Roads Without The State

Roads have varied from the apparently haphazard and irrational in organization to the almost mindlessly regular. George Washington complained in his diary that New England’s roads were “amazingly crooked,” but noted quickly that this was designed “to suit the convenience of everyman’s fields.” People built local roads to suit their own purposes, making things difficult for distant travelers. Washington, a great traveler in his first profession as a surveyor and then as an officer in the war against the French, wrote acerbically that the circuitousness of local