Page:A Guide to the Preparation of County Road Histories.pdf/9

 in the of Williamsburg, and photographs of portions of the road, abandoned and still in service. Accordingly, it was determined to issue this accumulated information as the fourth publication of this series.

During the research at Albemarle County Court House three Surveyors Books covering the years 1744-1853 were discovered. The plats contained in these books showed many roads in present Albemarle County as well as Amherst, Buckingham, Fluvanna, Nelson and parts of Appomattox, Bedford, and Campbell Counties, which were at one time within it. Photographic copies were made of these plats and, after annotation, an index was arranged to provide for easy reference as the remaining road orders of Albemarle County (1783-1816) were being analysed and indexed. As the utility of this index came to be recognised it was decided to issue it as another publication in this series (the fifth).

Experience with the Three Notch'd Road had by now clearly demonstrated the feasibility of preparing brief reports setting out the specific route of a road and the principal facts concerning it. From road orders available at the county courthouses, published Acts of the Assembly, the records of the Board of Public Works, Confederate Engineers’ maps and those published by the Virginia Department of Highways and Transportation, similar brief histories and route maps could easily be constructed for many of the eighteenth and nineteenth century roads of Virginia.

Especially was this true for turnpikes. By this time the records of the Board of Public Works 1816-1902, Virginia's coordinating body for internal improvements such as canals, railroads and turnpikes, were available on microfilm, thanks to the efforts of Howard Newlon, Jr. of the Council and Donald Haynes of the Virginia State Library. Most of the Confederate maps were also available at either the State Library or the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Architectural surveys such as those available at the Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission and the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia often provide additional information as to tollhouse and tavern locations along the routes. Besides this, most of the turnpike routes are still in service as primary or secondary roads, thus simplifying greatly the task of the amateur road historian. With the foregoing in mind, a brief history of the Staunton and James River Turnpike became the next publication of the series. Originally a senior undergraduate thesis in the humanities program of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia, this publication was issued in the belief that it was a good example of what individuals in local historical groups could accomplish in a limited time with the use of readily available resources dealing with the hundreds of Virginia turnpikes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Following this, the long-awaited and massive volume (421 pages) was indexed and published and the Albemarle road history itself was begun. Since no adequate treatment of Virginia's roads up to the advent of the steam railroad was available, the first portion of the Albemarle study was given over to a synopsis of this from about 1607 to 1840. At the suggestion of several of the people who read the first draft of this, and in the interest of increasing the utility – 3 –