GWINNETT EXTRA, JANUARY 26, 1984 Dusty roads becoming thing of past Country folks' reaction mixed to paving program By Kevin Metcalt-Kelly Staff Writer Wilbur Crow, an 83-year-old rural patriarch who reigns over Crow's General Merchandise in the Hog Mountain community, recalls dusty, bone-jarring truck rides over Gwinnett County's dirt roads. Once a week, he loaded his 1927 Chevrolet with chickens and eggs and headed down U.S. 29 for Atlanta, where he sold the poultry and bought groceries. More than 50 years have passed since U.S. 29, the Crow family's lifeline to Atlanta, became Gwinnett's first paved road.
It's been more than 30 years since the county blacktopped Ga. 124, the road beside Crow's old home. Crow welcomed the change and, even in retrospect, his disdain for the rough roads has not softened. "When you live on a dirt road, dust gets on everything you've got," Crow said. "I hope I never have to live on another dirt road." Today, the sprawling county's major thoroughfares all are paved, but Gwinnett still is honeycombed with more dirt roads than the other metro Atlanta counties combined.
Among Gwinnett's 1,622 miles of city- and county-maintained roads, 224 miles or nearly one in seven are dirt or gravel. By contrast, only 140 miles of roads remain unpaved in Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton counties. Clayton and Rockdale counties have paved all but 60 miles of their road networks. "We've sure whacked away at them, but we have a lot more to go," said Wayne Shackelford, administrative assistant to the Gwinnett County Commission. Gwinnett road crews hard-top about 40 miles of unpaved road a year, but one-third of that paving is applied to newly cut roads, Shackelford said.
In seven years, Gwinnett has paved about 130 miles of the old rutted roads, he said. "My dream is to see all of our citizens served by an adequately designed and constructed hard-surface road," he said. Not all Gwinnett residents see the old washboard roads as a nuisance. Effie Sikes, 64, relishes the privacy of unpaved Paper Mill Road, which snakes and rolls through a wooded area east of Lawrenceville. The inconvenience of the dustyin-summer, muddy-in-winter road is a small price to pay for the isolated country enclave which she and her family enjoy, she said.
"It's the only way to live," Mrs. Sikes said, "out in the middle of nowhere with your dogs and cats." Mrs. Sikes is unhappy that the county's road-paving progam will alter her rustic lifestyle. "I know we've got to change, but that big a change I could do without," Mrs. Sikes said.
While most residents and county officials favor asphalt roads over gravel, not everyone agrees on the immediate importance of the job. Gwinnett County department heads whose work is tied to the roads echo Crow's enthusiasm for hardtop and are grateful for the progress the county has made. They remember when rough driving surfaces were the norm. Julian Waters said that in 1967, when he became Gwinnett County schools' director of transportation, about half the roads his buses plied were like "corrugated metal." Bus repairs often entailed refastening bolts shaken loose by the rugged roads, Waters said. While the steady upgrading of county roads has meant far fewer bumpy bus routes, Waters said, training new Gwinnett school bus drivers still includes practice on what he described as "corduroy roads." Gwinnett County's police frequently answer complaints of garbage dumping and abandoned automobiles on dirt roads, said uniform division commander Maj.
W.D. Bedingfield. Most crime, Bedingfield said, has long since moved from the Effie Sikes walks down one of the county's remote rural areas of the lanes east of Lawrenceville where she's county to its more populated subur- most of her life. ban sprawl. (Photo Bill Mahan) Res.
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