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The Road Situation in Adair County, 1912-1913, and the First County Road This article is inspired, in part by an earlier article on the Big Freshet of 1913. Good roads, and how to achieve them, were almost as big an issue one hundred years ago, when they remain the focus of attention Click on headline for complete story By Jim This article in no wise covers the complexity--or duration--of Adair County's "good roads question." In fact, it barely gives a glimpse. That issue explored in depth would take more hours of reading and research than this aging chronoscryer has left, and the resulting document would easily fit into the category of "tome." The Road Situation in Adair County, 1912-1913 and the First County Road Engineer In the Spring of 1912, the Kentucky Legislature passed two acts for the furtherance of good roads in the state. The first created a department of public roads, created a Commissioner of Public Roads, and made "provision for regulating the disbursement of a fund in the treasury of the state known as the 'State Road Fund.'" The second act of the Legislature created "an elaborate road law," which among other provisions, abolished the old road supervisor position and mandated the appointment of a County Road Engineer by the Fiscal Court of each county, that requirement to take effect on December 1, 1912. Another provision of this legislative act was to give the Fiscal Court of each county the option of building and maintaining roads solely by taxation, solely by the old method of "calling out the hands," or a combination of the two. The Adair Court elected to stick with the old model in which all non-exempt males aged18 to 50 were "subject to service on the road for 6 days or more in a year [but] not over 2 days in the week." In a letter published in the Adair County News in February 1913, native son Melvin L. White succinctly summed up the overseer model with this pithy comment, "forty-five" referring to the upper age limit in his adopted North Carolina: "[E]lect a man overseer who never saw a good road, and let him 'warn' the young men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to bring axes, hoes, shovels and hound dogs to put a 'brush' in the road.The Adair County Fiscal Court, during the first week of October 1912 and in accordance with the new state laws, unanimously approved J.N. Coffey for the post of Road Engineer (or Road Supervisor, as the position is now known) "as provided by the acts of the last legislature...to take effect December 1st and continue for two years on a salary of $600 per year." James Newton Coffey, then in his mid-fifties, was well-known in the county, having been for a number of years a partner in the Columbia general mercantile firm of Hughes, Coffey, & Hunter, later known as Hughes & Coffey after Mr. Hunter's withdrawal from the establishment. In 1906, Mr. Coffey bought out his partners, the brothers E.H. and Tobe Hughes, and went into business with his son-in-law, Jo F. Patteson, under the banner of Coffey & Patterson. Beginning in 1906, he served as assistant cashier at the First National Bank of Columbia for a number of years. He was active in the Adair County Republican party, served at least one term as Director of the Columbia Fair Association, and did surveying. Said the News of Mr. Coffey, "We deem it proper to state that we believe a competent man has been selected, and that he will endeavor to make good to the county in the betterment of the roads, both as to grades and general condition." As if to prove the newspaper correct in their assessment, Mr. Coffey took time by the forelock and immediately journeyed to Frankfort, took and passed the examination required of Road Engineers and thus "secured from the State Commissioner of Roads a certificate" which authorized him to discharge the duties for which he had been chosen. He promptly blazed a trail back to Adair County and "assumed the duties of the office on Oct 12th, 1912." And assume the duties he did. By the end of November, he already had surveyed (traversed) many of the roads in the northern part of the county, and, with assistance of County Judge N.H. Moss, had made considerable progress in dividing the county into eighteen districts, each with at least one assistant Road Engineer, with two assistants in the larger districts; one district warranted three. (The assistants drew the princely sum of one dollar for each day actually worked.) A long article near the end of November detailed Mr. Coffey's recent trip to the Casey's Creek and Pellyton sections of the county "to look after the public roads conditions." From Columbia, he described the road as "only passable" until reaching the district where Mr. Hardin Cundiff was overseer, where the road was in fine shape. From there to the Plum Point Bridge, the way was "in fairly good condition," but "After crossing the Watson [i.e., Plum Point] Bridge,. he found a section of road in very bad condition. The overseer...seems to have been resting on his hoe." Next, the road under the care of Mr. Tom McDermont was in fine shape, and from there he traveled to Pellyton via Dunbar Hill. The article noted the Fiscal Court had spent five hundred dollars