Written by Larry Felton Johnson
The March 2, 1899 issue of the Marietta Journal (one of the previous names of the Marietta Daily Journal) featured a letter from a high school student who seemed very forward-thinking for his age, writing about what was then the Cobb County highlighted the condition of the roads. Turn of the century.
I found this letter while trying to find the earliest mention of this car in an Atlanta or Cobb County newspaper that also mentioned Cobb County. This newspaper is digitized at the Georgia Historical Newspapers site.
A search revealed that the word “automobile” had been used before, but it referred to a type of torpedo. The student’s letter is the first time the term has been mentioned in Cobb County for motorized vehicles.
Without limiting your search to Cobb County, the first mention of the automobile is in an 1889 issue of the Thomasville Times, where Captain Henry Metcalf wrote that if a car scared a horse, he would stop the car and help it. It is reported that he had a card with the following information: Lead the horse forward. He also predicted that horses would become accustomed to cars.
A letter from a student (transcribed below) provides commentary on the current state of Cobb County’s road system.
cobb county road
Anyone who hasn’t driven Cobb County roads in all weather conditions can’t judge them properly. Who could ask for better roads when the weather is nice?
It’s like asphalt pavement, hard and smooth.
Many people ride bicycles on prefectural roads at any time of the day, and at dusk many people of all ages and genders can be seen taking evening walks.
But when it starts raining, there are no worse roads. Big holes are everywhere. The mud is quite deep. The poor horse can hardly move even a light load.
There is a place about 200 yards long between the town and my house, and here the horses go through the mud, and before they have gone half the distance they are completely exhausted. You have to wait a few minutes for it to arrive. Enough breathing to keep going.
If the Road Commission could drive just a few miles off Canton Road last week, it would have immediately ordered macadamization of the road. If this happens, real estate will increase by 50 percent.
To prove this, let me use one of the northern states as an example: New Jersey.
The crushed stone roads leading out of New Jersey cities have doubled the value of the real estate that follows them. For now, wealthy people from the city are going 15 or 20 miles outside, buying small plots of land and building great country mansions. Nowadays, large numbers of cars and electric horse-drawn carriages come and go every day.
Before the McAdam Road was built, 1.5 tonnes was considered a suitable load, but now farmers can pump 7 to 8 tonnes of water.
One-half of the total cost is borne by the state, one-fourth by the city, and one-quarter by the township in which the city is located. New York state allocated her $9 million to Canal, but it was stolen.
If it had concentrated on road blight, New York would have taken the lead.
Georgia has to get a grip on it.
This state has a chain gang system for prisoners, so using them on the streets would be a great idea.
Main roads can also be called state highways. The state would pay one-half of the cost, and the county and city through which the road would pass would each pay a quarter. But to return to the current road. In the place I mentioned before, someone, no doubt with good intentions, piled up he eight or he nine blocks of marble of various sizes.
These pieces stick out of the mud about a foot or so, and if you ride on them, your horse-drawn carriage will slam into you and almost kill you.
A stranger will definitely think that he has discovered a marble quarry, or that a volcanic eruption has recently taken place.
A few days ago, we were at school and when we jumped over a huge rock, it rose into the air as if shot by a gun and came down again with such force that it broke the bottom of the seat.
The county should pay for it, but I think if the county had to pay for all the accidents, big and small, caused this way, the county would go bankrupt. Road soon.
Watch the benefits accrue to those who build good roads. The time currently spent transporting 50 cents of wood to market is enough to transport four times that amount of wood, and the same amount of labor can do it.
Mr. Gramling would be in favor of good road laws, so that farmers could use fine horse-drawn carriages instead of driving poor sawmills.
Harnessers will benefit when horse-drawn carriages are used to replace lumber trucks, as better harnesses will be used instead of the ropes, chains, and straps commonly found today.
Grocery stores would benefit by being able to deliver rural produce more cheaply, and through the grocery store, the entire community would benefit.
So it’s clear that everyone should support good roads. –
EDNA A. Baker, sophomore in high school
These students had to wait decades for widespread paving to take hold in the county. Construction of the Interstate Dixie Highway began in his 1915 year and was largely completed by the 1920s. However, even into the 1950s, paved roads were mostly limited to state highways, U.S. highways, and paved roads within cities.
georgia history newspaper
Reading old newspapers has always been an interest of mine. After developing his Georgia Historical Newspaper website, I felt like a kid in a candy store.
The Georgia Historical Newspaper is part of the GALILEO project and is housed at the University of Georgia.
The project team has located and scanned copies of Georgia newspapers, which currently include newspapers from the 17th century to the present day.
We digitize your article into a PDF copy and run optical character recognition (OCR) to make it searchable and available in text format (although text rendering is not perfect).