Editor,

Dayton, my hometown, takes a giant leap into the future! Within another week, we will have a full-fledged traffic circle in the center of our town. It seems like only yesterday when, as a child, I was at the town meeting at our school and the town was discussing whether they should continue to pay for the blinking light that hung over Dayton’s only major intersection. The light still hung there last week, but I suspect this historic device has now been removed.

I went through this intersection last evening. The whole area has now been roughed out and may well receive its first coat of hot-top tomorrow or soon after. The traffic is still crossing the intersection as before, but the change is only waiting for the first coat of pavement and the new traffic pattern it will reveal.

I can see the possibilities already in my mind. Tourist promotions like, “See Historic Dayton.” One trip around the scenic circle and you will experience the historic consolidated school built around 1950. You may see the site of the former chicken farm and where the old Belanger Motel and Cabins once stood! Stop at the convenience store and you may hear an old story of the team of horses that appeared out of the woods and the young boy who came after them. How the tongue of the wagon load of wood had come unhitched, as as the wagon stopped and horses continued, they ripped the boy off the wagon and dragged him along the ground for a way before he could untangle himself from the reins. How bruised, but undaunted, the young lad had run after the horses and caught up to them as they were stopped at the former intersection. How the people there saw the young boy as far too young to be able to drive the horses back and re-hook the wagon. How this decision by the non-farming adults signaled a coming change in how future children would come to see themselves and their capabilities.

Further along the circle, you drive over the spot where during the great forest fire of 1947, the new Walters snow plow truck was place in a small triangle of grass between the roads to keep it safe. Placed there as the new town garage, it was expected to surely succumb to the wall of flames marching unmercifully toward it. Later people would find the town garage untouched while the new snow plow was totally burnt. The grass catching fire and igniting the tires, and thereafter, all else that was burnable within the truck.

Yes, I can see it all. Some will refer to this circle as our “road to nowhere” as they complain of its size, placement, or its simple change from what was there before. There is no going back however. Time marches on and now so will the traffic, only much faster. The future is ours, and we no longer need to stop and watch as it goes by. We simply leap into the ongoing traffic and are swept along with it to our new destination.

Gene Meserve

Dayton