on Dunbar Hill "but since that expenditure it has been neglected," with washouts making it "nearly impassable." At Pellyton he found "the best piece of road in the county" and on the Columbia side of the river in the Little Cake section, overseer Jim McQueary had the road in excellent shape. The harshest words were reserved for the overseer of "the next section, oh his return to Columbia." The News stated Mr. Coffey was "of the opinion that the overseer is a close relative to Rip Van Winkle, who it will be remembered, slept for twenty years, finding upon awakening, that his house and other effects had tumbled down." The article also noted the road from Ruberts store to the Green River Bridge was virtually impassable and stated, "A little work would do incalculable good here..." Then came the big freshet of January 1913. Three months later, Mr. Coffey wrote of the havoc wreaked by this deluge, "This flood in addition to washing the roads all to pieces and creating almost impassable conditions in many places, washed away 48 feet of the approach to the bridge at the mouth of Disappointment, and rendered useless and unsafe about 60 feet of the approach to the bridge at Mill town. The bridge over Green River at Watson was swept from the piers and lodged about 75 yards below, in the river."In regard to the latter structure, Mr. Coffey strongly recommended that the Adair Fiscal Court "authorize the raising of the bridge 3 or four feet when it is reconstructed, so as to place it above high water mark, as it has been demonstrated by this catastrophe to be entirely too low." He also suggested that the approaches "be placed upon cement abutments...and that iron runners be substituted for the wood," expressing the belief that to do so "will be an economy in the long run." Meanwhile, controversy swirled across the county in regard to the new road laws and the implications of funding via levy and bonds. A number of citizens, among them Mr. Ambrose C. Wheeler, a merchant of the Knifley country, and poet-pundit Dr. J.T. Jones of near Garlin, went into near-apoplectic shock at the remotest possibility of the county issuing bonds to help pay for road improvements. In a letter the News published in January 1913, Mr. Wheeler, with considerably more fury than fact, railed against the issuance of bonds, fulminating that "We have a new road law and what does it amount to? Our engineer passes over the roads once in 12 months, [and] appoints assistants. They are promised sufficient pay to keep them mum, and the Engineer draws the salary."In a display of his business acumen, Mr. Coffey laid before the Fiscal Court as well as the readership of the News the proposal that the Court empower the Road Engineer--"if you can trust him financially, and if you cannot you had better get one that you can"--to make bulk purchases of equipment and materiels required for repairs and maintenance, thus getting the items at a much reduced per-unit cost as well as saving the merchants the necessity of submitting claims and then waiting six months to a year for reimbursement. He concluded this request by unequivocally stating the Court should require "a strict accounting all that may be placed in my hands." In the closing paragraphs of the article, Mr. Coffey penned, with no small degree of eloquence, "A responsible head is needed in every undertaking in life. The road question is no exception even if it the largest one undertaken by mankind since they tried to build the tower of Babel. and as your honored body has seen fit to put me at the head of this road movement and as the responsibility for success or failure must rest upon me, I request that you stand by me in all that is reasonable in these suggestions and in my efforts to better the roads in this county.Despite the road laws passed in 1912 (and afterward), despite the best laid plans and well-intentioned efforts of Mr. J.N. Coffey and his successors, and despite the many gallons of ink News editor Charles Snow Harris devoted, over a period of two decades, to preaching the value of a good transportation system, Adair County's roads for the most part remained mired in the mud of the past for several decades. This story was posted on 2015-02-19 09:03:36
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Have comments or corrections for this story? Use our contact form and let us know. (AD) - Many Reunion organizing efforts are also advertised in our REUNIONS category in our CM Classifeds. These are posted at a very low cost. See RATES & TERMS More articles from topic Local History:
BJF: Remembers grandmother tell about 1917-18 winter JIM: Winter of 1917-18 was a real ripsnorter Steve Dowell: Looking for photos of Dode Dowell QUERY: Information about W.C. Barrett's name JIM: Dr. J.C. Gose, beloved Adair Co. citizen, died Feb. 4, 1945 Freshet at Plum Point was portent of Great Flood of 1913 Ben Finn: Billy Joe Fudge story reminds of visits to Dr. Howard Mike Watson: Early history, Cane Valley, KY Tommy Melson: rubberrized roofing a Johns Manville product JIM: School attendance was at 56.4% in 1910 View even more articles in topic Local History |
 
115 Jamestown St. Columbia, KY. 270-384-2496 
  
   
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