Pioneers blazed trails for county's roads

By Ryan Howard (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published 06:31 a.m., February 22, 2010

There are a lot of things County Highway Engineer Rick West has to deal with, from rising water to traffic safety hazards to securing easements. However, while figuring out a way to keep a rising lake from flooding a road can be frustrating and often expensive, at least West doesn’t have to deal with federal engineers building redundant roads next to his or his surveying oxen falling off a bridge.

That’s what life could be like for the original road surveyors of Minnesota, West explained to a small group of people at last Friday’s Otter Tail County Historical Society's Coffee Klatch. West related some of the stories of Alvin H. Wilcox, a U.S. deputy surveyor who, working through the federal government and with the state government, conducted some road surveying in Otter Tail County and the surrounding area starting in the early 1870s.

Back then, some of the roads present day Minnesotans know were just being laid for the first time, without the aid of the technological advantages highway engineers use today, like satellites and precise measurement devices. Many of the roads were set up alongside railroad lines (often to be used as service lines if a train needed supplies) or on Native American trails or pioneers’ oxcart trails.

In those days, most surveyors were contract workers who got paid by the job. Most of them brought along a teamster to drive an oxcart and some assistants to help with the measurements.

Surveyors measured the roads using surveying chains. Each chain contained 66 links, each one measuring a foot long. Surveyors would stretch out the chain (with the help of their assistants) and place it down on the area that was to become a road, thus usually laying out the road in 66 foot increments.

In the center of each chain was a pointed marker, which would be used to mark the center of the road. Some surveyors, like Wilcox, would mark each road mark with a stake so that he (and the people who would eventually build the road) could see where the road was going and where its center would be.

These measurements were not always accurate. “The chains wore out,” West explained. He added that the more conscientious surveyors would repair their chains to make sure they were truly 66 feet in length, but the people with less scruples would simply take their stretched out chains and measure with them anyway. Oftentimes, their work ethic matched the quality of their equipment: lousy.

West noted that when some roads were remeasured in the modern day, it was found that their original measurements were off by about 66 or 132 feet, indicating that a lazy or forgetful surveyor had miscounted how many times he had laid out a new chain. When this happened, it was said that a surveyor “dropped a chain.”

The lack of communication technology in the 1870s was another barrier to the surveyors. Northern Minnesota was still a mostly untamed frontier, with small pockets of settlers forming the first inklings of the towns that Otter Tail County residents know today. Messages were often delivered on horseback, and communication between county governments and the federal government was, at times, nonexistent. Such was the case in 1871, when Wilcox was assigned to lay out a road from Morris, in Stevens County, to the White Earth Indian Agency, in Becker County.

Wilcox’s route took him very close to Fergus Falls and through Elizabeth, which was at that time called Elizabethtown. Meanwhile, a county surveyor named Charlie Thompson was commissioned to measure a road between Fergus Falls and Elizabeth - only two miles away from the road Wilcox was planning. When the two roads reached Elizabeth, they entered the town only one block away from each other. A couple of blocks west of those roads was what is known as County Highway 59, then advertised as a road from Laredo, Texas to the Canadian border.

West said that it’s highly unlikely that neither Thompson nor Wilcox realized there was another road close by, but, for one reason or another, neither of them contacted the other person about consolidating the two roads. West said that it could have been a case where “one (surveyor) says, ‘I’ve got a contract to do this project. I’m going to get paid for this,’” and the other surveyor says the same thing.

Another example of poor communication was when Wilcox traveled by mule to Pelican Rapids to lay out the town. When he got there, he was unable to complete his job, as the settlement’s leader had been carted off to jail in St. Paul for selling alcohol to the Native Americans.

Lastly, the old frontier and lack of direct authority over surveyors at times made for some oddball adventures. Wilcox once was traveling over a rickety bridge about 10 feet over a stream with a careless teamster who urged on his oxcart too fast. The cart fell off of the bridge, pulling the oxen down with it, and the team had to spend the rest of day trying to recover the supplies, animals and surveying equipment out of the water and mud.

In the early 1900s up until around 1940, the redundant roads and different jurisdictions were slowly corrected and consolidated, a process West called “the maturing of our road system.” Nowadays, roadways can be plotted much more precisely, by government workers who don’t have to use cumbersome chains and teams of oxen. However, thanks to places like the Otter Tail County Historical Society and people like Rick West, pioneers of the roadways like Alvin Wilcox will not be soon forgotten.

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