Bar ditch

February 4th, 2012 by admin

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6 comments on this post.

  1. John:

    June 13th, 2012 at 1:31 pm

    As a native of North Mississippi, I grew up with the term “borrow pit,” and I was born quite a bit later than 1893. After moving away years ago, I realized that my home state was often last to accept new trends. I look forward to the arrival of “bar ditch” somewhere around mid-century.

  2. Scott F:

    June 19th, 2012 at 9:24 pm

    I grew up in Kansas – they just called them ditches. Lived in OK for 2 years and all they talked about were bar ditches. When I naively asked how that was different from a regular ditch, they all looked at me like I was crazy. No one could ever explain this, so I read this with great enjoyment and some nostalgia

  3. Bud Short:

    July 17th, 2012 at 5:34 pm

    I am a civil engineer and have been designing and building roads for more than 35 years. The article is correct. The ditches are cut and the spoil dirt is mounded up between the ditches to raise the road grade. The dirt is “borrowed” from the ditches to create the road crown therefore “borrow ditch” shortened in the south the way they do in the south is now “bar ditch”.

  4. David A.:

    August 24th, 2012 at 8:25 pm

    Well, Bud is on the right track in explaining what the term is. The term is spelled “borrow ditch” when committed to writing but when using the unique oral skills of a true Southerner it is phonetically pronounced as illustrated above “Bar-aahd ditch”. Unfortunately those who are not used to hearing such dialect think they are hearing “bar ditch”. Thus the confusion.

  5. Starla Medlin:

    January 9th, 2013 at 1:19 pm

    we here in texas believed it was called this because that is where you usually ended up after a night at the bars drinking and partying.

  6. terri@texascuisine.com:

    January 9th, 2013 at 1:56 pm

    It must be true they had it on the internet…

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