Last week’s column described some of the changes in Fergus in 1927 that brought that town firmly into the modern era.
Fergus was unique in Wellington County in those years, enjoying growth and rising assessment when other towns were at best stagnating, and many were suffering declines in population and assessment. At one point in the 1920s, Fergus had one half of the urban assessment in Wellington.
One aspect of the progress in the 1920s was the reconstruction and paving of roads, and that benefitted all communities in Wellington, both urban and rural.
County council, in fact, had been putting more resources into roads since the 1890s, when the Good Roads movement began, pushed largely by farmers. Poor roads were costly for farmers, raising costs of getting their products to market when wagons got bogged down in mud, and poor surfaces limited the size of loads they could transport.
In the end, though, it was pressure from motorists that fueled the drive for better roads, and those pressures became overwhelming by the 1920s. The provincial department of highways conducted some traffic surveys in 1922, when road improvements were in their early stages, and repeated the surveys two years later, after a number of road improvements had been made. Those figures provide some hard evidence of the traffic growth that accompanied better roads.
Jurisdiction over roads and highways was originally local. County governments often maintained major routes, many of which originated as privately-owned toll roads. Under pressure from the Good Roads organization, Ontario established a Road Instructor’s Office under the Department of Agriculture in 1896 to assist local governments in road building.
In 1910 the province began work on what would become Highway 2, the first major stretch of concrete road in the province. That project was completed in 1915. The following year the province established the Department of Highways, and gradually evolved a system of construction tendering, along with subsidies to finance secondary roads. Interestingly, there was no numbering system for provincial highways until 1925.
The Ontario government began work improving the old Owen Sound Road, which later became Highway 6, in 1920. This had been the busiest road in Wellington during the late 19th century, and it maintains that position to this day.
By the standards of today, traffic counts on the county roads were minuscule in the 1920s. In the summer of 1922 the future Highway 6 in Puslinch Township averaged 948 motor vehicles and 43 horse drawn conveyances. Two years later those figures were 1,482 and 49. On peak days those numbers would more than double, indicating that many motorists used their cars for pleasure trips rather than commuting or other business applications.
Two years later, the average motorized count had jumped to 1,482, an increase of 56%. Surprisingly, horse-drawn traffic also increased slightly, indicating that better roads encouraged farmers to make more frequent trips into town.
To the north, south of Arthur village, the traffic count for motorized vehicles was 238 in 1922 and 400 in 1924. Horse drawn vehicles jumped from 107 to 168 at that point.
A very busy section of that road was the portion between Guelph and the junction with the Elora Road at Marden. That section saw an average of 938 motor vehicles in the summer of 1924, plus 55 horse-drawn vehicles. That point was not surveyed in 1922. The numbers do show that farmers in the south of Wellington were much quicker to embrace cars and trucks than those in the north.
The Elora Road, once a county-operated toll road, was the second busiest road in Wellington. At the north end of Clifford that road saw 302 vehicles per day in 1924. The future Highway 9 at Arthur saw only a daily average of 52 at the same time. Planners for the provincial highway network originally planned to route the future Highway 9 from Teviotdale to Marden, but, as the result of some back-room manoeuvres, the province assumed the road east from Teviotdale to Arthur, even though the Elora Road was a far busier and important route.
Some of the officials predicted that Arthur-Orangeville section would become a major route to Toronto after it was brought up to a higher standard. That happened to some extent, but the traffic volumes did not reach the predicted levels until after the Second World War.
The other route that became a provincial highway in the 1920s was the future Highway 7. In the summer of 1924, that route averaged 549 motor vehicles east of Guelph and 366 west of the Royal City. At Breslau that number rose to 605, plus some 46 horse-drawn vehicles. Traffic analysts at the time considered traffic there to be verging on congestion at busy times. Today, some 90 years later and with traffic counts many times those of the 1920s, that problem is not yet resolved.
The surveys on the future Highway 6 sampled all sections of that roadway, from Hamilton to Chatsworth. North of Mount Forest the numbers declined significantly. At Durham the motorized count rose from 182 vehicles per day in 1922 to 262 in 1924. The latter figure might have been higher had not work been in progress on that section of the highway. The same applied to Highway 6 between Fergus and Arthur. Many motorists detoured over the Marden-Teviotdale section to avoid delays and construction activity during the summer of 1924.
The provincial highway system planned in the 1920s proved to be a durable one. At the time, the deputy minister, L.S. Squires, complained that much of his time was occupied in dealing with delegations that wanted a particular stretch of road included in the provincial network.
He was able to resist those pleas, and designed a network that, with additions, lasted for 75 years, until the years of the Harris government’s downloading policy, which dramatically reduced the provincial highway network by downloading various roads to counties and lower tier municipalities.
In the 1920s the county governments were assessed a portion of the costs of the improvements being made to the provincial highway network. That, plus an aggressive construction program to upgrade Wellington County roads, claimed an ever-larger portion of the county budget.
County council, in the 1920s, allocated between $350,000 and $400,000 to roads each year for construction, repairs and maintenance. Even by factoring in inflation, those numbers seem very reasonable by today’s standards.
Most of the municipalities in the northern part of the county were happy with the roads program. People there wanted more and better roads. On balance, their benefits outweighed the costs assessed to them. In the south of Wellington, which had enjoyed, on balance, far better roads than the north had for years, the cost of the road program caused resentment.
Fergus council, in particular, believed that their town, with its large and growing assessment base, was shouldering far more than a fair share of the county’s road budget.
The situation led to an effort by Fergus to leave the county system, and stand as an independent municipality. Fergus had tried to do this on previous occasions, and would try again in the future.
That subject has been covered in this column on previous occasions, and will likely be picked up again in the future.