efficient statute labor. Those counties that wanted to hire engineers had difficulty finding them, since the supply of civil engineers with highway training was exceedingly small.
The shortage was so serious that Director Dodge in 1903 had recommended that Congress establish in Washington, in connection with the Office of Public Road Inquiries, a National School for Roadbuilding, similar to the famous School of Bridges and Roads which had trained French road engineers since 1747. This institution, as envisioned by Dodge, would be “. . . a post-graduate school, where graduates in civil engineering from the land-grant colleges could secure a thorough course in theoretical and practical road building. . . . The American school of road building should include a series of lectures by experts of this Office, and some practical work in the road-material laboratory and in connection with the object-lesson road work of the Office in different parts of the country.”[1] Most of the students would be employees of the States, counties and cities who would return to these agencies after completing their training.
This school was never established, but after he became Director, Page obtained Department approval for a training program under which a limited number of young civil engineering graduates, after taking competitive examinations, were appointed to the position of civil engineer student in the OPR, at a salary of $600 per year. These young men learned practical roadbuilding in the field with the OPR’s object lesson road teams. They received instruction in testing road materials in the laboratory and were detailed as assistants in the OPR’s other activities to learn by doing. After 1 year in the training program, they were eligible for promotion to junior highway engineer without further examination.[2]
Despite the small compensation, the OPR had no trouble recruiting all the civil engineer students it needed. Over a period of 10 years, some 70 engineers were hired, of whom about 36 resigned within a year of completing their training to accept positions with colleges, counties and State highway departments. Page accepted these losses philosophically:
. . . the engineers after a few years’ training in the office are in great demand for State and county work. The practice of permitting these engineers to resign is detrimental in one sense to the service, in that the office is constantly losing some of its best men, but the benefits derived by the various States and counties through the distribution of trained men to all sections of the country are so great as to be a vindication of the wisdom of this project.[3]
Page also realized that his ability to expand the Federal good roads effort would depend on attracting additional experienced engineers to his staff. His first acquisition was Arthur N. Johnson, the able highway engineer of the Maryland Roads Commission.[N 1] Johnson agreed to take over the supervision of the OPR’s far flung field operations. Later, Page got Edwin W. James, who had supervised road work in the Philippines, to transfer to the OPR from the War Department. However, in the long run, the major source of recruitment for the OPR’s permanent force of engineers was the civil engineer student training program. Page’s foresight was forcefully demonstrated 12 years later when the trainees he had selected for this program became the backbone of the Bureau of Public Roads organization for administering the immense Federal-aid appropriations.
Director Page’s interest in the education and training of engineers went far beyond his own organization. In 1909 he had the OPR survey the status of highway engineering instruction in all the technical schools and colleges in the United States, and he furnished advisors to help the schools set up practical courses in highway design and construction. The OPR aided a number of schools to set up first-class testing laboratories, and whenever its agents and engineers could be spared from other work, they were detailed to lecture on highway engineering in the colleges.
Federal Roads on Federal Lands
Since the two agencies were in the same department of the Government, it was natural for the Forest Service to turn to the Office of Public Roads for help with its road problems, and the OPR was furnishing occasional advice on forest trails as early as 1905.[4]
However, it was not until 1913 that a formal arrangement was made for the OPR to handle road work in the national forests.[N 2] Congress in 1912 had required that 10 percent of the revenues from the national forests should be spent to construct roads and trails within these forests.[6] By the end of fiscal year 1912, $210,925 had accumulated in the forest road fund, and the Forest Service found that it needed expert advice on where and how to spend the money. The Chief Forester asked Director Page to assign highway engineers to inspect all the existing roads and to recommend how these should be improved and where others should be built. The OPR then assigned five engineers to this work, one for each of five forest districts.
About this time, the Secretary of the Interior also asked for assistance to help with the planning of roads in the national parks. Page responded by placing an engineer and a field survey party in Yosemite National Park during the summer of 1914 and promised to begin work in five other parks as soon as he could find the engineers.[N 3]
- ↑ Johnson resigned 2 years later to become chief engineer of the Illinois Highway Department, and he subsequently became one of the most distinguished American highway engineers and one of the founders of the science of traffic analysis.
- ↑ In 1910 the OPR, at the request of the Crater Lake Highway Commission, a private body, assigned a road expert to supervise the construction of a road through the Crater Lake National Forest to the Crater Lake National Park and to plan a system of roads and trails for the Park. This road was financed by county funds and private subscriptions and was not actually Forest Service work.[5]
- ↑ At this time, there was no National Park Service; each park superintendent reported directly to the Secretary of the Interior and did his own road work, except for Yellowstone where the roads were built by the Corps of Engineers. In 1914 there were 12 national parks.
To handle this sudden increase in workload, Director Page set up a Division of National Park and Forest Roads within the OPR and assigned responsibility for the Division to T. Warren Allen. The work in
