two state legal statutes influenced the establishment of local roads either directly or tangentially: road law and trespass, or fence, law. The caveat here is that, although law is codified and therefore strives to establish a normative condition, it is not immutable. Road law was subject to local interpretation and differential application in the context of local traditions and preferences, so these accumulated contingencies produced road landscapes at variance with what one would expect had the statutes been rigidly and uniformly applied (Livingstone 2003, 10-11, 182;

Schein 2003, 202-203).

Kentucky's 1797 road law was a direct adoption of existing Virginia road law that was, in turn, an adaptation of old English road law (U.S. Department of Agriculture 1895, 7). The statute outlined a procedure whereby residents could petition county courts to open new roads or alter existing roads at the direction of citizen surveyors and "viewers." The law specified that roads could be opened for "the convenience of traveling to [the] county court house, or to any public warehouse, landing, ferry, mill, lead or ironworks, or the seat of government" (Littell and Smith 1809-181o, 1: 414). Further provisions directed the viewers to contact affected landowners, who were required to "shew cause why such road should not be opened" and to recog- nize and provide monetary payment for damages to lands adjoining the new road through issuance of a writ of ad quod damnum-Latin, meaning "to what damage" (Garner 1999, 50). Court-appointed road viewers then were, "to the best of their skill and judgment, [to] view the lands through which the said road [was] proposed to be conducted, and... taking into estimation as well the use of the lands to be laid open for such road as the additional fencing which will be thereby rendered neces- sary" (Littell and Smith 1809-1810, 1: 634).




Landowners who wished to avoid new road construction through their land could petition the court for an inquest at which they could present their case. If the court ruled in favor of the road petitioner, the cost of the inquest was borne by the landowner, a rather powerful motivation for landowners to negotiate informal agree- ments on possible road alignments before submitting a petition to the court.

State road law also required counties to appoint precinct "surveyors" whose task was to superintend roads; that is, to clear them and to maintain them in good repair. This would be accomplished by a "militia" system of road labor outlined in the law whereby all "male, laboring persons of the age of sixteen years or more, except such as are masters of two or more male laboring slaves . . . shall be appointed by the court to work on some public road" and to arrive at roadwork as- signments properly outfitted (Littell and Smith 18o9-181o, 1: 634-635). Road militias were notoriously inefficient and profoundly ill equipped; they lacked training and informed direction in the most elementary forms of roadwork. The First Biennial Report by the state's Department of Public Roads decried the militia system, which had proved to be "absolutely worthless and while some counties pretend to en- force the system there is usually more yarn spinning, tobacco chewing, and resting done than work on roads[,]" a condition exacerbated by "an underpaid overseer who understands absolutely nothing of the first principles of road building" (Ken- tucky Department of Public Roads 1912-1913, 14-15). Though surficially objective and normative, the state's road law was largely a qualitative document that permitted substantial latitude in interpretation by local petitioners and in application by court representatives in the field. Although legal statutes were intended to exercise control over the pattern and organization of roads, legal terms such as "convenience" had different meanings depending on one's place of residence, whether one was a farmer or a miller, or if one owned property through which a new road would or would not pass (Montgomery 2000, 2). On behalf of road users, the term could refer to distance, to general alignment or direction, to topographic configu- rations, or to other road qualities. For landowners,"convenience" or "inconvenience could refer to land fragmentation where a road split properties, to the need to provide additional roadside fencing, or to the responsibility to assist in maintaining the road.

Trespass law also influenced road-construction decisions. Kentucky's open-range grazing tradition placed the legal burden for preventing livestock from damaging field crops and gardens not on the stock owner but on the farmer whose crops were subject to predation. By statute, landowners who wished to avoid damage caused by wandering livestock had to erect "lawful enclosures,' or fences, to protect their crops (Littell and Smith 18o9-181o, 2: 27). If one's fences were ruled "legal" and livestock nevertheless broke them down and entered a property, the court could then assess severe penalties against the livestock owner. In recognition of their liability, farmers erected fences along their property boundaries and along roads that traversed their land. New roads would, perforce, cross property and field boundaries and so require new fence construction.




