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Recent Movements Toward Roadside Improvement.

Roadside improvement is a national movement, well under way. There is
new planned beauty abroad in rural America. Along paved highways in every
quarter of the country, lengths of orderly landscaping are beginning to appear.
Federal aid is being invoked for the furtherance of this project. Two
bureaus of government, the Department of Agriculture and the Forestry
Service are giving valuable assistance. There are only nineteen states which
have no organizations for the promotion of roadside improvement, and none
in which some activity has not been inaugurated to keep down weeds, keep out
signs, seeding shoulders to hold them, and other developments, all of which
count for utility and beauty.

In Vermont, the State Chamber of Commerce, in it’s Highway Beautification
Campaign, has issued bulletins and poster which alternate in their tone
between challenge and inspirational encouragement, which have produced results.
This pioneering literature has attracted wide-spread attention outside
of the state and has been in demand on the part of State Highway Departments
and Civic Organizations.

The movement, itself is a constructive project of public interest, such
as President Hoover had in mind, when he alluded to a new principle of relationship
between the government and it’s citizens, in which lie potentialities
for the common good.

In Georgia, the fruit of concerted campaign, conducted on a state wide
scale, to preserve and maintain the natural beauty found along it’s roadsides,
is to be seen in an announcement by the State Highways Department, prohibiting
the placing of advertising signs along the highways. The policy of
the department is to encourage the preservation of the natural beauty and
to that end, all employees of the department are instructed to keep the right
of way cleared off and in neat condition, and to prevent unnecessary cutting
of trees and the disfigurement of the land.

Public movements, sponsored nationally known men and women, have form