Recollections of full years

by Helen Herron Taft

Let somebody else argue the question as to whether or not this road has justified the faith of the men who built it. My husband and his colleagues were responsible for the beginning of it and Mr. Taft authorised the payment of the large sums of money which went into it, but he does not in the least object to honest criticism of the project. His only question is: “How else could we have accomplished what we did?” For which there is no satisfactory answer. I have ridden over it since it was completed and, in common with a majority of those who have enjoyed this privilege, I am strongly prejudiced in its favour. There are few, if any roads in the world more spectacular, or which represent a greater triumph of engineering skill. Fairly hewn out of the almost solid, but too crumbling, walls of the Bued River Canyon, it winds for about seventeen miles through constantly changing scenes of extraordinary grandeur, then it strikes the foothills of the mountains and rises in a succession of splendid upward sweeps to an altitude of more than five thousand feet in less than six miles.

The Benguet Road was originally a railway project and was to have been built by the British company which owns the Manila and Dagupan Railway. But this syndicate wanted a perpetual grant and a guarantee from the government which could not then be given. It was necessary, in any case, to build a wagon-road before railway construction could be started and Captain Mead, who was sent out at the head of a surveying party, reported that such a road would cost at least $50,000, or $75,000. The Commission appropriated the $50,000 and issued orders to have the work begun, fully expecting to have to add another $25,000 before the road was finished. Nobody knows what character of road Captain Mead had in mind when he made his estimate, but it transpired that nothing short of first-class construction would last through even one heavy rain. Besides, the Bued River Canyon had to be spanned six or eight times with tremendous suspension bridges, and before the project was completed an unwilling government had spent something like $2,500,000 on it. This was spread over a period of years, of course, and much of it went for necessary improvements or for the replacement of storm-wrecked bridges and graded sections, but its enemies like to refer to it as our two and a half million dollar road.

The Manila and Dagupan Railway company extended its road up to the point where the Benguet Road begins and thus a way was opened into the only region in the Philippines where one may find really invigorating air. And while the road was building Baguio development began. A United States Army Camp was established on a ridge overlooking a wide range of pine-covered hills, and a hospital was erected for the accommodation of invalid soldiers who, before these facilities for taking care of them were provided, had always, at great expense to the government, to be sent back to the United States. A civil hospital and tuberculosis camp were opened; good hotels under private ownership soon took the place of field tents and rough board shacks; markets and stores were started, bringing in supplies in wholesale lots, and fair-sized buildings soon began to go up in a substantial business section; people began to build houses as rapidly as builders could be found to do the work; churches and schools began to appear where nothing was before; a summer camp for the recuperation of thousands of public school teachers was started in a high valley carpeted with pine-needles, and lecture courses for vacation instruction were instituted; a country club was organised with golf links, a baseball diamond, polo grounds, tennis courts and everything that goes to make a country club successful. The plan of the city was drawn by Architect Burnham of Chicago, who visited Benguet for the purpose, and a great central plaza was provided with artistic, but inexpensive buildings for the accommodation of the two branches of the government. Cottages in rows went up almost overnight; rich Filipinos and a few Americans built fine homes; beautifully metalled drives began to wind in and out and over and around the hills, and a high-class government automobile ‘bus line was put on the Benguet Road which is the delight of every American or other foreigner in the Islands, as well as of many hundreds of Filipinos who annually take advantage of this wholly novel opportunity to reach a salubrious climate in their own land, and by a route which in any European country would attract scores of thrill-seeking tourists.

And so the Philippine Simla was begun. Its friends, or, in other words, most people have dreams of a great future for it when it shall be a thriving, prosperous city and a health resort for everybody “east of Suez” who needs to seek near by a temperate and invigorating climate.

It is six years since I saw Baguio, for I visited it the last time in 1907, but even then I could not believe that it was built on the ground that I had ridden over and found practically uninhabited only six years before. At that time a provincial government had been organised, and an American, Mr. Phelps Whitmarsh, who was a writer and had lived among the Igorrotes a long time, was appointed governor. But he was governor of a wild-tribe province which did not then boast any greater signs of civilisation than winding foot trails and a few groups of low-thatched huts which were known as towns.

We rode in from Trinidad, not many miles from Baguio, on the morning of the 23rd of June and went straight to the governor’s “mansion.” We were welcomed by Mrs. Whitmarsh into a nipa-roofed, suali house which, though it was quite large, had no partitions except such as were made of bamboo screens and hangings of bright-coloured Igorrote cloths. But it had a big, open fireplace and a fine blaze from odorous pine boughs was crackling up the chimney. This seemed particularly cosy and delightful to us because we had just been camping in native huts in which the only place for a fire was a square of earth in the middle of the floor and we were not only quite frozen but we were thoroughly smoked.

THE ZIGZAG. HOW THE BENGUET ROAD CLIMBS TO AN ALTITUDE OF OVER 5,000 FEET IN SIX MILES

At Baguio we got letters and telegrams from Manila and one of the telegrams announced my husband’s appointment as Governor of the Islands, so I knew that an adjustment of state affairs had been made and that I should reach Manila to begin a new era in my Philippine experience. Mr. Taft wrote me that the plans for his inauguration were practically complete and that he was issuing cards for a big reception in honour of General MacArthur at our house on the evening of the Fourth of July. This filled me with something like panic, because I didn’t expect to reach Manila until after the first of July and I didn’t see how I could get ready on such short notice to entertain hundreds of people. However, it was not for me to enter a protest on such a score, so it was decided that we would go down as soon as we possibly could.

We spent two days enjoying the delightful hospitality of our friends in Baguio and in exploring the country round about, and I, after listening to builders’ dreams of what was to be and now is, proceeded to select a site for my own future summer home.