BEFORE AND AFTER THE TURNPIKE
Before the nineteenth century, travellers who visited Niagara
generally went there by way of Montreal and Lake Ontario, returning
to the seacoast by Presque Isle (Erie, Pennsylvania) and Pittsburg to
Philadelphia or Baltimore. Occasionally an adventurous tourist struck
out from Albany into the “Back Woods”. Such an one was Lieutenant
John Harriott, an Englishman, who visited whatever parts of the known
world he could reach and recorded his journeyings in a book with the
suggestive title,--“Struggles Through Life, Exemplified in the Various
Travels and Adventures in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America”. In June,
1796, he set out from New York on a “tour to view the back lands”. He
chose the land route to Albany, going the one hundred and sixty miles
in a “coachee” drawn by two horses. Albany he describes as a town of
“upwards of six thousand inhabitants, collected from various parts....
It is the storehouse for the trade to and from Canada and the lakes,
therefore likely to flourish and the inhabitants to grow rich.” The
next morning he set off at half-past five and travelled forty miles by
stage through the fertile country of the German Flats, every now and
then being obliged to alight and walk for a mile or two as the wagon
floundered through a bit of swampy road, or up a steep grade.
Across wet places were bits of log causeways. These were made of trunks
of pine and oak trees laid down crossways layer upon layer, regardless
of uniformity of size or the comfort of those who might travel over
them. This kind of road was called corduroy because it resembled the
French cloth of that name. In drier places, the settlers cut down trees
on the line of the road. Six or eight oxen yoked to a plough would stir
up the soil as deeply as possible, pulling out or displacing stumps or
rocks. The cleared surface would then be smoothed over a little and
left to be worn hard by travel.
The “coachee” or stage-wagon, in which Harriott travelled over this
route, was typical of the region and was not supplanted on this road
twenty years later, although by that time more modern ones had
been put on the line between New York and Boston, and New York and
Philadelphia. The body of the coachee was rather long in proportion
to its breadth. It had four seats, each holding three passengers, who
faced towards the horses. “From the height of the seat,” writes a
traveller of the time, “it is open all round, and the roof is supported
by slender shafts rising up at the corners and sides; in wet weather
a leathern apron is let down at the sides and back, to protect the
inmates.” The wagon had no door; the passengers got in by the front,
stepping over the seats as they went backward. It was said that these
coaches had no outside seats on top, as did those in England, because
the vehicle lurched and jolted so violently that passengers sitting
on them would have been thrown off. The heavier boxes and trunks were
fastened behind, upon the frame of the carriage, but smaller articles
and the mail-bag were huddled under the seats, to the great annoyance
of the passengers, who were frequently forced “to sit with their knees
up to their mouths or with their feet insinuated between two trunks,
where they are most lovingly compressed whenever the vehicle makes a
lurch into a rut.” The body of the wagon was suspended upon two stout
leathern straps passing lengthwise under it and strongly secured before
and behind. When these straps gave way, as they sometimes did, the
driver selected a stout rail from a neighboring fence. The passengers
by united effort thrust in this substitute for a spring and the
conveyance jolted on.
At the end of his first day’s journey, Harriott found that the coach in
which he was going to proceed had been overturned and broken to pieces,
so that he was obliged to stop three days at German Flats Town. As he
continued on his way to Fort Schuyler (Utica) he found himself in a
rich country with many new settlers, but as the road steadily became
worse and worse, although, as he says, he and his fellow-travellers
“alighted safe from broken bones, [they were] most miserably bruised
from head to foot.” At Whitestown, he stayed several days watching with
interest the allotment of land to settlers and visiting the remnant of
the Six Nations, some sixteen hundred in number, all that were left of
that fierce confederacy that so long had held this region against the
white men.
