North Carolina was once known far and wide as “the good roads state.” This is an appropriate time to call attention to this fact, because it all began to fall into place about 100 years ago.
America actually had a “good roads movement,” and it may have originated in 1899 in Asheville, N.C., under the leadership of Dr. Chase P. Ambler, a local physician and conservationist.
Dr. Ambler helped create “a sense of urgency to remedy the mostly wretched conditions of county roads,” according to Terry Ruscin of the Hendersonville Times-News. During this period, “North Carolina’s individual counties built and maintained their roads,” Rucsin reported. Most were clay, dirt or gravel.
Walter Turner, historian at the North Carolina Transportation Museum Foundation in Spencer, said: “Counties had scant money for machinery, so making and maintaining roads was largely done with cheap manual labor. Prisoners on chain gangs performed most of the work.”
He was interviewed by Bryan Mims for an article in Our State magazine. “The counties didn’t work together, so the state became a haphazard patchwork of roads to nowhere. Roads didn’t always connect from one county to another,” according to Turner.
“After a drenching rain,
the roads turned to mush,” Mims wrote. “Cars sank to their fenders in the ooze.
Mules and horses often had to haul them out. North Carolina, for a time, was
where cars went to die.”
Historian Dr. Jeffrey J. Crow wrote: “When the North Carolina General Assembly of 1921 agreed to issue $50 million in bonds to establish a paved state highway system, the Raleigh Times complimented the work of Harriet “Hattie” Morehead Berry of Hillsborough of the North Carolina Good Roads Association “for bringing North Carolina out of the mud.”
Berry had begun working with Joseph Hyde Pratt, North Carolina’s state geologist, in 1901. Their duties were expanded to coordinate activities of the state good roads association in 1902. “The pair worked relentlessly for good roads during the next two decades,” Dr. Crow said.
When the United States
entered World War I in 1917, Pratt joined the army. Berry assumed leadership of
good roads initiative.
She was credited with delivering “one of the most stupendous pieces of legislation in the history of the state,” Dr. Crow said. Hence, Berry was dubbed as the “Mother of Good Roads.” Raleigh’s other newspaper, The News & Observer, said Berry was the “best woman politician in the state.”
Although Gov. Cameron Morrison was labeled as the “good roads governor” in 1921, Berry called him down when he seemed to waffle on funding the transportation package, Dr. Crowe said.
“Morrison sought to shield the wealthier counties from heavy expense by recommending that each county pay for half the cost of building and maintaining roads,” Dr. Crowe said. Berry and the good roads supporters were stunned. “Poorer counties could not possibly raise enough tax revenues for such a program.”
Berry and her backers confronted
Gov. Morrison and “pointedly reminded him” that his campaign promise was “for
the state, not the counties, to build roads.”
“After the meeting, Morrison told a reporter: ‘If it hadn’t been for that waspish woman, I could have had my way.’”
Dr. Crowe said when an urban contingent of “good roads” supporters once suggested that their campaign for good roads “might be too much for a woman, “Berry icily replied:
“The weak shoulders of a
woman have for the past 15 years carried this proposition, and I propose that
the weak shoulders of a women should continue to carry it.”
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