A Nation on Wheels
In early days the Indian had not only followed the watercourses in his
canoe but had made his way on foot over trails through the woods and
over the mountains. In colonial days, Englishman and Frenchman followed
the footsteps of the Indian, and as settlement increased and trade
developed, the forest path widened into the highway for wheeled
vehicles. Massachusetts began the work of road making in 1639 by passing
an act which decreed that "the ways" should be six to ten rods wide "in
common grounds," thus allowing sufficient room for more than one track.
Similar broad "ways" were authorized in New York and Pennsylvania in
1664; stumps and shrubs were to be cut close to the ground, and
"sufficient bridges" were to be built over streams and marshy places.
Virginia passed legislation for highways at an early date, but it was
not until 1662 that strict laws were enacted with a view to keeping the
roads in a permanently good condition. Under these laws surveyors were
appointed to establish in each county roads forty feet wide to the
church and to the courthouse. In 1700, Pennsylvania turned her local
roads over to the county justices, put the King's highway and the main
public roads under the care of the governor and his council, and ordered
each county to erect bridges over its streams.
The word "roadmaking" was capable of several interpretations. In
general, it meant outlining the course for the new thoroughfare,
clearing away fallen timber, blazing or notching the trees so that the
traveler might not miss the track, and building bridges or laying logs
"over all the marshy, swampy, and difficult dirty places."
The streams proved serious obstacles to early traffic. It has been shown
already that the earliest routes of animal or man sought the watersheds;
the trails therefore usually encountered one stream near its junction
with another. At first, of course, fording was the common method of
crossing water, and the most advantageous fording places were generally
found near the mouths of tributary streams, where bars and islands are
frequently formed and where the water is consequently shallow. When
ferries began to be used, they were usually situated just above or below
the fords; but when the bridge succeeded the ferry, the primitive bridge
builder went back to the old fording place in order to take advantage of
the shallower water, bars, and islands. With the advent of improved
engineering, the character of river banks and currents was more
frequently taken into consideration in choosing a site for a bridge than
was the case in the olden times, but despite this fact the bridges of
today, generally speaking, span the rivers where the deer or the buffalo
splashed his way across centuries ago.
On the broader streams, where fording was impossible and traffic was
perforce carried by ferry, the canoe and the keel boat of the earliest
days gave way in time to the ordinary "flat" or barge. At first the
obligation of the ferryman to the public, though recognized by English
law, was ignored in America by legislators and monopolists alike. Men
obtained the land on both sides of the rivers at the crossing places and
served the public only at their own convenience and at their own
charges. In many cases, to encourage the opening of roads or of ferries,
national and state authorities made grants of land on the same principle
followed in later days in the case of Western railroads. Such, for
instance, was the grant to Ebenezer Zane, at Zanesville, Lancaster, and
Chillicothe in the Northwest Territory. These monopolies sometimes were
extremely profitable: a descendant of the owners of the famous Ingles
ferry across New River, on the Wilderness Road to Kentucky, is
responsible for the statement that in the heyday of travel to the
Southwest the privilege was worth from $10,000 to $15,000 annually to
the family. But as local governments became more efficient, monopolies
were abolished and the collection of tolls was taken over by the
authorities. The awakening of inland trade is most clearly indicated
everywhere by the action of assemblies regarding the operation of
ferries, and in general, by the beginning of the eighteenth century,
tolls and ferries were being regulated by law.
But neither roads nor ferries were of themselves sufficient to put a
nation on wheels. The early polite society of the settled neighborhoods
traveled in horse litters, in sedan chairs, or on horseback, the women
seated on pillions or cushions behind the saddle riders, while oxcarts
and horse barrows brought to town the produce of the outlying farms.
Although carts and rude wagons could be built entirely of wood, there
could be no marked advance in transportation until the development of
mining in certain localities reduced the price of iron. With the
increase of travel and trade, the old world coach and chaise and wain
came into use, and iron for tire and brace became an imperative
necessity. The connection between the production of iron and the care of
highways was recognized by legislation as early as 1732, when Maryland
excused men and slaves in the ironworks from labor on the public roads,
though by the middle of the century owners of ironworks were obliged to
detail one man out of every ten in their employ for such work.
