century. Immediate corroboration for these chains of early road orders was provided by the fact that many of the principal roads studied had survived, in all or part, under their eighteenth century name down to the present or the time when the Confederate Engineers produced the first good maps of some of the counties of Virginia in 1863 and 1864. Most of these early roads remain today nearly exactly on the routes shown on these maps. The ready availability of the road orders in a convenient, printed form, along with these maps as corroborative evidence, greatly facilitated the writing of brief histories of some individual roads (such as Three Notch'd). These histories ultimately made possible the evolution of a road-oriented architectural survey course at the University of Virginia.
While the previously mentioned Three Notch'd Road report was being prepared for Mr. Bear at Monticello, K. Edward Lay, Assistant Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia,became aware of the road history project during an informal discussion with Howard Newlon, who in addition to his duties with the Council is also a lecturer in that School. His curiosity piqued by Newlon's descriptions of some of the taverns and other surviving buildings along the road, Lay, after viewing the slides, maps, and other materials of Messrs. Pawlett and Newlon, decided the potential existed for a very interesting, unique and innovative course tying architectural development to the existence of the road itself and its subsequent influence on Virginia history.
After discussions between the various parties involved, a course called "Architectural Patterns Associated with Eighteenth Century Virginia Road Traces" was initiated in late 1975 or early 1976 by the Architectural History Department. The initial semester of this course dealt with the Three Notch'd Road between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Goochland County line. Following the success of this maiden voyage, it was decided that the course would be repeated. The second time, portions of the Secretary's Road and the Buck Mountain Road in Albemarle and Fluvanna Counties were dealt with. The documents from these surveys, consisting of information sheets, photographs, maps and brief histories, were bound and placed on deposit in the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library at the University, where they are available to scholars, local historians and genealogists.
In each case the availability of the printed and indexed road orders allowed the construction of a chronological chain of road orders for the road in question and, subsequently, a brief written history of the road supported by plats, deeds, and the corpus of the work dealing with the architectural survey itself. At the back of the published report on the Three Notch'd Road can be found an appendix containing just such a chain of road orders for it, to which have been added other pertinent road orders from Orange and Augusta Counties, an ordinary license from Louisa containing the name, and citations of the name from the Virginia Gazette of Williamsburg.
The same system of recording used for the road orders will also be useful when extracting other information from early records, and will eliminate that curse of the historian and genealogist, longhand copying and notetaking, while simultaneously allowing a literal reproduction of the documents in
– 14 –
