Forest clearance for roads — Another important activity that had an impact on the forests of the island was road-building. The creation of the island's road system was a long-drawn out business that proceeded in conjunction with settlement and agricultural clearance: it was both driven by settlement, and also led to new settlement in the areas through which the roads ran.238 Johnstone (1822) outlines the various stages in the making of a road on the island:

when a new road is to be opened here, a survey is made by one well acquainted with the neighbourhood [in fact this would usually have been by a professional surveyor hired by the government]; the trees are then lie. at the time of the survey] marked with chips along the track; this they call blazing them. The next process is to cut as many trees as to open a way to ride or walk in. The next step is to cut down as many more (rooting out the stumps) as to allow a carryall or slay (sledge) to pass. Next, to level the cradle—hills; and lastly to cast up the earth like a new formed road in Scotland. . if any of it is swampy and wet, they cut down small soft wood trees, and lay across the bottom as close as one can lie at the side of another, and by casting earth from the sides of the road upon these, make it both firm and durable.

It needs to be stressed that for any given stretch of road these various stages would have taken

quite a number of years to complete, and so throughout much of the nineteenth century there would have been roads in a state not very different from those seen by Lord Selkirk in 1803: ”the roads are very indifferent, mere bridle paths - nowhere the stumps rooted out, they might in some parts be passable for a Slay in Winter, but scarcely anywhere for a Cart in summer — full of

deep wet places”?39

Before we consider the effects of road-making on the forests of the island it should be noted that there does not seem to have been any bias in the selection of the forest-types through which the roads were run. In most of the coastal areas, settlement had preceded the making of roads, with the roads being subsequently created on an ad hoc basis without any official survey being carried

83, 128, 237) as follows: 1798: 4,372; 1805; 6,957; 1827: 23,266; 1833: 32,292; 1841: 47,034; 1848: 62,678; 1855: 71,496; 1861: 80,857; 1871: 94,021; 1881: 108,891; 1891: 109,078; 1901: 103,259.

233 Vass (1986) provides a useful historical review of the building of the main roads of the island, and there is other information in Clark (1959) (eg. p. 72, and Figs. 26 and 28).

“9 Selkirk 1803.

out.240 However, the trunk roads in the 'inland’ parts of the island and most of the later settlement roads were constructed under government direction and were thus laid out by government- employed surveyorsz‘“. Such roads (as is evident from any island road—map) tended to run in straight lines across the landscape with little regard for either contours or the substratum. The resulting disadvantages were noted by Selkirk (1803): ”[because] they go on in direct lines marked out by the compass, it is mere chance whether they go along swamp or dry land".242 Thus no attempt was made to avoid the problems that wet and swampy areas presented to road-building, nor to the convenience of the traveling public. 243

The creation of roads had a number of effects on the forests through which they ran. The most significant was the destruction of the forest on the area of the road itself. Given the statutory road width of 60 feetz‘“, we may calculate that for each mile of fully completed road 7.3 acres of forest would have been cleared.245 To work out the amount of forest destruction connected with the whole road system at various stages in the nineteenth century we would need to know the length of the road system at any given time. This

24° Many such coastal roads have remained with us to this day,

their route frequently shadowing the shoreline, with some adjustment for contours and other natural features.

2“ They can be easily picked out on a map since most of them follow a grid pattern that is based on the magnetic north at the time of the original survey of Samuel Holland in 1765. One ‘posthumous‘ advantage of their straight-line nature is that where the original survey books or maps survive and have forest descriptives, they are in effect ‘line transects‘ providing an unbiased sample of the forests through which they ran.

242 Selkirk was not the only person to note this disadvantage: see the letter from "Viator” to the Prince Edward Island Register in April 1824, as cited by Vass (1986).

2‘3 l might note here that the route of the Prince Edward Island Railway, notoriously. was laid out on quite the opposite principle: it followed contours wherever possible, and never pursued a straight line. Even so, the building of the railway had only a minor effect on the forest in terms of forest destruction. This was because by the 18705, when it was built, much of the land over which it ran was already cleared farmland. The principal exception was the line between Miscouche and Coleman, where it seems to have almost entirely run through forest that had never been cleared for farming.

2“ A government notice containing instructions for road overseers

published in the Prince Edward Island Gazette of July 1820 (cited by Vass 1986) gives 60 feet as the ‘full width' of the road, though the ‘raised part' (i.e. the trackway) is to be 16 feet.

2‘5 Were the trees cut down in road-building used for other purposes? Presumably where there were already settlers nearby. some may have been used for firewood — though there is no comment on this in the records.