derick and Hagerstown to Cumberland, and thus formed a single
route from the Ohio to Baltimore. Great stagecoach and freight lines
were soon established, each patronizing its own stage house or wagon
stand in the thriving towns along the road. The primitive box stage gave
way to the oval or football type with curved top and bottom, and this
was displaced in turn by the more practical Concord coach of national
fame. The names of the important stagecoach companies were quite as well
known, a century ago, as those of our great railways today. Chief among
them were the National, Good Intent, June Bug, and Pioneer lines. The
coaches, drawn by four and sometimes six horses, were usually painted in
brilliant colors and were named after eminent statesmen. The drivers
of these gay chariots were characters quite as famous locally as the
personages whose names were borne by the coaches. Westover and his
record of forty-five minutes for the twenty miles between Uniontown
and Brownsville, and "Red" Bunting, with his drive of a hundred and
thirty-one miles in twelve hours with the declaration of war against
Mexico, will be long famous on the curving stretches of the Cumberland
Road.

Although the freight and express traffic of those days lacked the
picturesqueness of the passenger coaches, nothing illustrates so
conclusively what the great road meant to an awakening West as the long
lines of heavy Conestogas and rattling express wagons which raced
at "unprecedented" speed across hill and vale. Searight, the local
historian of the road, describes these large, broad-wheeled wagons
covered with white canvas as

"visible all the day long, at every point, making the highway look
more like a leading avenue of a great city than a road through rural
districts.... I have staid over night with William Cheets on Nigger
[Negro] Mountain when there were about thirty six-horse teams in the
wagon yard, a hundred Kentucky mules in an adjoining lot, a thousand
hogs in their enclosures, and as many fat cattle in adjoining fields.
The music made by this large number of hogs eating corn on a frosty
night I shall never forget. After supper and attention to the teams,
the wagoners would gather in the bar-room and listen to the music on the
violin furnished by one of their fellows, have a Virginia hoe-down, sing
songs, tell anecdotes, and hear the experiences of drivers and drovers
from all points of the road, and, when it was all over, unroll their
beds