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
$8,000 a mile respectively; and the latter, connecting with roads to
Cumberland, linked itself with the great n