The Wheelbarrow – 2

It was apparent that we required our own wheelbarrow, but where to buy one? We lived in the Winterpock area of Chesterfield County in the days before they widened Hull Street Road, before the Walmart at Hancock Village Shopping Center, before the traffic light at Winterpock Road and Hull Street Road, and before the Lowe’s at Hull Street Road and Winterpock Road.

If you’re wondering why Hull Street Road is called Hull Street Road and not just Hull Street or Hull Road you’ve come to the wrong place for a certain explanation. My best guess is that in the City of Richmond it was Hull Street but that when it was in the county that folks knew it wasn’t a “street” because it was a road – you don’t have streets passing through farmland you have roads. No self-respecting rural area has a street running through pastureland – it’s got to be a road or a route or maybe even a highway, but it can’t be a street. Come to think of it, in the city it is simply Hull Street.

The nearest thing I can come up with is that the state highway department (VDOT) put in an order for dozens of signs for the street and the road; a few dozen destined for the city were supposed to read “Hull Street” and a few dozen more were supposed to read “Hull Road”. The problem was that the foreman of the sign shop in the state prison, Clem “Four Eyes” How’dIgetthisjob, had broken his glasses the day before the order came in and misread the order, thinking through his blurry vision that “street” and “road” were to appear together on the sign. When VDOT received the signs the area resident engineer didn’t pay any attention to the wording and told his crew to install them. Before long signs for Hull Street Road stretched for miles and miles, from the City of Richmond all the way to Out Yonder.

About six months later the head of VDOT was driving down what he thought was Hull Road and noticed that it was Hull Street Road. He called the resident area engineer and asked who made the mistake and what it would cost to rectify the problem. The resident engineer, having seen the error shortly after installation, had a ready answer – it was not a mistake, but rather a cost-saving measure designed to save the Commonwealth of Virginia thousands of dollars over future years. By putting the words “street” and “road” on the same sign the commonwealth did not incur two setup fees for sign production, because it could abbreviate “street” to “St” on the sign it saved on the cost of ink, and it saved labor hours in trying to figure out just where the street ended and the road began. The engineer also told the head of VDOT that part of the test was to see whether people would notice, and if they noticed, whether they would complain. Few people had noticed and no one had complained – other than one person from Out Yonder who wanted to know whether Hull Street went west and Hull Road went east, or was it the other way around. He said no self-respecting rural area had a street running through pastureland. The resident engineer’s response to this complaint was to encourage Walmart to build Out Yonder – no more pastureland.

The head of VDOT, Mr. Leanonmyshovel, nominated the resident engineer for an efficiency award – which he won. The resident engineer in turn called the warden and gave credit where credit is due to the foresight of Clem Four Eyes. The warden told the governor and Clem got a pardon. Now Clem works for VDOT in the “consolidation of signage” department.

As I mentioned above, if you want a certain explanation of how we came to have Hull Street Road you’ve come to the wrong place.