The country system, as I recall it, was in my boyhood about as poor and inefficient as it could well be. Each township was divided up into road districts, and each road district was presided over by an overseer of highways, whose duty it is to collect so many days’ work or so many dollars from each taxpayer in the district. Of course no taxpayer would pay a dollar when he could come and make mud pies on the road all day and visit and gossip with the neighbors and save his dollar too.
The result seemed to be that the work was misdirected and generally an injury to the road. With all our respect to the farmer, I will state right here that he does not know how to make roads. An all wise Providence never intended that he should know. The professional roadbuilder, with the money used by the ignorant sapheads and self-made road architects, would in a few years make roads in the United States over which two or three times the present sized load could be easily drawn, and the dumb beasts of the Republic would rise up and call us blessed for doing it.
This bit of doggerel appeared in Good Roads about the same time:
They May Be Sinking Yet
Old farmer John drove off to town
All on a rainy day.
The glistening highway up and down,
With mire shone all the way.
The gentle weeping raindrops fell
And had fallen all the night;