Enough of you are suggesting “for road surfacing” and that’s coherent; road and ditch work is a classic unskilled labor sink

(Roads used to be built and maintained by corvee labor, citizens required to work a certain number of days a year. The wealthy hired others, and it was effectively a way to keep farm laborers employed and occupied in the summer between planting and harvest)

But still I have a hard time picturing even forced manual labor being as efficient as a triphammer mill set up on even the dinkiest creek