The Rural Voice, 1992-12, Page 49Book Review
Book tells how
we got here
from there
"The first roads through the
wilderness were products of man's
strength. The roads taken for granted
today are products of man's
ingenuity."
The opening lines of William
Barlow's Everything
for the Road Maker
neatly sum up the
story of this book
about the men and
machines (mostly
machines) that have
enabled us to zip
along highways at
high speed today.
Barlow is right: we do
take our roads for
granted today and most of us have
quickly forgotten times when it
wasn't so.
You don't have to be too old, for
instance, to remember when a big
winter storm could close a concession
road for most of a week. Not only are
the machines used to plow the snow
more powerful today, but roads have
been redesigned in the last couple of
decades so they aren't as susceptible
to drifting. That work was only
possible because of better machines
and better roadbuilding skills.
The book is a tribute to those road -
builders, people like A. W. Campbell,
Andrew Pattullo, Dr. Doolittle and
Hon. G. S. Henry, founders of the
Canadian Good Roads Association in
the 1890s, an association dedicated to
improving the roads in Ontario
through education on road building
skills and through legislation.
The association campaigned
against the use of statute labour for
road building. Early roads were built
through this requirement that men
devote up to 12 days' labour a year
(when we complain about taxes
today, calculate what 12 days of
labour would cost) and the use of
appointed pathmasters who oversaw
the efforts of the conscripted
labourers. The pioneers argued that
this meant some portions of road
were good while others were terrible.
Eventually they won their case and
trained road superintendents began to
bring uniformity and improvement to
the roads.
But their jobs would have been
impossible without the improvements
in equipment that came along.
Barlow provides hundreds of pictures
of that equipment and shows the
evolution of the grader from a simple
horse-drawn scraper to today's
sophisticated
machine.
Barlow's uncle,
T. H. Mitchell,
once had the con-
trolling interest in
the Dominion Road
Machinery Com-
pany, the company
we now know as
Champion Road
Machinery Limited.
Barlow's father moved from Toronto
to work in the Goderich plant and the
author worked there himself until his
retirement. Naturally that company
plays a large part in the story he tells.
The first 30 pages of the book
provides an interesting background of
roadbuilding in Ontario, from the first
trails through the bush to the "high"
ways (roads built up with gravel and
sand and with a crown in the middle
to make the water run off) that made
better road travel possible. The rest of
the 155 -page book is mostly photos
of various road building machines,
pictures Barlow collected through
long years of research in archives
across North America.
The book is self -published but
there's nothing amateurish about it.
Credit for the exceptional design (the
cover design and choice of paper give
it a high-quality feel) goes to Rhea
Hamilton -Seeger, gardening col-
umnist at The Rural Voice who also
publishes books. The quality of
printing (by Stratford Beacon Herald
Fine Printing), makes the old photos
nearly jump off the pages. It's a fine
package for a fine story.—KRO
Everything for the Road Maker by
William Barlow, published by
Possibilities, paperback, $21.00.
LAST MINUTE
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Sat., Sun., & evenings by appointment
DECEMBER 1992 45