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[Drawn about 1756; from original in British Museum]

When the Erie Canal was being built, so poor were the roads leading into the region traversed by the canal, that contractors were compelled to do most of their hauling in winter, when the ground was frozen and sleds could be used on the snow. Among the reasons given—as we shall see in a later monograph of this series—for delays in completing portions of the canal, was that of bad roads and the impossibility of sending heavy freight into the interior except in winter; and a lack of snow, during at least one winter, seriously handicapped the contractors. But when the Erie Canal was built, the prophecies of its advocates were fulfilled, as the rate per hundred-weight by canal was only one-tenth the rate charged by teamsters on the Genesee Road. The old “waggoners” who, for a generation, had successfully competed with the Inland Lock Navigation Company, could not compete with the Erie Canal, and it was indeed very significant that, when Governor Clinton and party made that first triumphal journey by canal-boat from Buffalo to Albany and New York—carrying a keg of Lake Erie water to be emptied into the Atlantic Ocean—they were not joyously received at certain points, such as Schenectady, where the old methods of transportation were the principal means of livelihood for a large body of citizens. How delighted were the old tavern-keepers in central New York with the opening of the Erie Canal, on whose boats immigrants ate and slept? About as happy, we may say, as were the canal operators when a railway was built, hurrying travelers on at such a rapid pace that their destinations could be reached, in many cases, between meals!

Yet until the railway came, the fast mail-stages rolled along over the Genesee Road, keeping alive the old traditions and the old breed of horses. Local business was vastly increased by the dawning of the new era; society adapted itself to new and altered conditions, and the old days when the Genesee Road was a highway of national import became the heritage of those who could look backward and take hope for the future, because they recognized better the advances that each new year had made.

CHAPTER V

A TRAVELER ON THE GENESEE ROAD

Among the many records of travelers on the famous Genesee Road, that of Timothy Bigelow, as given in his Journal of a Tour to Niagara Falls in the Year 1805,[40] approaches perhaps most nearly to the character of a description of the old highway which should be presented here: