Whether you know much about gravel roads in Indiana depends upon your age and where you live. Some counties paved the last mile of county road over 40 years ago. Others still have plenty of gravel roads and likely will for some time to come.

They’re even more common in Iowa. On a trip there last summer to prepare for the Farm Progress Virtual Experience, my wife, Carla, and I ventured into Madison County, southwest of Des Moines. It’s famous for covered bridges and “The Bridges of Madison County,” a romantic film. The county had gravel roads when the movie was filmed, and it still has them today.

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On the way to find a specific covered bridge, we came up behind a road grader on a winding, hilly gravel road. It was unlike any road grader I remember from growing up, when we still lived by a gravel road. It was a big Caterpillar machine and looked to be equipped with modern features.

“It’s just like being back home when I grew up,” Carla said. “One thing hasn’t changed — you get behind a road grader, and you’re stuck if the road is narrow. They went slow then, and this one is going slow now.”

Carla grew up in Allen County, Ind. With Fort Wayne being a major city, you might think all roads were paved. But they weren’t when she grew up near Huntertown, and they still aren’t all paved today.

Later in the trip, we visited the Hancock County Agricultural Museum on the fairgrounds near Britt, Iowa. The incredible collection of farming tools from the early 1900s through the 1960s fascinated me. But my mouth dropped when I found an early version of a road grader in the museum. Trust me, it wasn’t made by Caterpillar! It was pulled in its heyday by actual horse power, not the horsepower in a Caterpillar engine.

GOING WAY, WAY BACK: This horse-drawn road grader dates to the early 1900s. How do you know it’s old? Historians working with the Hancock County Ag Museum in Britt, Iowa, say in its day, all adult males paid a poll tax to vote. They could work off the tax instead by working on the roads with tools like this.

Ironically, the old grader was made by the Good Roads Machinery Co. of Fort Wayne. And I can guarantee one thing. Anyone who came up behind it on a hilly road in Iowa or Indiana probably thought the same thing Carla did: “Man, these things go slow.”

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