While the coastwise trade between the colonies was still preëminently
important as a means of transporting commodities, by the beginning of
the eighteenth century the land routes from New York to New England,
from New York across New Jersey to Philadelphia, and those radiating
from Philadelphia in every direction, were coming into general use. The
date of the opening of regular freight traffic between New York and
Philadelphia is set by the reply of the Governor of New Jersey in 1707
to a protest against monopolies granted on one of the old widened Indian
trails between Burlington and Amboy. "At present," he says, "everybody
is sure, once a fortnight, to have an opportunity of sending any
quantity of goods, great or small, at reasonable rates, without being in
danger of imposition; and the sending of this wagon is so far from being
a grievance or monopoly, that by this means and no other, a trade has
been carried on between Philadelphia, Burlington, Amboy, and New York,
which was never known before."
The long Philadelphia Road from the Lancaster region into the Valley of
Virginia, by way of Wadkins on the Potomac, was used by German and Irish
traders probably as early as 1700. In 1728 the people of Maryland were
petitioning for a road from the ford of the Monocacy to the home of
Nathan Wickham. Four years later Jost Heydt, leading an immigrant party
southward, broke open a road from the York Barrens toward the Potomac
two miles above Harper's Ferry. This avenue--by way of the Berkeley,
Staunton, Watauga, and Greenbrier regions to Tennessee and Kentucky--was
the longest and most important in America during the Revolutionary
period. The Virginia Assembly in 1779 appointed commissioners to view
this route and to report on the advisability of making it a wagon road
all the way to Kentucky. In 1795, efforts were made in Kentucky to turn
the Wilderness Trail into a wagon road, and in this same year the
Kentucky Legislature passed an act making the route from Crab Orchard to
Cumberland Gap a wagon road thirty feet in width.
From Pennsylvania and from Virginia commerce westward bound followed in
the main the army roads hewn out by Braddock and Forbes in their
campaigns against Fort Duquesne. In 1755, Braddock, marching from
Alexandria by way of Fort Cumberland, had opened a passage for his
artillery and wagons to Laurel Hill, near Uniontown, Pennsylvania. His
force included a corps of seamen equipped with block and tackle to raise
and lower his wagons in the steep inclines of the Alleghanies. Three
years later, Forbes, in his careful, dogged campaign, followed a more
northerly route. Advancing from Philadelphia and Carlisle, he
established Fort Bedford and Fort Ligonier as bases of supply and broke
a new road through the interminable forest which clothed the rugged
mountain ranges. From the first there was bitter rivalry between these
two routes, and the young Colonel Washington was roundly criticized by
both Forbes and Bouquet, his second in command, for his partisan effort
to "drive me down," as Forbes phrased it, into the Virginia or
Braddock's Road. This rivalry between the two routes continued when the
destruction of the French power over the roads in the interior threw
open to Pennsylvania and her southern neighbors alike the lucrative
trade of the Ohio country.
From the journals of the time may be caught faint glimpses of the toils
and dangers of travel through these wild hill regions. Let the traveler
of today, as he follows the track that once was Braddock's Road, picture
the scene of that earlier time when, in the face of every natural
obstacle, the army toiled across the mountain chains. Where the earth in
yonder ravine is whipped to a black froth, the engineers have thrown
down the timber cut in widening the trail and have constructed a
corduroy bridge, or rather a loose raft on a sea of muck. The wreck of
the last wagon which tried to pass gives some additional safety to the
next. Already the stench from the horse killed in the accident deadens
the heavy, heated air of the forest. The sailors, stripped to the waist,
are ready with ropes and tackle to let the next wagon down the incline;
the pulleys creak, the ropes groan. The horses, weak and
terror-stricken, plunge and rear; in the final crash to the level the
leg of the wheel horse is caught and broken; one of the soldiers shoots
the animal; the traces are unbuckled; another beast is substituted.
Beyond, the seamen are waiting with tackle attached to trees on the
ridge above to assist the horses on the cruel upgrade--and Braddock, the
deceived, maligned, misrepresented, and misjudged, creeps onward in his
brave conquest of the Alleghanies in a campaign that, in spite of its
military failure, deserves honorable mention among the achievements of
British arms.
Everywhere, north and south, the early American road was a veritable
Slough of Despond. Watery pits were to be encountered wherein horses
were drowned and loads sank from sight. Frequently traffic was stopped
for hours by wagons which had broken down and blocked the way. Thirteen
wagons at one time were stalled on Logan's Hill on the York Road.
