Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 15).djvu/197

 so that the plain question submitted to me was, Can you construct eleven miles of stone road nine feet wide for $40,000? The conditions to be met were these: There was no stone suitable for road-building nearer than from sixty to eighty miles; cost of freight, about seventy-five cents per ton; the hauls from the railroad siding averaged about one and three-quarter miles; price of teams in summer, when farmers were busy, about $3.50 per day. In preparation for road construction there were several hills to be cut from one to three feet; causeways and embankments to be made over wet and swampy ground. For this latter work the property holders and others interested along the road agreed to furnish teams, the township paying for laborers. The next difficulty was the kind of a road to build. As the width was fixed at nine feet as a part of the conditions for bonding, there seemed only one way left to apply the economics—that was, in the depth of the roads.

On the dry, sandy soils I put the macadam six inches deep; this depth was applied to about six miles of road. On roads