….. A WHAT?

Submitted by Ken Geib

Reprinted from PA Chapter “A” Newsletter

            There you are tooling down the highway enjoying life and all of a sudden you feel the thud, the bike shakes momentarily and it is all over, you are back in control.  You just drove through a pothole.  What a silly name for a hole in the road – well, as Paul Harvey would say … Here is the rest of the story.  Right or wrong this is the explanation as told by a tour guide at a colonial village in Tennessee.

            In early colonial days the poor settler’s rustic cabins only had earth floors, no wood, tile, or stone, only compacted virgin earth.  The kitchen had on open hearth in which was mounted a metal hook or arm or chain.  This was used to suspend a cast iron pot used to boil potatoes and similar foods.  When the potatoes boiled long enough to become soft the pot was removed from the hanger and set on the earth floor at the edge of the hearth.  The next step was to mash the potatoes using a cylindrical wooden masher by violently thrusting it into the pot until you had the equivalent of today’s mashed potatoes.  Over a time of months or years this plunging action created a nice round hole in the earth formed by the shape of the pot reacting to the impacting blows of the masher.  As travelers encountered nasty little depressions in the dirt roads they envisioned a comparison in appearance to the “pot hole” in their kitchen.