Page:A Guide to the Preparation of County Road Histories.pdf/30

 Where the number of plats showing named roads is not so great these might simply be cited in an appendix to the road history itself or to the published road orders rather than be given separate publication.

Site surveys are the core of any adequate road history, the   so to speak, tying together the information gathered from road orders, plats, and other sources, verifying the conclusions drawn from this information by the researcher and, often, providing fresh flashes of insight as the road historian attempts to place himself in the position of the eighteenth century surveyor laying out a road along the best (or sometimes, the "least worst") route through the countryside of Virginia.

It is doubtful whether any road history worthy of the name could be produced without a fairly comprehensive survey of all of the main roads of the area, their geography, river and stream crossings, and so forth. Certainly this is true for the early principal roads of each area, although probably somewhat less true of the later, subsidiary, connecting roads. By performing the surveys faithfully the researcher will shortly begin to develop a real "feel" for the early roads. This will enable him to speak with much greater authority when he puts pen to paper than would one who remained in a cloistered study populated only with books and maps, or in the county courthouse poring over the records, and attempted a road history from there.

The results of the site surveys should, however, be used as confirming or supporting evidence in writing the road history, rather than being incorporated simply as narratives of trips along certain roads with a point-by-point commentary on what was seen. This should not preclude the citing of significant facts about the present condition of an old route or its surviving trace alongside a more modern route, its fords and grades.

Quantity and placement of illustrations, whether photographs, prints or line drawings produced especially for the road history, will have to be determined by what is available for the area in question. Since there is probably a finite number of existing period prints and photographs of a general nature (i.e. tobacco hogshead being rolled, stagecoach travel, .) repetition may become a problem after a few histories have been published using many of the available ones. Later histories will probably have to lean more heavily on illustrations relating to their specific area, to modern or earlier photographs and/or sketches.

Naturally, the visual materials available for some areas will be far greater than those for others. Where no photographic archives exist researchers will be forced to fall back upon their own ingenuity and resources. Modern photographs, conjectural drawings and panoramas all can be used to illustrate key points in an early road network, or even the whole network. To – 24 –