Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/446

 in consideration of keeping a public highway in order; in 1670, an annual allowance was made to Mr. Thomas Hunt of one thousand pounds under an arrangement binding him to maintain a good roadbed for horse, foot, and cart over the milldam at Portan.

As late as 1667, there appears to have been no regular system of gates on a very considerable number of estates. So obstructive of the public business did this become, that it was found necessary to compel the owner of every plantation to provide a gate in his fence which would enable a man and horse to reach the house of the proprietor without delay, but it is highly probable that the demand for this improvement existed chiefly on tracts of land to which patents had been recently obtained. The bridle path which the law had special application to was characteristic both of the settled and the outlying regions, but even here some means of making a comparatively easy passage through a line of fence was necessary, and doubtless the draw-bar was a common substitute for the ordinary gate. Hinges and nails were procurable, but only at considerable expense, an expense which the owners of even the estates that had been under cultivation the longest were disposed to avoid. The draw-bar is one of the familiar features of the Virginian plantation to-day, when nails and hinges can be bought so cheaply, and two hundred and twenty-five years ago it must have been in almost universal use, as the reasons for its employment were much more urgent.

The bridges that spanned the streams intersecting the