Except for Roman military roads and the Inca roads in Peru, roads and road-making have seldom attracted much attention. Like fields, fences and old stone walls, roads can seem so much part of the fabric of a landscape that we need reminding that many of them were made intentionally. In New Brunswick, road-building was a great labour performed, as elsewhere, without fuss by often reluctant workers drawn from a remarkably small population. Against heavy odds, New Brunswick by 1930 had roads and a highway system that, in terms of quality and coverage, was the envy of many larger provinces.

A new addition to the Images of Our Past series, New Brunswick's Early Roads follows the development of the province's roadways through the era of post and military roads, the rise of the Good Roads movement, to the dominance of the automobile and paved highways

Over 60 remarkable black and white images document the astonishing process.

Ronald Rees is a former professor of historical geography who taught at the University of Saskatchewan and, as adjunct professor, at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. He has written books on the landscape and settlement of the Canadian prairies, on garden history, on science and industry in nineteenth-century Wales, and on United Empire Loyalist settlements in the Maritimes. He was born in Wales and for the past twenty-five years he has lived in St. Andrews, New Brunswick.

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