BOURBON COUNTY, KENTUCKY circa 1825

Inner Bluegrass

7 Eden Shale Nineteenth-century mill sites Urban area

Primary road

Frontier station Riddle's Mill county Millersburg

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FIG. 6-Bourbon County, Kentucky primary roads, circa 1825. Sources: Hewitt and Hewitt 1861; Beers 1877; Blanton 1934. (Cartography by Richard Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Cartographic and Geographic Information Laboratory, University of Kentucky)




BOURBON COUNTY, KENTUCKY circa 1877

Urban area

Inner Bluegrass

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Mill

Meeting house

Turnpike

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FIG. 7-Bourbon County, Kentucky turnpikes, circa 1877. Sources: Hewitt and Hewitt 1861; Beers 1877; Blanton 1934. (Cartography by Richard Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Cartographic and Geographic Information Laboratory, University of Kentucky)




Rudimentary engineering techniques, however elementary in the early decades, were a third form of knowledge that influenced road construction and entered local dialogue, initially as surveyor's bearings that demarcated road alignments and in the state's turnpike laws of the 182os. Early "natural" roads were not surveyed or constructed per se but were simply organic earth tracks. The new roads called for by professional engineers were termed "artificial" roads, a designation given to those alignments selected to minimize gradients by following a land surface excavated or filled to create a well-drained, elevated cross-section, often with a broken-stone or macadam surface.

Bourbon County's primary cross-county roads became toll-supported turnpikes and eventually were subject to formal engineering standards (Figure 7). The road-engineering precepts that would most influence Kentucky's primary road construction were from Europe, where the most advanced road engineering, in theory and in practice, was initially developed in France. There, stone-surfaced roads had been built since the early 17o00s, and engineers were trained in road building at Napoleon's 1cole Polytechnique in Paris. French engineer-teachers refined historic techniques into rigorous, science-based building methods that produced superior roads and permitted expeditious carriage and wagon travel. Road engineering in Great Britain, derived from French practice, advanced apace with construction techniques developed by Thomas Telford in Scotland and by John McAdam, whose "artificial" broken-stone-surfaced road design was of lighter and less resilient construction than the Telford or French designs, albeit less expensive to build (Forbes 1958, 525-535; Hunter 1963, 200).

French and British road engineering entered the American educational system by way of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Military Academy at West Point, where the French engineer Claudius Crozet established a rigorous science-and- mathematics-based curriculum and taught classes, Union College, and, eventually, other colleges and universities (Hunter 1963,177; Dooley 1984, 452). Most roads built in Kentucky prior to 1835, be they primary or local, were at best graded and ditched with the most elementary tools but not gradient adjusted or stone surfaced (U.S. Department of Agriculture 1895, 11). Decrying the state's poor road conditions in 1836, the Kentucky Board of Internal Improvement also recognized that "the con- templated improvements, though entirely practicable, and well understood in other countries, are, to most of us ..., altogether new, and... will have to be done through ... experienced and competent agents" (Owsley, Daviess, and Thompson 1836, 71). To address the dearth of engineering expertise in the state, the board in 1836 hired Sylvester Welch as chief engineer and H. I. Eastin as an assistant responsible for road engineering. Welch had experience in building the Erie Canal and was at work on the Allegheny Portage Railroad section of the Main Line Canal in central Penn- sylvania when he agreed to accept Kentucky's offer. In 1838 Welch published detailed instructions for building and repairing turnpike roads and contract templates to be used by road-construction superintendents as they procured building materials and hired laborers. Henceforth, turnpike roads would be stone surfaced with appropri-




ate culverts for drainage, and paid labor crews trained in road building would replace the (in)voluntary militia labor system (Morehead 1838, 99-104).

