Colville Boosters Redrew the Map, and the Taxpayers Paid for the Surveys
Northport cries foul after County Surveyor Clare Hunt moves the Newport–Metaline–Orient road off its original line, leaving a direct-route town side-tracked — and several thousand dollars spent on surveys that produced no road at all.
Northport is not the only town to register a complaint for the extravagant expenditure of the people's money on surveys for a wagon road between the Pend Oreille and Columbia rivers without beneficial results. The route as first laid out — connecting Newport, Metaline and Northport in Stevens county with Orient in Ferry county — was, until Clare Hunt became county surveyor, considered to be the most practicable and by far the most economical route for a county road, but soon after Hunt was installed in office a change was deemed most advisable.
The cause for this sudden change was hatched up by a few adventurous individuals whose endeavors to secure everything in sight for Colville led them to ignore the rights of citizens of other places. By the aid of the county surveyor these prominent Colville boosters caused a new route to be marked on the map for the state road, leaving Northport side-tracked although in direct line between the two terminal points.
In addition to robbing Northport of what justly belonged to it, the people have been fleeced to the tune of several thousand dollars in useless surveys and are still without a road between the points named. — Republican.
“In addition to robbing Northport of what justly belonged to it the people have been fleeced to the tune of several thousand dollars in useless surveys and are still without a road between the points named.”
Road money and county-seat favoritism are as old as the roads themselves: a surveyor's pen can move a highway, and with it the business and settlement that follow. Modern debates over which corridor gets paved — and which community gets bypassed — are the same argument, with the same suspicion that the folks nearest the courthouse get the first cut.
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