Photo of the Batangas-Bauan 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.

About the photograph below, it is a portion of the first macadamized road built in the Province of Batangas, at Kilometer 121 of the Batangas-Bauan Road. The term “macadamized” pertains to a type of pavement that uses compacted pieces of crushed stone. The Batangas-Bauan Road is actually just a portion of the Batangas-Nasugbu Road.

These seven kilometers of the Batangas-Bauan Road were first laid in 1907 using hand-broken stone and without using a road roller.

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.