By the 1840s and 1850s knowledge of advanced road-engineering techniques was available across Kentucky through professional engineers such as Welch and Eastin and in published materials such as William Gillespie's widely circulated Manual of the Principles and Practice of Road Making (1858). By the mid-nineteenth century, then, road-building knowledge should have begun a transition from the status of folk custom to an increasingly precise and rigorous dialogue shared by engineers, surveyors, and road superintendents, knowledge that was progressively informed by the science of physics and descriptive geometry and the intent of which was to transcend parochial traditions (Livingstone 2003,1-3). Our concern centers on how formal engineering knowledge was actually applied in the field to local-scale roads, whether engineering principles reached local road builders, and, if so, whether application was rigorous and ubiquitous or subject to local interpretation and prior- ity. If engineering standards were subject to local interpretation, what were the conditions and the limits of their plasticity?

LOCAL ROAD PETITIONS

Bourbon County's court records include road petitions couched in legal terminol- ogy derived from the state's 1797 road law. Court-appointed viewers and surveyors recorded entries in standard surveyors' bearings and poles (a pole equals 1 rod, or 16.5 feet) for existing tracks or roads, where they existed, and for new alignments. Prior to the Welch era of formal engineering, surveyors possessed the only stan- dardized "engineering" language in the dialogue on roads. Road-petition entries included the viewer's judgments on the convenience or inconvenience each route presented-qualifying legal terms.

Bourbon County's first local road petitions recorded early in the nineteenth century were predicated on concerns of alignment, gradient, and natural road-surface quality. Some petitioners requested short realignments of existing tracks to avoid cutting through farms, especially small properties. Others sought to avoid contentious topography. One petition requested that a road be realigned because "the old way crosses a bad gully and then immediately commences the ascent of an extremely steep bad stony hill which occupies the balance of the old way" (County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 7-8).

Some petitioners ambitiously sought to link entire neighborhoods to primary roads, mills, and river shipping points. On 30 June 1818, court-appointed viewers John Redman, John Honey, James McDowel [McDowell], and Alexander Ogle marked out a new road that would connect the Mt. Gilead Meeting House on Lime- stone Road to Ogle's Mill on Stoner Creek (Figure 8).' Although the state road law explicitly enjoined road surveyors from accepting bribes, the map accompanying this report suggests that at least two viewers owned land along the proposed road and that another may have owned the mill. Whatever their provenance, the four men reported favorably on the proposed road, noting in the basic binary legal lan-




PROPOSED ROAD

MT. GILEAD MEETING HOUSE TO OGLE'S MILL

BOURBON COUNTY, KENTUCKY

30 JUNE I818

covered bridge

Ogle's Mill

Existing Road

Proposed Road

Property Line

Surveyor' Corners Col. Jas. Garrard

Land A

jaer. jaer.

John Allen Land

Tho. Currentd' Land ,, ii

John Grer Land ,

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-JohnRedman Land

;44

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John Honeys Land

]Jas. McCroryls 1 Land

Adam Woods Dec(eased)

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woo" Alice Browns Land

c

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0 100 200 poles

Note: 1 pole = 16.5feet

FIG. 8-Route of the proposed road between the Mt. Gilead Meeting House and Ogle's Mill in Bour- bon County, Kentucky. Source: Adapted from County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 85. (Cartography by Richard Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Cartographic and Geographic Information Laboratory, University of Kentucky)




guage of "convenient" and "inconvenient" that it provided a link between neigh- boring farms, a mill, a meeting house, and the Limestone Road. Any loss of land or timber to the new right-of-way was clearly outweighed by the convenient access

provided (County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 85-87).

The proposed road was long, at 1,364 poles (22,506 feet, or 4.3 miles). Its com-

plex alignment followed some property boundaries but included short, corner-cut-

ting angle sections that-though intended to straighten the route and shorten the

distance-perforce fragmented other properties. Even though the road was established and figured in a proposed 1819 road adjustment, it is in little evidence today, other than as farm-field roads (County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 127-129).