From this point there was no public conveyance, and Lieutenant
Harriott bought a horse and proceeded in company with a young farmer
from Massachusetts who was making his third trip westward to conclude
a purchase of land on the Genesee River and could therefore serve as a
guide. It took the travellers three days to reach Geneva, from which
place they journeyed fifty miles to the river and thence to Niagara
Falls, seventy miles more through the wilderness following the Indian
trails. By making haste, they avoided spending more than one night in
the woods. As darkness fell, they made a bed of boughs and kept two
fires burning “as a guard against wolves and panthers.” Again gaining
the Mohawk, he went down-stream in a bateau, managed by five men, which
he hired for the trip. On his return, Harriott wrote that “except for
a view of the grand falls,” there was nothing to reward him for the
fatigue of the journey.
Fifteen years after Harriott’s visit, John Melish, the map-maker,
passed over the same route. He had come from Cleveland, Ohio, and Erie,
Pennsylvania, to the Niagara River and the town of Buffalo, which had
been laid out about five years previously, but already had five hundred
inhabitants and was rapidly growing. The buildings were mostly of
wood, painted white, but there were a number of good brick houses and a
few of stone. There were four taverns, eight stores, two schools, and a
weekly paper in this town, which Melish prophesied would become a great
settlement. Already roads were being constructed in all directions,
and the Albany turnpike had been brought to within a few miles of the
village. As he travelled along, he was surprised to find the country so
well settled. The houses were so frequent that the traveller was seldom
out of sight of one, and every few miles there was an inn. Lands were
all taken up for a mile or so on either side of the road. He constantly
met parties journeying westward and from inquiry found that a family
of seven could travel in their own wagon at the rate of twenty miles
a day, making the journey of six hundred miles from Connecticut to
Cleveland at an expense of seventy dollars. The emigrants would carry
their own provisions but would stop at the inns to feed their horses
and eat their food. In the course of one day’s journey, he met more
than twenty families thus proceeding westward.
Stage fares would have made the trip much more expensive. By law these
fares could not exceed seven cents a mile, and no fees to drivers
were expected. Stage travel was at this time made inconvenient by the
number of companies operating only on short sections of the road. Each
proprietor took up payment for his own portion of the way,--half a
dollar here, seventy-five cents there,--and turned the traveller out of
his vehicle when he came to the end of his stretch to wait with what
patience he could summon till the next stage appeared.
As Melish neared Utica, the houses along the road were so thick that
it was for a considerable way like a continuous village. Yet here as
everywhere on the route, back of the neat white houses with their green
blinds and roomy verandas, and the fertile, cultivated plots of ground
around them, the land would be covered with stumps from one to three
feet high, and the smoke of the clearing fires could often be seen in
the distance. The expense of the trip from Buffalo to Utica had been
ten dollars and ninety-one cents.
Melish had made his journey on horseback, although he met many coaches
on the way. In 1819 an Englishwoman describes a trip which she made
from Albany to Utica in one of the fifteen coaches that made the
trip daily. On her way she met the man who eighteen years previously
had carried in his coat pocket the weekly mail between the two
towns. She found the journey rough, but her companions good-humored,
intelligent, and accommodating. She recommended the stage-coach for
the traveller who wished “to see people as well as things,--to hear
intelligent remarks upon the country and its inhabitants, and to
understand the rapid changes that each year brings forth, and if he be
of an easy temper, not incommoded with trifles, not caring to take,
nor understanding to give, offence, liking the interchange of little
civilities with strangers, and pleased to make an acquaintance, though
it should be but one of an hour, with a kind-hearted fellow-creature,
and if too he can bear a few jolts,--_not_ a few,--and can suffer to
be driven sometimes too quickly over a rough road, and sometimes too
slowly over a smooth one,--then let him, by all means, fill a corner in
the post-coach or stage-wagon.... But if he be of an unsociable humour,
easily put out of his way, or as the phrase is, _a very particular
gentleman_--then he will hire or purchase his own dearborn or light
wagon and travel _solus cum solo_ with his own horse.”
This was turnpike travel in the early nineteenth century, and this was
the route over which thousands of families made their way to the lakes.
For years the tide of emigration went on until the story of western New
York was repeated in every part of the region, and the wilderness of
twenty and thirty years before became the seat of thriving towns and
cities.