Page:America's Highways 1776–1976.djvu/58

 Stuck in the mud in Sacramento Canyon.

Director Dodge recommended that his office be transformed into a Division of the Department “with a statutory roll of officers and employees.”

"The work of this Office appears to be no longer of tentative character. Year after year it has assumed increased importance and wider scope, and there is now a general demand coming up from all sections of the country that it be made a permanent feature of the work of this Department. It appears fitting, therefore, that it be given a more definite legal status, thereby adding dignity and stability to this branch of the Department’s work. . .."

Congress eventually heeded this plea, and in the Agriculture Appropriation Act of March 3, 1905 (33 Stat. 882), it merged the Division of Tests of the Bureau of Chemistry with the Office of Public Road Inquiries to form the Office of Public Roads. The new agency had a statutory roll, headed by a Director, “who shall be a scientist and have charge of all scientific and technical work,” at a salary of $2,500 per year. The Act also provided for a Chief of Records, an Instrument Maker and 6 clerks, and boosted the total annual appropriation for the office’s work to $50,000.

The requirement that the Director should be a scientist prevented Martin Dodge, a lawyer, from succeeding to the directorship of the new Office of Public Roads, and Logan Waller Page was appointed instead.

Director Page assumed the helm of the Office of Public Roads at a momentous time in the history of land transportation. To his predecessors “good roads” meant wagon roads, constructed according to the time-tested methods of Trésaguet, Telford and McAdam and designed for horsedrawn steel-tired traffic traveling 6 to 8 miles per hour. In 1905 the shape of things to come was dimly foreshadowed by scarcely 78,000 automobiles, most of which were confined to the cities. Ten years later 2.33 million autos were raising clouds of dust on the country roads, and by 1918 this number had increased to 5.55 million. The motor age had arrived, and with it a new kind of highway, designed specifically for motor vehicles, would evolve. Director Page would preside over the early stages of this evolution. 52