Horatio S. Earle

Horatio S. Earle, born in 1855 in Vermont, moved in 1889 to Detroit, Michigan, where he was a businessman specializing in road-related activities: Earle Cycle Company, Genesee Gravel Company, the Good Roads Supply Company, and the Earle Equipment Company. He joined the LAW in 1896, becoming chief consul of the LAW's Michigan Highway Improvement Committee in 1898. As he traveled around the State speaking on good roads, he observed the difference between rural and urban audiences, as historian Kenneth Earl Peters explained:

On To Washington

Some years later, Dodge said of his service as chairman of the Ohio Good Roads Commission:

Governor McKinley . . . often told me that if he should become President he wanted me to take charge of the road office for the United States government.

Who was Martin Dodge?

Joyce Ritter, former writer-editor with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), gathered information about Martin Dodge while developing America's Highways 1776-1976 for publication by the FHWA in 1976. That information, passed on to the author, was invaluable in preparing the biographical portions of this article.

End Notes

(click on end note number to return to text)

1. Obituary, The New York Times, August 7, 1905.

2. Glover, Edwin A., Bucktailed Wildcats: A Regiment of Civil War Volunteers, Thomas Yseloff, 1960, p. 86-87, 104.

3. Pension records.

Part 8 of 8

Final Years

The Beginning Has Just Been Made

Stone returned to the ORI in January 1899. A newsclip reprinted in the L.A.W. Bulletin and Good Roads on May 5, 1899, noted his return:

Part 7 of 8

Education for the Cause

Throughout these years of advocacy, Stone supported education, whether in the form of object-lesson roads or school lessons. In his opening address to the first meeting of the National League for Good Roads in 1892, he had proposed a grass-roots effort, at the school district level, to promote his National Highway Commission bill and the cause of good roads in general:

Part 6 of 8

Part 6 of 8

The Cost of Building Good Roads

Another approach was to emphasize that good roads would not be as costly as the farmers and other skeptics expected. Stone's credit partnership plan was one way of spreading the cost and keeping it minimal. Stone also recommended suiting the road to the need, a concept that would be the foundation of road building in all succeeding decades. In 1894, he told the Southern Immigration and Industrial Congress that wide roads were not needed in farming areas.

Part 5 of 8

U.S. Office of Road Inquiry

Rigid Economy, Strict Construction

Part 4 of 8

Good Roads Advocate

The Bicycle Craze

Interest in roads, dormant since the spread of railroads in the 1830's and 1840's, was revived by the introduction of the bicycle in the late 1870's. The initial craze was based on a bicycle--called an "ordinary" in the United States or, in England where it was invented, a "penny farthing"--that had a large front wheel and a small rear wheel. The ordinary soon reached America, largely because of the efforts of a Civil War veteran, Colonel Albert A. Pope of Boston.

Part 3 of 8

The Wilderness

Stone's military records indicate he was "Badly wounded" and that he had been "Captured at Gettysburg Pa. & Paroled July 4." Evidence suggests that Stone and his wounded men had received little, if any, medical attention in McPherson's barn after it fell behind Confederate lines. On August 1, Dr. John Dickson operated on Stone: