OLD JOURNEYS FROM PHILADELPHIA TO THE WEST
The people of New York City like to say that Philadelphia is slow, and
would almost make one think that all the men there wear Quaker hats
and act like William Penn. The citizens of Philadelphia, however, are
not much troubled by this, for they have a great and busy city, and
they like to remind the men of New York that Philadelphia is a “city of
homes,” and that the people do not live in great tenement houses nor do
all their business in “sky scrapers.” The Liberty Bell hangs there, the
Continental Congress sat there, and the home of the federal government
was there before it was in Washington. For a long time the Quaker City
was the metropolis of America, but as New York and Baltimore grew they
took away some of the trade that otherwise would have gone to the city
on the Delaware. It also ceased to be the capital of the nation and
thus had to depend more on its shipping and inland business. Now to
do much inland business it was necessary not only to reach the rich
lowlands at hand but also to send out across the mountains. This could
not be done without roads.
When men went from New York City across the mountains they found the
Great Lakes and the rich plains on their shores. So Philadelphia,
looking over her mountain wall, saw the noble valley of the Ohio river
and the young Pittsburg at its gateway. As New York found a route to
the West, so Philadelphia sought out its highways to the country beyond
the Appalachian mountains. In this chapter and the next we shall see
where these highways ran.
The first roads were little like those of to-day, and the stage drivers
had to be steady, cool-headed men. There were many stumps and logs in
what was called a road, and the teams were guided less by reins than by
shouts in a kind of language which the horses understood. A traveler
between Philadelphia and Washington said that often the driver would
call to the passengers to lean out of the carriage on one side or the
other, so that their weight might keep the balance even. He would say,
“Now, gentlemen, to the right!” and the men would lean out as far as
they could; or, “Now, gentlemen, to the left!” and over they would
swing to the other side.
[Illustration: PENNSYLVANIA
PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD -+-+-+-+-+-
NATIONAL ROAD - - - - - -
TURNPIKE FROM PHILADELPHIA TO PITTSBURG -·-·-·-·-·-
]
It took strong wagons to travel such roads, and sometimes the wheels
were cut solid by sawing off short sections of the butt of a great
tree, much as the wheels of a toy cart have been made by many boys.
When a driver was stuck in the mud he had to wait for other teams to
come up, when they would hook on with him and drag him out upon hard
ground again. They were a rough but sociable company, the teamsters
of those days, feeding their horses and cracking their jokes at the
taverns which lined the turnpikes. They would stand by one another
loyally, but when they met some fine gentleman on the road they did
not object to taking off a wheel or crushing the frame of his light
carriage.
[Illustration: FIG. 21. PENN SQUARE, LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA, LOOKING
EAST ALONG THE “LANCASTER PIKE”]
Out of West Philadelphia to-day leads a street known as Lancaster
avenue. It is the eastern end of the old “Lancaster pike,” the town
which gave name to the road being sixty-six miles to the west. This
is the oldest turnpike road in the United States. When the pioneers
were clearing up the forests and building the Genesee road in New York
this region was already well settled. If you ride from Philadelphia to
Lancaster to-day, you will see that it is an old country, and you will
not think it strange when you learn that so long ago as 1730, two years
before the birth of Washington, some of the inhabitants were moving out
beyond Lancaster. This means that they went west of the Susquehanna,
for Lancaster is only about twelve miles east of that great river.
Many of the earlier settlers of this lowland region west of
Philadelphia were Germans. William Penn had invited some of these
people to come, and they had settled near by in the place now known
as Germantown. In time many others settled both around Lancaster and
farther west. Hence we hear of “Pennsylvania Dutch,” although they
were not really Dutch, which is a term belonging rather to Hollanders
and their descendants. There were also some Scotch-Irish, as they were
called,--descendants of Scotch people who had migrated to the north
of Ireland, whence their children had come to America. These were
Presbyterians, and some of them had settled in New Jersey, where they
founded Princeton College.
The country between Philadelphia and the Susquehanna is one of the
richest and most fertile regions in the world. Most of it is low, with
gently rolling fields and a few higher hills. One fine farm joins
another, and the great stone houses look as strong and as solid as if
they had grown up out of the ground. Huge chimneys rise from the roofs
and make one think of the warm fire-places and well-spread tables of
the thrifty German farmers who built these houses and lived in them.
The barns, like the houses, are large; they are often built of stone
and whitewashed, and they still hold great harvests. One side of the
barn usually reaches several feet beyond the high foundation, and is
called an “overshoot.” As the doors to the stables are under this, it
seems to have been planned as a protection against storms.
An English traveler went over the Lancaster pike in 1796 and found it
worthy of praise. He said that it was paved with stone, covered with
gravel, and could be traversed in any season of the year. About one
mile east of the public square in Lancaster a fine old arched bridge
of stone carries the turnpike across Conestoga creek, a stream flowing
southward into the Susquehanna. It takes its name, which has become
famous in American history, from a small tribe of Indians who lived on
its borders. The early inhabitants made the water deeper by building
dams with locks, and sailed their boats with loads of produce down to
the Susquehanna. In the common phrase of that time, they spoke of it as
the “Conestoga navigation.”
[Illustration: FIG. 22. BRIDGE ON THE “PIKE” CROSSING CONESTOGA CREEK
ONE MILE EAST OF PENN SQUARE, LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA]
But the most interesting thing to which the name Conestoga was given
was a wagon that was invented in this region. It was made very large
and strong, to carry freight, and was drawn by four, seven, or even a
dozen horses. Hundreds of these wagons were to be seen on the Lancaster
pike and on the other great roads of that time. They were built, as
freight cars are now, to carry heavy loads long distances in safety.
