Page:Motoring Magazine and Motor Life November 1913.djvu/12

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��MOTORING MAGAZINE AND MOTOR LIFE

��November, 1913.

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�� ���Road building, a course of study for the rural schools of Lane County, Ore- gon, is to be introduced within a few days by Miss Goldie Van Biber, School Super- visor in the Siuslaw district. Instructions have been mailed. This is the first ex- periment of its kind ever tried in Oregon. Actual road building is the laboratory work which will accompany this course. The children of each district will build and maintain during the approaching rainy season a strip of county road near the school building.. The school whose road stands the winter and is found in the best condition will be the winner of a unique contest in which school children on the Siuslaw eagerly are awaiting to participate.

County Judge Helmus W. Thompson, Lane County's most active good roads enthusiast, was so pleased with this wo- man's plan to teach the fundamentals of road building in the rural schools that he immediately offered two huge silver cups as prizes for this good roads contest.

"I was afraid that perhaps the county court might not allow me to experiment on the roads, but it has even authorized its supervisors to furnish us rock and gravel, handle powder and do the work that children could not do alone," says Miss Van Biber, who has just made a 60-mile stage trip to present her plans.

The county court sees in the scheme of this small woman a plan to establish the fundamentals of good road-building in a new generation and at the same time to interest the present farming class in the principles of drainage and highway con- struction which the children learn at 'school. It has eritered into the plan with enthusiasm.

"It's a corking idea," exclaimed Judge Thompson, while telling of Miss Van Biber's plan. "It is a remarkable woman who will design a scheme like that. It will accomplish results that we have been longing for. It has taken that girl, a Supervisor over thirty-five districts in a mountainous seacoast district, without a railroad, to solve our good roads problem. Some of these school people go around with a mouthful of teeth, thinking of nothing at all, but that girl has a head on her shoulders. This is all her scheme, too.

��"This is the attitude in which the County Court received the plan which this girl Supervisor, scarcely out of college, brought timidly before that body re- cently, asking only the use of 100 yards of road in each school district.

"Miss Van Biber has jurisdiction over 700 square miles, extending into Lin- coln, Lane and Douglas counties. She is the idol of her district. All the year on horseback, by boat or on foot, she travels over the rough mountain high- ways and trails up the small rivers. Every homesteader is her friend; wherever she appears she is welcomed. It was she who introduced manual training in the Sius- law schools, and the exhibits of handi- craft, sewing, carpentry work, bead work from Florence, took first prizes at the Lane County fair ahead of the Eugene and advanced valley schools. She her- self supervised the installation of the in- dustrial work, placed it under proper supervision, and now roadbuilding is her next step.

"She is a modest little woman, and was a student at the University only three years ago. When the County Judge sug- gested that her plan be made known in the newspapers, she protested; when the reporter interviewed her she protested. She pleaded that her name be left out.

"'It's the plan that's important; that's all,' said Miss Van Biber. 'Don't men- tion me. And besides, it's only an un- tried plan. Yet I know it will succeed, because the people there are interested; they want it tried, and they have never attempted anything down there that did not succeed.

"Those mountain people in the Sius- law territory are an unusual class. They

��have lived in that secluded region for years and yeais. They never had a school fair until two years ago; now they can hold the biggest and best school fair in Lane County. Whatever they take up they put through.

"And moreover, this is no scheme to work children on the roads. They will care for only one hundred yards, and not necessarily that much if the district road be difficult.

"The road building is not going to be taught by the teachers, because the av- erage teacher is not qualified to teach road building. We shall organize a good roads club in each school. We shall give schools credit for the hour or more a week that they spend on the roads. Those who undertake this road work, and it will be purely optional, will be ex- cused from studying the road chapter in the Agricultural Manual. The whole plan is to arouse interest in roads, and give adequate instruction, and the already overworked teachers will not be bur- dened with this additional work.

"Of course, all districts will not be able to participate, because many of the schools are built on trails; they have no roads on which to work. Possibly these districts can compete for the prize by lay- ing out and actually building a piece of road past their school.

"In the Siuslaw County we will work out this plan under the most difficult con- ditions. Everything is against it. The grades are narrow, scarcely more than trails, and the enormous rainfall is the most severe test a road can have. The Siuslaw roads are subject to more washing than any other roads in the country."

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��Actual work on the Turnbull Canyon road has been started. Colonel Scofield, president of the Board of Trade of Whit- tier, was accorded the honor of holding the plow handles for the first furrow. Grouped around him were the officers and directors of the two big boosting organiza- tions of the city, the Board of Trade and.

��the Whittier Commercial Club. Seated on the plow-beam was Dr. George Flan- ders, dubbed by his fellow boosters as the "Daddy of Turnbull Canyon Road."

"Colonel Schofield made a short ad- dress, in which he called for three cheers for Supervisor Manning and his asso- ciates for the new road, and for Dr. Flan-

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