Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 May 1917 — MAIN ROADS ARE NEGLECTED [ARTICLE]

MAIN ROADS ARE NEGLECTED

Work Is Not Being Done Where It Is Most Needed. , It certainly is enough to make angels weep to observe the\ manner in which main traveled roads in Jasper county are torn up and rendered impassable without the slightest regard for the rights, privileges or convenience of the traveling public. Such rank assininity is probably without a parallel in the entire United States. And yet “we want to encourage tourist travel through Jasper county.” < Ye Gods! . The condition of the so-called Jackson highway in places in Jasper county during the past two or three seasons has been such as to cause a large per cent of the tourists who have passed through here to use more cuss words than they ever used before in their lives in consigning Jasper county and its road officials to the lowest depths of perdition. Our officers go ahead and tear out bridges on this much-traveled highway or make other plans for improving sections of it without making the slightest provision for the traveling public or spending a few dollars to make passable for a temporary time the highways necessarily traveled in detouring, and an unnecessarily long time is usually taken to make the improvements. Last summer we had the bridge over the Hoover slough south of town torn out for several weeks and, while a very few dollars would haye put the detour road in passable condition, no effort whatever was made to put the road in shape and hundreds of tourists mired down in the one or two bad places which a little work and a few dollars would have put in fair condition. Last fall they started to improve the Burk bridge grade north of Rensselaer, and such a good job was done of the “improving” that this particular stretch of road has been almost impassable almost ever since, and it is Still so. Tourists on the Jackson highway could for a time turn off at the Zeigler corner and go a mile west and get along fairly well, but nothing was done to keep this road in deecnt temporary repair and it is said to have been in a frightful. condition all spring. Now, some little work has been done toward the building of the Union township stone road on the Jackson highway through the Schultz settlement and the grade has been cut down in places. The deepest cut is at the hill near the German Lutheran church, and here is a stretch of a couple hundred feet of pure sand in which nearly, ■every car that goes through there gets stalled. A traveling man for a Chicago paper house, who was in Rensselaer Wednesday, driving here from Valparaiso, said that there

were seven cars stuck in this sand when he came through; that he managed to get through with his own car, but that it was all he could do. With very little expense this place could be made fairly passable until the rock is put on and the road fully improved. But the policy of our officers, whose duty i-t is to keep the roads in a passable condition, seems to be “the public be d —d,” and while it may be months, possibly not until late next fall, before this new rock road is completed—nothing whatever is said to be doing by the contractors at the present time —the traveling public will probably have to put up with this condition all of this time. And, in the meantime, our highly paid and wholly inefficient county highway superintendent is improving at county expense a street in Rensselaer which goes directly past his residence, and the $3,500 county steam roller and equipment, together with several teams and haulers are being used in this work of improving, a street in Rensselaer!