Prior to formal surveys required by the 1797 Kentucky road law, open country was traversed by tracks, or ways, that usually favored dry uplands and avoided steep slopes and boggy bottomland. Such tracks were not "grandfathered" into existence after 1797 unless those who used them formally petitioned the court. On 22 Sep- tember 1820, court-appointed viewers marked a complex prelaw local road that linked the Limestone Road to a gristmill on Hinkston Creek (Figure 9). The old track followed the bank of Flat Run, crossing it at shallow fords three times before an-

gling northward, tracing along property boundaries and across open farmland to a horse mill owned by John Shaw. From there the track continued generally northwestward toward Hinkston Creek, fragmenting some properties while bordering others along property lines. The entire route measured 1,732.5 poles (28,586 feet or

5.4 miles). Recognizing the track's meandering character, the viewers included on their map a straight survey line linking endpoints that measured 4 miles. The viewers acknowledged the road's length but argued that it would open a "certain and easy route" between two important mills and the most favored landing on the navi-

gable section of the Licking River.

The viewers could have argued that the old track was too long and crooked to warrant formal approval, arguments that obtained in other petitions. Instead, they supported the petition, noting that it offered neighborhood residents the advantage of linking a water-powered mill and a horse mill, the latter being the only mill in the

county that could operate during dry periods when the creek flow was insufficient to turn a water wheel. The new road would also prohibit individual landowners from closing off the established track by fence and gate, as was their habit. (County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 176-177). Hence, the neighborhood realized a greater good by connecting to a principal road and established mills. In use for more than two decades before this petition was filed, the road appears in the court record again in 1835 as Shaw's Horse Mill Road (County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 394). The route's south- ern section did not survive into the post-Civil War era, although remnants of old sunken roadways still trace through woodland pastures in the area (D. G. Beers &

Company 1877).

The proposed Ogle's Mill and Ruddle's Mill roads crossed the Inner Bluegrass plain along routes where topographic variation was comparatively benign. In southeastern Bourbon County, from North Middletown to the Montgomery County line,




the planar Inner Bluegrass gives way to abrupt ridges that demarcate the Eden Shale. Some road petitions for new roads in the Shale acknowledged topographic realities, but many did not (Figure lo). On 5 October 1818, three court-appointed viewers

surveyed an east-west track proposed to link the road to Mt. Sterling, the county seat in adjoining Montgomery County, and to North Middletown and Seamon's Mill on Stoner Creek. The Mt. Sterling Road was an old valley-bottom track that followed Indian Creek westward and northward toward Paris, bypassing North Middletown, a small hamlet with a post office and a few houses. The proposed route was 155 poles (2,557 feet) longer than the existing route along Indian Creek. Nevertheless, the viewers offered their opinion that the proposed road would be of

great advantage to the citizens of North Middletown while also noting that the proposed way would give direct road access to four prominent farmers who otherwise were obligated to travel to town across one another's fields.

The transparent rationale for the new road, then, was to provide access to new landowners. Although noting that the established road ran along Indian Creek, the viewer's report is mute on the proposed road's topographic context. Today, Prescott Road follows the proposed way of 1818. Just east of North Middletown the narrow, entrenched road climbs a ridge, falls into a valley, and mounts a second, higher ridge before dropping into the steep-sloped Plum Creek drainage that it follows

upstream to Indian Creek. The height of land between North Middletown and Plum Creek is the drainage divide between Stoner and Hinkston Creeks. Although surveyors for other roads chose to interpret the road law's term "convenience" to apply to topographic character as well as distance and direction, the North Middletown viewers chose to neutralize topography as a contextual factor in their report; never mind that the grades on the proposed way were sufficiently steep to require that farmers either partially load or double-team their wagons (Gillespie 1858, 33-34). Mt. Sterling Road followed the low-gradient Indian Creek valley. The creek is not a substantial stream; if traffic had to cross, its shallow, rock-floored bed and narrow channel-less then 30 feet across in most places-would have offered little challenge to fording wagons unless it was in flood. The floodplain broadens to one-quarter mile or more near North Middletown and was the more direct and desirable route.

Today U.S. 460 follows the old Mt. Sterling Road alignment, and Prescott Road diminishes into an unused farm track near Plum Creek.