Frightful accidents occurred in attempting to draw out loads. Jonathan
Tyson, for instance, in 1792, near Philadelphia saw a horse's lower jaw
torn off by the slipping of a chain. Save in the winter, when in the
northern colonies snow filled the ruts and frost built solid bridges
over the streams, travel on these early roads was never safe, rapid, nor
comfortable. The comparative ease of winter travel for the carriage of
heavy freight and for purposes of trade and social intercourse gave the
colder regions an advantage over the southern that was an important
factor in the development of the country.
No genuine improvement of roads and highways seems to have been
attempted until the era heralded by Washington's letter to Harrison in
1784. But the problem slowly forced itself upon all sections of the
country, and especially upon Pennsylvania and Maryland, whose
inhabitants began to fear lest New York, Alexandria, or Richmond should
snatch the Western trade from Philadelphia or Baltimore. The truth that
underlies the proverb that "history repeats itself" is well illustrated
by the fact that the first macadamized road in America was built in
Pennsylvania, for here also originated the pack-horse trade and the
Conestoga horse and wagon; here the first inland American canal was
built, the first roadbed was graded on the principle of dividing the
whole distance by the whole descent, and the first railway was operated.
Macadam and Telford had only begun to show the people of England how to
build roads of crushed stone--an art first developed by the French
engineer Trésaguet--when Pennsylvanians built the Lancaster Turnpike.
The Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike Road Company was chartered April
9, 1792, as a part of the general plan of the Society for the
Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation already described. This road,
sixty-two miles in length, was built of stone at a cost of $465,000 and
was completed in two years. Never before had such a sum been invested in
internal improvement in the United States. The rapidity with which the
undertaking was carried through and the profits which accrued from the
investment were alike astonishing. The subscription books were opened at
eleven o'clock one morning and by midnight 2226 shares had been
subscribed, each purchaser paying down thirty dollars. At the same time
Elkanah Watson was despondently scanning the subscription books of his
Mohawk River enterprise at Albany where "no mortal" had risked more than
two shares.
The success of the Lancaster Turnpike was not achieved without a protest
against the monopoly which the new venture created. It is true that in
all the colonies the exercise of the right of eminent domain had been
conceded in a veiled way to officials to whose care the laying out of
roads had been delegated. As early as 1639 the General Court of
Massachusetts had ordered each town to choose men who, coöperating with
men from the adjoining town, should "lay out highways where they may be
most convenient, notwithstanding any man's property, or any corne
ground, so as it occasion not the pulling down of any man's house, or
laying open any garden or orchard." But the open and extended exercise
of these rights led to vigorous opposition in the case of this
Pennsylvania road. A public meeting was held at the Prince of Wales
Tavern in Philadelphia in 1793 to protest in round terms against the
monopolistic character of the Lancaster Turnpike. Blackstone and Edward
III were hurled at the heads of the "venal" legislators who had made
this "monstrosity" possible. The opposition died down, however, in the
face of the success which the new road instantly achieved. The Turnpike
was, indeed, admirably situated. Converging at the quaint old "borough
of Lancaster," the various routes--northeast from Virginia, east from
the Carlisle and Chambersburg region and the Alleghanies, and southeast
from the upper Susquehanna country--poured upon the Quaker City a trade
that profited every merchant, landholder, and laborer. The nine
tollgates, on the average a little less than seven miles apart, turned
in a revenue that allowed the "President and Managers" to declare
dividends to stockholders running, it is said, as high as fifteen per
cent.
The Lancaster Turnpike is interesting from three points of view: it
began a new period of American transportation; it ushered in an era of
speculation unheard of in the previous history of the country; and it
introduced American lawmakers to the great problem of controlling public
corporations.
Along this thirty-seven-foot road, of which twenty-four feet were laid
with stone, the new era of American inland travel progressed. The array
of two-wheeled private equipages and other family carriages, the
stagecoaches of bright color, and the carts, Dutch wagons, and
Conestogas, gave token of what was soon to be witnessed on the great
roads of a dozen States in the next generation. Here, probably, the
first distinction began to be drawn between the taverns for passengers
and those patronized by the drivers of freight. The colonial taverns,
comparatively few and far between, had up to this time served the
traveling public, high and low, rich and poor, alike. But in this new
era members of Congress and the élite of Philadelphia and neighboring
towns were not to be jostled at the table by burly hostlers, drivers,
wagoners, and hucksters. Two types of inns thus came quickly into
existence: the tavern entertained the stagecoach traffic, while the
democratic roadhouse served the established lines of Conestogas,
freighters, and all other vehicles which poured from every town,
village, and hamlet upon the great thoroughfare leading to the
metropolis on the Delaware.