[Illustration: FIG. 23. TOLLHOUSE EIGHT MILES EAST OF LANCASTER,
PENNSYLVANIA]
These wagons were unusually long, and the boxes curved upward at the
ends, so that inside and out they were shaped somewhat like a canoe.
The advantage of this was that the loads did not slide, but rode
steadily when the wagons went up and down steep hills. The wheels were
big and had wide tires, so that the heavy loads would not cut the
roads. The story is told that one of these wagons with its load of
tobacco weighed more than thirteen thousand pounds, or almost seven
tons.
They were painted red and blue, and were covered with a canopy of
cloth, so that they looked like the “prairie schooners” which in later
days were the emigrant wagons of the western plains. Each wagon had a
tool box fastened at the side, and a tar bucket and a water pail hung
beneath. The horses were well fed, well matched, and strong, with good
harnesses and many jingling bells. The drivers were rough-and-ready
men, who snapped their whips in the daytime, told stories in the
evening, and slept at night on little mattresses of their own in front
of the barroom fire.
Hundreds of these wagons were going and coming on the roads in the
days when people were not dreaming of freight trains, and no doubt
the Conestoga seemed as important then as the chief freight lines now
appear to us. In the French and Indian War, when there was great need
of wagons to carry Braddock’s stores, Benjamin Franklin was asked to
get some of these famous conveyances. He succeeded, for many were to
be found in this part of Pennsylvania, and he sent on more than one
hundred and fifty of them. He nearly lost his fortune in consequence,
for he told the farmers he would see that they were paid if the wagons
and horses were not returned. It cost the old patriot twenty thousand
pounds, but fortunately the government afterwards paid the money
back to him. Not long ago the writer saw one of these wagons, with a
boat-shaped box, but without a canopy, in use on a farm near Lancaster.
Following the pike westward for twelve miles from Lancaster, the
traveler crosses the Susquehanna river at Columbia. The old bridge was
destroyed long ago, but the present one, although it looks new, is
hardly used in a modern way. It is narrow, with a plank floor, and it
serves for railway trains and wagons, as well as for foot passengers.
There is no separate place for any of these, so when a train or wagon
goes on at either end a telegram is sent to the other end to keep cars
and carriages from entering the bridge there.
[Illustration: FIG. 24. HAMBRIGHT’S HOTEL, ON THE “PIKE,” THREE MILES
WEST OF LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA]
Along the “Pike” is an electric road, which carries people more swiftly
and doubtless with less dust and jolting than did the old stages.
Hambright’s Hotel, shown in the picture above, is on this road, and,
with its big chimneys and high, long-handled pump, shows how many of
the ancient hotels looked. They seem lonely enough now, but they were
gay and busy places then. It is very appropriate that the company
which runs all the street cars in and about Lancaster calls itself The
Conestoga Traction Company.
Westward from the Susquehanna, in what we shall know in a later chapter
as the Great Valley, are some comfortable old towns bearing the names
of Carlisle, Shippensburg, and Chambersburg. The pike passes through
these and on to the old town of Bedford. Then it enters a high, rough
strip of land that was covered with forest long after Philadelphia had
become a city and the farmers about Lancaster had built their great
houses and barns. At the other end of this wilderness was Pittsburg.
The road from Bedford to Pittsburg was cut through the woods in 1758,
in the time of the French and Indian wars, and is sometimes called
Forbes’s road, from the general who directed the making of it. It was
used in the time of the Revolution, and many forts were built to guard
it.
[Illustration: FIG. 25. OLD ROAD HOUSE, ONE MILE WEST OF CHAMBERSBURG,
PENNSYLVANIA]
This roadway was so important that the Pennsylvania government, a few
years after the Revolutionary War, took it in hand and improved it.
Thus there was a line of travel over the older highway to Lancaster
and Bedford, and thence over the newer road to Pittsburg. The whole
road led from the seaboard to the Ohio river and was often called the
Pittsburg pike.
We have now learned of two great, well-trodden routes from east to
west,--the route of the Hudson and the Mohawk through New York, and the
route through the southern parts of Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to
Pittsburg.
In laying out such roads the pioneers almost always followed trails
that the Indians had made. For long generations the red men had
followed the same paths, beating them smooth and deep in the forest
earth. The white men widened the trail by using pack horses, loading
the beasts well with all sorts of things. The next step was to cut away
trees, take out the stones, and make roads for wagons. Carrying by pack
horses, however, had become a great business, and the horse owners were
very angry when the wagons began to take away their trade.
In 1830 a Pennsylvania citizen, then nearly a hundred years old, told
of seeing the first wagon reach Carlisle, and he remembered how furious
the “packers” were because they feared that they would lose their
business. It did not occur to them that they could harness their horses
into teams, buy strong wagons, and be ready to make money in the new
way instead of the old. The horse owners were quite as angry about
stagecoaches, and they sometimes destroyed the coaches and injured
the passengers to vent their spite. Moreover, as people often like
an excuse for doing wrong, and for harboring mean feelings, these men
said that the stage business was bad for the cloth makers and tailors,
because people could ride in coaches without spoiling their fine
clothes, whereas when they rode on horseback they soon ruined them and
had to buy new ones. Almost any excuse will serve those to whom no way
seems good except their own.
Philadelphia now had its connection with Pittsburg and the Ohio river
and the rich lands bordering it, as New York had its way leading to
Buffalo and the Great Lakes and the prairies. But the southern road
crossed a rougher country than did the northern one, and so it was less
easily kept in order and was harder to travel. Hence Philadelphia, like
New York, sought better means of communication with the country on the
other side of the mountains.