Hinkston Creek slices a 300oo-foot-deep valley into the Eden Shale in Bourbon

County's southeastern corner, and its tributaries-though comparatively short- reach the creek through steep, narrowly incised valleys. George Barnett erected a mill on Hinkston Creek some time before 1820, and residents on the creek's west

side soon beat a road across the difficult terrain to the mill site (Figure 11). An April 1820 court petition proposed a new road to the mill and vividly mapped and de- scribed the relationship between the road and the terrain. The old road to the mill cut a crooked way through four farms yet followed solid ground. At the approach to the creek, the road made a steep descent, a formidable impediment for heavily loaded

wagons during wet weather. In seeking a more salutary route, locals had changed




PROPOSED ROAD

LIMESTONE ROAD TO

JOHN CURRENT'S MILL

BOURBON COUNTY, KENTUCKY 22 SEPTEMBER I820

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SExisting track /proposed road

Four Mile Survey Line

Property Line

0 125 250 poles


To John Current's Mill

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FIG. 9-Route of the proposed road between Limestone Road and John Current's Mill in Bourbon County, Kentucky. Source: Adapted from County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 174. (Cartography by Richard Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Cartographic and Geographic Information Laboratory, University of Kentucky)




Rock Bridge

Road

Mt.

Sterling

Road

North Middletown

Scott's House Indian

Greek

Seamon Mil

Poston 's Smith Shop /

0 50 100 poles Note: 1 pole = 16.5feet

PROPOSED ROAD

SEAMON'S MILL TO MT. STERLING ROAD


5 OCTOBER I8i8

Existing road

Proposed road

Surveyor's corners

FIG. lo-Route of the proposed road between Seamon's Mill and Mt. Sterling Road in Bourbon County, Kentucky. Source: Adapted from County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 93. (Cartography by Richard Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Cartographic and Geographic Information Laboratory, University of Ken- tucky)




North Middletown

Letton's Fence

PROPOSED ROAD

NORTH MIDDLETOWN TO BARNETT'S MILL


APRIL, IBZO

Existing road

Proposed road

Original track

Surveyor' corners

Barnett's Mill

0 25


50 poles

FIG. 11--Route of the proposed road between North Middletown and Barnett's Mill in Bourbon County, Kentucky. Source: Adapted from County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 163. (Cartography by Richard Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Cartographic and Geo- graphic Information Laboratory, University of Kentucky)

the road's direction without permission of the court, an ancillary problem that the petitioners sought to remedy (County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 163-164).

The viewers made no mention of mill size, duration of operation, number of customers, or other particulars that would suggest frequency and volume of road use, although reference to difficult passage in wet weather suggests that people moved their grain and flour by wagon rather than by packhorse (County Clerk's Office n.d.b, 40). Central Kentucky's "muddy-road season" could extend for six months, from November through May. Meticulous weather records kept by Dr. Samuel Martin of Clark County--about 15 miles south of Paris-during the 1860s suggest a direct relationship between precipitation and dirt-road quality. In February 1865, for example, Martin observed, "February was a very disagreeable month, rain and snow




melting have made the roads exceedingly bad. Very difficult traveling mud roads" (1868, 78). Wet March weather two years later resulted in similar road conditions. "It rained some on (17) seventeen days and snowed on (lo) ten days. We hear of

great damage done by water during the month, bridges washed away; mills and dams destroyed .... Roads have been almost impassible from the depth of the mud in those that are not paved" (p. 134). To consummate the irony, mills required suffi- cient creek-water flow for operation, which was assured only in wet weather.

A partial solution to the steep, muddy traverse on the Barnett's Mill road was to cut a new route along a shallower grade. The new road would also pass across ground that was "so very sidling that it will require a considerable [amount] of labour by digging to complete a road but the... ascent will be moderate [and] the road will be firm. As to the inconveniences that will result to individuals we believe there is none

save the labour of making the road [and] that the public will be benefited instead of

meeting with inconveniences by having a shorter road to travel from North Middle- town to Barnett's Mill, Carlisle, and the Lower Blue Licks" (County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 164-165).

