Early Roads Established by Wagons

In the early days when transportation horsepower was limited to the number of horses pulling a wagon, we find that the route from some Point A to another Point B did not always follow the route of the shortest distance. This observation is true for hilly country. Wagon routes found the route of least effort, but maybe more distance, while modern highways found the shortest distance, using more effort. Better wheels and bigger engines on transport vehicles made all this change occur.
So, this begs the question of how wagon routes were chosen to get from a Point A to a Point B in hilly country before the car, the train.
First off, wagon drivers did not want to pull up a hill only to give it back again by going down the other side of a hill. In fact, going downhill was often a chore because wagons did not have adequate brakes and so the wagon would tend to run up on the horses. As an aside, one old trick was to chain a log to the wagon at the top of a hill; dragging it downhill helped with braking.
Okay, so no up a hill only to go back down the other side. So what was the most obvious way to select a route? They looked for creek beds, active or dry and they ran their wagon roads up the valley of the drainage.
There was another advantage to the selection of a creek drainage as the wagon road. It provided the most opportunity for watering the horses.

Comments

Smithville, USA

If you are not observant while traveling northwest on Highway 71, Smithville will be in the rearview mirror and so then you will have missed it all. It's not on the main road but off to the south a block or so. We have driven past Smithville many times but this time, in order not to miss it, we decided to make that our destination. Smithville's main street runs parallel to the highway that runs north-south and therefore parallel to Highway 71. Highway 71 connecting Houston with Austin runs on the north side of the Colorado River and Smithville is on the south side of the river. This narrow separation from the main trunk line highway is what has spared Smithville from the ultimate doom of either death from isolation or ruin from big city influence. We often travel miles and miles for a new lunch experience and this trip was no different in that it was a 90-minute drive to reach our destination of the Old World Bakery and Cafe. The bakery part is ...

Cause and Effect

We have this great world atlas book published by the National Geographical Society, which by the way, we bought at the local library used book sale for $2. Probably this low price of the book pains the Society but it sure makes my reference to maps an easy task without having to wake up my computer. The book occupies a permanent spot on a book stand in our breakfast room, standing ready to supply map information on request. The book happened to be open to the page showing the whole of Antarctica featuring all the outposts and even some commentary of scientific significance. One such comment was on ice coring data of historic temperatures and carbon dioxide content. I can understand how the CO2 content of the ice can be preserved over many centuries at varying depths, but I am unsure how the prevailing temperature of some thousand years ago can be preserved in the ice cores--but that's another issue that we will not get into here. So here is the comment on the data of the ice...

Aermotor Windmill Lives

The Aermotor windmill is probably the oldest iconic windmill In the United States today. We bought one that was very old at a seller's booth at the Round Top antique market. This was back in the late 1900s. So that makes it 20 years ago or so. We first erected this windmill In Fulshear in the backyard. We had to get Architectural Control Committee approval to do this. Because some of our neighbors may have some bad experiences with a neighboring windmill, we had to assure them that we would not let the brake slide and provide that nasty shrieking noise. Other than that, there was no objection to looking at a windmill. W e erected the windmill in Fulshear. It was quite a chore for us as we had no idea where all the parts fit together and how they were arranged. For example, we learned that the sail wheel with its struts is built with the same concept as a bicycle wheel with its spokes. After much head scratching and consulting the internet we had it to ...

NQ99HQ

Search This Blog