question.
For those documents such as plats (see Figures 5 and 6) and maps which must be directly reproduced from the original, either photography or a copying machine should be used. The great number and condition of the surviving plats in the Albemarle County Surveyors Books 1744-1853 showing roads made necessary the use of photography there, but it might in many cases be possible to produce usable reproductions on a copying machine where the number involved is not large. This assumes, of course, that plats of other counties contain as many roads as did Albemarle's, an assumption not generally supported by the plats of the several other counties which the author has thus far viewed.
Because the Albemarle plats did contain so many roads, an effort was made on each of the photographic copies to identify the present county and general area into which it would fall. Many of the plats fell within that period when Albemarle contained within it a number of other counties and the usefulness of this information to researchers over a broad area soon became obvious. Then, utilizing a form similar to that of E.G. Swem's Virginia Historical Index, an index was prepared and published as another part of the continuing series "Historic Roads of Virginia”.
Many other sources of information already exist in a prerecorded readily available form. County road maps, for instance, can be procured from the Virginia Department of Highways and Transportation. Aerial photographs as well as detailed topographical maps, both by the U.S. Geological Survey, also come readily to mind, and are available at the Division of Mineral Resources in Charlottesville. Collections of early photographs similar to those by the Cooks in Richmond and Holsinger's in Charlottesville are also available in many places. Others are still held by individuals and are waiting to be discovered.
With the first really detailed maps of Virginia counties dating from the 1860's, and surviving photographs seldom of earlier date, a large gap of a hundred years or so exists between the coming into existence of most roads and their first appearance on maps of an area. Here enters what can be the most potent of all our research tools: the site survey. This is usually accomplished by actually driving over those portions of the old roads still in service on, or very nearly on, their original routes. Where this is not possible because of abandonment or alteration of the route, the old trace can usually be covered on foot in the fall or winter with only minimal difficulty.
At this time photographs of interesting surviving portions of the road or its trace, the architecture along it, and fords and bridges can be made and the road sketched on county road maps, or geological survey maps if necessary. Of necessity, the site survey usually will come only after considerable preparatory work has been done in the early road orders, plats and maps to establish the general route of the road in question and its degree of correspondence with the modern highway system.
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