Photo of Kilometer 74, Batangas-Manila Road [July 1914, BPW Quarterly Bulletin]

This photograph is part of a series showing construction projects undertaken by the Bureau of Public Works during the American colonial era. All photographs have been digitally extracted from the Quarterly Bulletins of the bureau and processed using graphics editing software to improve quality. It goes without saying that the eventual output of each extract was always going to be dependent on the quality of the original scan.

In the year 1914, road construction by the American colonial government was at fever pitch in the Province of Batangas, with roads under construction in towns both in the eastern as well as the western sides of the province. The Bureau of Public Work, in fact, was paving roads using macadam, made up of crushed stone.

This was a relatively new technology at the time and the Americans even brought in portable rock crushing machines to cut down on manual labor. Below is a photo of such a road under construction. The caption in the quarterly bulletin said, “Batangas-Manila Road, kilometer 74, Batangas.” This should place the location of the photo as between the town of Tanauan and Malvar.

¹ “Bureau of Public Works Quarterly Bulletin, Volume 2 No. 4,” compiiled by C.A. Tansill, published July 1914 in Manila by the Bureau of Public Works.