Although the court-appointed viewers emphasized road distance as the primary rationale for realignment, the difference between the "present road" at 6,798 feet and the "proposed road" at 6,220 is a mere 578 feet, a very small portion of a trip from North Middletown to the mill and beyond. More importantly, the new road would eliminate a long, steep, and dangerous slope. The report downplays the cost or "inconvenience" of such road construction, offering no negative comment other than the requirement for labor to cut down the hill. The proposed road was built and is known today as Convict Road. In 1915 the state authorized the use of convict labor on public roads, so the name may suggest road modifications made by pris- oners after that date.

COURTS, CONSTRUCTION, AND CONTINGENCY

After publication of new state road-engineering specifications in the mid-183os, the Bourbon County road-petition entries do not acknowledge that new or ad-

justed local roads would conform to the new standards. Rather, the new principles for road dimensions, gradients, and cross-section structures were applied to the

county's primary turnpike roads (Figure 7). Residents continued petitioning the court to change and adjust local-scale roads, although the rationale presented by petitioners and the court's viewers focused less on the interpretation of shortened road distances as "conveniences" than on pragmatic solutions to road-induced

problems, such as straightening roads to defragment farms, changing alignments to reduce fencing costs, and closing redundant roads to reduce road-upkeep ex-

penses. Roads that cut across farmland, instead of aligning along property boundaries,

required fencing along all frontages if farmers were to comply with Kentucky trespass law. A road that cut an angle across a farm-property corner not only isolated the land in the angle from the rest of the farm but also forced the farmer to fence




both sides of the road if they intended to use the orphaned land for crops or pasture. Farmers obtained wood for their first-generation rail fences by clearing trees from their land, although many retained extensive woodland pastures that they were loath to cut down (County Clerk's Office n.d.a, 418). An 1852 road petition illustrates the concern: "In making said change it will enable said James M. Thomas to enclose all his land... and save two strings of fence nearly the whole length of the present way [1,633 feet] which will be of considerable benefit... as timber is scarce and we think there will be very little inconvenience if any to the Travelling Commu- nity" (County Clerk's Office n.d.b, 2-3).

Closing, or "vacating," old roads was an increasing concern after 1850 and oc- curred in tandem with increasing farm size through land consolidation. Most petitioners were farmers requesting permission to fence off roads that were in poor condition and infrequently used and to defragment their farmland. Court consent also advantaged the landowner because land occupied by a closed road reverted to them, but it could disadvantage the traveling public by denying access to traditional shortest-distance routes. Although deeply rankled by toll costs, the markedly im-

proving turnpikes offered travelers some solace (County Clerk's Office n.d.b, 15-16, 57-58).

Old road tracks still lace the Bourbon County countryside. Some have reverted to farmland and now appear as faint traces across pastures. Others continue to func- tion as farm roads or are part of the modern county-road network. The oldest "beaten" tracks usually follow narrow, entrenched alignments where large old trees encroach on the roadbed. The improved, or "turnpiked" roads were adjusted for

gradient and paved with broken stone. Today, though superficially similar to old natural roads, the turnpikes are different in cross-section-they are seldom deeply entrenched, and their beds stand higher and are flanked by shallow ditches on both sides.

The rationale for building Bourbon County's local roads did not conform to Burghardt's "unknown value of felt need." Rather, establishing and changing local- scale roads was a long-standing practice of adapting local need and contingency through considered manipulation of state legal statutes. Modern engineering precepts were largely ignored at the local level and by the 1880s had not yet entered the court's vocabulary for local roads. In nineteenth-century Kentucky, as the process of local-road evolution demonstrates, legal statutes and engineering standards were not transcendent conventions but mutable and subject to negotiation by local people whose parochial traditions and priorities rendered statutes and standards geographi- cally contingent, qualified by regional adjectives (Livingstone 2003, 13).

NOTE

1. Our road-survey maps were redrafted from the original maps (County Clerk's Office n.d.a, n.d.b) for clarity. Many Road Record Book maps were carefully hand drawn to scale by the surveyors, the viewers, or the county clerk, with details on land-parcel boundaries, landowners' names, and even building symbols representing mills or entire towns. The typeface was chosen to suggest the cursive lettering on the originals. The directional arrows are likewise approximations of the originals.




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