Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 15).djvu/123

 is most needed, and the roller compacts and keeps it there. The labor-saving machinery now manufactured for road-building is just as effectual and necessary as the modern mower, self-binder, and thrasher. Road graders and rollers are the modern inventions necessary to permanent and economical construction. Two men with two teams can build more road in one day with a grader and roller than fifty men can with picks and shovels, and do it more uniformly and more thoroughly.

Doubtless the best way to keep an earth road, or any road, for that matter, in repair is by the use of wide tires on all wagons carrying heavy burdens. Water and narrow tires aid each other in destroying streets, macadam, gravel, and earth roads. Narrow tires are also among the most destructive agents to the fields, pastures, and meadows of farms, while on the other hand wide tires are road-makers; they roll and harden the surface, and every loaded wagon becomes in effect a road roller. Nothing so much tends to the improving of a road as the continued rolling of its surface.