The development of a road and highway system in North Carolina
Shute discusses the development of a road and highway system in North Carolina. North Carolina began as a state where residents had to maintain the stretch of road in front of their homes, and became known as the Good Roads State because it devoted so much state money to building and maintaining roads. Shute describes that evolution here.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with John Raymond Shute, June 25, 1982. Interview B-0054-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- WAYNE DURRILL:
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About that time, too, the county government especially began to
reorganize the system of building roads …
JOHN RAYMOND SHUTE, Jr.:
Right, right.
- WAYNE DURRILL:
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… and a lot of people would come and petition to have a
private road declared a public road.
JOHN RAYMOND SHUTE, Jr.:
Right.
- WAYNE DURRILL:
-
And then you could call people out for a two-mile radius along the road
to work on it. Do you have any sense of how the
merchants in town felt about that?
JOHN RAYMOND SHUTE, Jr.:
The merchants were in favor of roads and good
roads—all-weather roads, they were called—where
the farmer could bring his cotton to town to the market and carry his
supplies back without getting hub-deep in mud in the wintertime and
covered with dust in the summertime. But the road business reflects the
history of a county and a community. Later on, after the state highway
system was developed, you can tell the counties that had members of the
State Highway Commission, because they had more good roads emanating
from their county seats out into rural areas to bring those people into,
say, Wadesboro instead of Monroe. You had that sort of thing, which I
presume was more or less natural. But the building of roads is in itself
a special field of study that would be very good for somebody to get
into. It went through an evolutionary period. First were the landowners
themselves. Said Bill, "Let's improve the road by
your farm and mine to the church." And their sons and they
would go out and work up a fairly passable road. They ran into problems
when they got to streams, because they didn't know too much
about bridge-building. They usually had fords. Then that went on, and
then Tom Jones on the other side of the church decided, "Is it
all right if I extend this road down across my property?
I'll, of course, keep it up." Yeah, it was all
right, unless he was a bad character, and that wouldn't be
often. So this sort of thing. You developed a bunch of purely private
roads, you might say. Then later on, this thought was extended by these
people who were maintaining the roads going before the county
commissioners and asking for financial help. Maybe
they'd give them a couple hundred dollars to keep up a
certain piece of road. There was a period when each man was required to
keep up the road in front of his own property. It went through that
period, which seems logical enough. You run into the question of
children growing up and marrying and moving away, and the old man and
his wife being left there with the responsibility of maintaining a road,
which he was no longer physically able to do, and he'd have
to go out and hire somebody to do it. Then it became a hardship, you
see. There were so many problems like that that arose that you pretty
soon developed the desire to have the county take over all public roads,
so they established what was called a road commission on a countywide
basis. The county took over certain numbers of the roads; some of them
they didn't. They would come before the commissioners and
apply for their road to be taken over as a public road. In the early
days, we had chain gangs. These prisons were operated by the county, and
they called it that because the convicts that received sentences had
chains that went down to their ankles from their waists to keep them
from running away. In the early days, these members of the chain gang
were required to work on these county roads. That's where the
labor came from. There was a superintendent of roads under the county
road commission who had charge of these workers, and they had guards
with rifles. You probably have seen pictures of them. It's
rather pathetic thing, in a way, and there were a lot of
people… I remember, as a young man, one friend of mine
particularly. As we would be riding out in the country, we would
pass, maybe, a gang of these fellows working on
the road. He was a person who smoked cigarettes. He would always reach
in his pocket and get his pack of cigarettes and throw it out to these
convicts, every time he'd pass them. It struck me as a rather
humane sort of an attitude to establish towards these people. They had
no chance to buy cigarettes, because they had no money. But that was the
way the road system worked in the early period, and then the evolution
from that phase into a state highway system came along, and then you
went through it on a statewide basis. For a long period of time, North
Carolina was known as "The Good Roads State," because
it was the first state ever to float a bond issue of the magnitude that
we did. It seems to me like it was $400 million dollars, which
was almost an unheard of amount of money, that the state floated bonds
for to build. The idea was to connect every county seat in North
Carolina with an all-weather road, usually paved. The first chairman of
the highway commission was a fellow Page from down in Moore County, who
later was associated with the Page Trust Company. That was a banking
chain that was wiped out in the Great Depression. Just like the state
school system that Governor Aycock established, the road system achieved
national importance because it was significant, I mean the extent to
which we went into it. The evolution of the highway system in North
Carolina would make an excellent study for some student getting a
master's degree, to have a study in depth of the system
itself, because it's a fascinating thing. And as roads are
built, communities develop. Transportation is the life of trade, both
local and otherwise, so these roads became quite important.