The electric railroad made the village centers more available to farm
people and gave transportation facilities to many villages without
railroads, but it also made it possible for the people of smaller
communities to go to the larger centers for trading and other
advantages. Trolleys have made it possible for many farm children to get
to high school who could not otherwise have attended and have enabled
those living near them to more easily get back and forth from the
village centers for all phases of community life. On the whole, however,
they have probably carried more traffic between communities, and it
seems strange that they have not more generally been able to find a
profit in hauling produce from the farms to the nearest markets or
shipping stations.
Of more importance to community life has been the development of good
roads, a movement which did not get under way until the present century
and which was chiefly due to the rural free mail delivery and the
automobile. The change in rural life due to automotive vehicles can
hardly be exaggerated. In our best agricultural states practically every
farmer has his automobile. He can get to the community center as quickly
as the business man or laborer gets to his work in the average city, and
can go to the county seat or neighboring city as quickly as one can
drive to the business section from the more distant parts of New York or
Chicago. Auto-bus lines radiate from most of our small cities, and auto
trucks not only bring freight from nearby wholesale centers, but are
rapidly supplanting horses for hauling farm produce to the shipping
station or market.
As good roads have been due chiefly to state and county, and more
recently to national aid, it is but natural that they should have been
constructed where the traffic is heaviest connecting the main centers.
What is now most needed to build up the local communities is a
systematic development of the principal local roads radiating from the
community centers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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