Among American inventions the Conestoga wagon must forever be remembered
with respect. Originating in the Lancaster region of Pennsylvania and
taking its name either from the horses of the Conestoga Valley or from
the valley itself, this vehicle was unlike the old English wain or the
Dutch wagon because of the curve of its bed. This peculiarly shaped
bottom, higher by twelve inches or more at each end than in the middle,
made the vehicle a safer conveyance across the mountains and over all
rough country than the old straight-bed wagon. The Conestoga was covered
with canvas, as were other freight vehicles, but the lines of the bed
were also carried out in the framework above and gave the whole the
effect of a great ship swaying up and down the billowy hills. The wheels
of the Conestoga were heavily built and wore tires four and six inches
in width. The harness of the six horses attached to the wagon was
proportionately heavy, the back bands being fifteen inches wide, the hip
straps ten, and the traces consisting of ponderous iron chains. The
color of the original Conestoga wagons never varied: the underbody was
always blue and the upper parts were red. The wagoners and drivers who
manned this fleet on wheels were men of a type that finds no parallel
except in the boatmen on the western rivers who were almost their
contemporaries. Fit for the severest toil, weathered to the color of the
red man, at home under any roof that harbored a demijohn and a fiddle,
these hardy nomads of early commerce were the custodians of the largest
amount of traffic in their day.
The turnpike era overlaps the period of the building of national roads
and canals and the beginning of the railway age, but it is of greatest
interest during the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth century,
up to the time when the completion of the Erie Canal set new standards.
During this period roads were also constructed westward from Baltimore
and Albany to connect, as the Lancaster Turnpike did at its terminus,
with the thoroughfares from the trans-Alleghany country. The metropolis
of Maryland was quickly in the field to challenge the bid which the
Quaker City made for western trade. The Baltimore-Reisterstown and
Baltimore-Frederick turnpikes were built at a cost of $10,000 and $8000
a mile respectively; and the latter, connecting with roads to
Cumberland, linked itself with the great national road to Ohio which the
Government built between 1811 and 1817. These famous stone roads of
Maryland long kept Baltimore in the lead as the principal outlet for the
western trade. New York, too, proved her right to the title of Empire
State by a marvelous activity in improving her magnificent strategic
position. In the first seven years of the nineteenth century
eighty-eight incorporated road companies were formed with a total
capital of over $8,000,000. Twenty large bridges and more than three
thousand miles of turnpike were constructed. The movement, indeed,
extended from New England to Virginia and the Carolinas, and turnpike
companies built all kinds of roads--earth, corduroy, plank, and stone.
In many cases the kind of road to be constructed, the tolls to be
charged, and the amount of profit to be permitted, were laid down in the
charters. Thus new problems confronted the various legislatures, and
interesting principles of regulation were now established. In most cases
companies were allowed, on producing their books of receipts and
expenditures, to increase their tolls until they obtained a profit of
six per cent on the investment, though in a number of cases nine per
cent was permitted. When revenues increased beyond the six per cent
mark, however, the tendency was to reduce tolls or to use the extra
profit to purchase the stock for the State, with the expectation of
ultimately abolishing tollgates entirely. The theories of state
regulation of corporations and the obligations of public carriers,
extending even to the compensation of workmen in case of accident, were
developed to a considerable degree in this turnpike era; but, on the
other hand, the principle of permitting fair profit to corporations upon
public examination of their accounts was also recognized.
The stone roads, which were passable at all seasons, brought a new era
in correspondence and business. Lines of stages and wagons, as well
known at that time as are the great railways of today, plied the new
thoroughfares, provided some of the comforts of travel, and assured the
safer and more rapid delivery of goods. This period is sometimes known
in American history as "The Era of Good Feeling" and the turnpike
contributed in no small degree to make the phrase applicable not only to
the domain of politics but to all the relations of social and commercial
life.
While road building in the East gives a clear picture of the rise and
growth of commerce and trade in that section, it is to the rivers of the
trans-Alleghany country that we must look for a corresponding picture in
this early period. The canoe and pirogue could handle the packs and kegs
brought westward by the files of Indian ponies; but the heavy loads of
the Conestoga wagons demanded stancher craft. The flatboat and barge
therefore served the West and its commerce as the Conestoga and turnpike
served the East.