[Sand soil with nine inches of clay and two inches cover of sand]
Roads are prone to wear in ruts, and when hollows and ruts begin to make their appearance on the surface of an earth road great care should be used in selecting new material, with which they should be immediately filled, because a hole which could have been filled at first with a shovel full of material would soon need a cart full. It should, if possible, be of a gravelly nature, entirely free from vegetable earth, muck, or mold. Sod or turf should not be placed on the surface, neither should the surface be renewed by throwing upon it the worn-out material from the gutters alongside. The last injunction, if rightly observed and the proper remedy applied, would doubtless put an end to the deplorable condition of thousands of miles of earth roads in the United States.
A road-maker should not go to the other extreme and fill up ruts and holes with stone or large gravel. In many cases it would be wiser to dump such material in the river. These stones do not wear uniformly with the rest of the material, but produce bumps and ridges, and in nearly every case result in making two holes instead of one. Every hole or rut in a roadway, if not tamped full of some good material like that of which the road is constructed, will become filled with water, and finally with mud and water, and will be dug deeper and wider by each passing vehicle.
The work of maintaining earth roads will be much increased by lack of care in properly finishing the work. The labor and money spent in rolling a newly-made road may save many times that amount of labor and money in making future repairs. After the material has been placed it should not be left for the traffic to consolidate, or for the rains to wash off into the ditches, but should be carefully formed and surfaced, and then, if possible, rolled. The rolling not only consolidates the material, but puts the roadbed in proper shape for travel immediately. If there is anything more trying on man or beast than to travel over an unimproved road, it must be to travel over one which has just been "worked" by the antiquated methods now in vogue in many of the states.
The traveled way should never be repaired by the use of plows or scoops. The plow breaks up the compact surface which age and traffic have made tolerable. Earth roads can be rapidly repaired by a judicious use of road machines and road rollers. The road machine places the material where it is most needed, and the roller compacts and keeps it there. The labor-saving machinery now manufactured for road-building is just as effectual and necessary as the modern mower, self-binder, and thrasher. Road graders and rollers are the modern inventions necessary to permanent and economical construction. Two men with two teams can build more road in one day with a grader and roller than fifty men can with picks and shovels, and do it more uniformly and more thoroughly.
Doubtless the best way to keep an earth road, or any road, for that matter, in repair is by the use of wide tires on all wagons carrying heavy burdens. Water and narrow tires aid each other in destroying streets, macadam, gravel, and earth roads. Narrow tires are also among the most destructive agents to the fields, pastures, and meadows of farms, while on the other hand wide tires are road-makers; they roll and harden the surface, and every loaded wagon becomes in effect a road roller. Nothing so much tends to the improving of a road as the continued rolling of its surface.
Tests recently made at the experiment stations in Utah and Missouri show that wide tires not only improve the surface of roads, but that under ordinary circumstances less power is required to pull a wagon on which wide tires are used. The introduction in recent years of a wide metallic tire which can be placed on any narrow-tired wheel at the cost of two dollars each, has removed one very serious objection to the proposed substitution of broad tires for the narrow ones now in use.
Repairs on earth roads should be attended to particularly in the spring of the year, but the great mistake of letting all the repairs go until that time should rot be made. The great want of the country road is daily care, and the sooner we do away with the system of "working out" our road taxes, and pay such taxes in money, the sooner will it be possible to build improved roads and to hire experts to keep them constantly in good repair. Roads could then secure attention when such attention is most needed. If they are repaired only annually or semiannually they are seldom in good condition but when they are given daily or weekly care they are almost always in good condition, and, moreover, the second method costs far less than the first. A portion of all levy tax money raised for road purposes should be used in buying improved road machinery, and in constructing each year a few miles of improved stone or gravel roads.
The only exceptions to the instructions given on road drainage are found in the attempt to improve a sand road. The more one improves the drainage of a sand road the more deplorable becomes its condition. Nothing will ruin one quicker than to dig a ditch on each side and drain all the water away. The best way to make such a road firm is to keep it constantly damp. Very bushy or shady trees alongside such roads prevent the evaporation of water.
The usual way of mending roads which run over loose sandy soils is to cover the surface with tough clay or mix the clay and sand together. This is quite an expensive treatment if the clay has to be transported a great distance, but the expense may be reduced by improving only eight or ten feet or half of the roadway.