Page:A Guide to the Preparation of County Road Histories.pdf/25

 to start fitting together the various bits and pieces of information to be gathered from road orders, maps and plats in such a manner as to illustrate the development of the principal roads of an area while identifying them by name and defining their routes.

Road orders, the primary source of information, and their use in the construction of chains of evidence for such roads as the Three Notch'd have already been touched upon here. Deeds were not originally consulted in the Albemarle study, although it was supposed that they would prove very helpful for the early period if they were available in the form of an easily read, indexed typescript. The recent publication by Rosalie Edith Davis of seems to refute this idea, however, at least for this portion of Albemarle during the early period. When these deed books are placed beside a computer printout of all the place names contained in Louisa County deeds 1765-1815, prepared by Ransom True, nearly complete coverage is available for the first seventy-five years of Louisa deeds and the fallacy inherent in this line of thought is laid bare, at least as far as roads in the first twenty or thirty years after the initial settlement are concerned. Only nine roads are specifically named by the Davis index, with the rather unspecific "Main Road" leading in number of citations. Three Notch'd Road, the southern border of the county, is mentioned by name only once. It would appear that the earlier Hanover deeds for this area would be little more productive for this period, were they not lost. True's list, while containing more roads, is for a period beginning some forty or forty-five years after Louisa began to be settled, and thirty years after that part of Louisa later to be incorporated into Albemarle began to be settled. No doubt the problem arises from attempting to read the twentieth century practice of using roads for property lines back into an eighteenth century Virginia context where the original land patents were laid out with regard to the topography and the quality of the land (as well as other property owners’ lines), rather than to road locations. In the beginning, of course, there were no roads to speak of, and those which did exist doubtless moved at the will of the users. It would, therefore, have been foolhardy to rest property ownership on the locations of such nebulous and transitory things as roads. Later, as the gentlemen justices of the county court made their power felt through their appointed surveyors of roads, locations became more nearly fixed, and as time and death took their toll and tracts changed hands and were broken up, roads probably became more important as boundary lines. While it is true that a considerable body of material has survived in the form of the later deeds and plats, these probably serve better as corroborative material than as anything else. Deeds and plats seldom can provide the answers to such questions as why a road was built, or when and by whom. To begin to answer these questions the original road orders themselves are essential.

Besides the historical limitations inherent in the use of the deeds and plats, there is also the problem of information retrieval, unless printed deed abstracts are available. While early plats can be readily examined, for an individual to extract from the early deeds of a county all the bits – 19 –