In winter the road was almost impassable; Brodhead wrote Richard Peters: “The great Depth of Snow upon the Alleghany and Laurel Hills have prevented our Getting every kind of Stores, nor do I expect to get any now until the latter End of April.”[80] General Irvine wrote his wife January 8, 1782: “If the road was fit for sleighing I could now go down (to Carlisle) snugly, but it is quite impracticable; it is barely passable on horseback.” Fort Pitt was invariably supplied with regular troops from Lancaster or Carlisle, which marched over the Pennsylvania Road.[81]
CHAPTER VII
THE PENNSYLVANIA ROAD
Such had become the importance of the Pennsylvania Road that, soon after the Revolutionary struggle, Pennsylvania took active steps to improve it. On the twenty-first day of September an act of the Assembly of Pennsylvania gave birth to the great thoroughfare at first called “The Western Road to Pittsburg,” and familiarly known since as the Pittsburg or the Chambersburg-Pittsburg Pike.[82] This state road was, as heretofore recorded, one hundred and ninety-seven miles in length from Carlisle to Pittsburg. The road built in 1785-87 follows practically the course of the present highway between the same points. Here and there the traveler may see the olden track a few rods distant on his right or left; at points it lies several miles to the south. The present Pittsburg Pike passes through Greensburg, while old Hannastown on Forbes’s Road lies three miles to the northwest. The old route was a little less careful as to hills than the new, and made a straighter line across the country; the telephone companies have taken advantage of this and send their wires along the easily discerned track of the old road at many points. There is no point perhaps where the old road of 1785 is so plainly to be remarked as on the side of the upper end of Long Hollow Run, Napier township, Bedford County, a few miles west of historic little Bedford.[83]
The Pennsylvania Road and its important branch, the “Turkey Foot” Road to the Youghiogheny, became one of the important highways to the Ohio basin in the pioneer era. With the digging of the Pennsylvania canal up the valley of the Juniata, the Pennsylvania Road became less important until it became what it is today, a merely local thoroughfare. For the last two decades in the eighteenth century, the Pennsylvania Road held a preëminent position—days when a good road westward meant everything to the West. But the road could never be again what it was in the savage days of ’58, ’63 and ’75-’82, when it was the one fortified route to the Ohio. The need for Forbes’s Road passed when Forts Loudoun, Bedford, Ligonier, and Pitt were demolished. While they were standing, the open pathway between them meant everything to their defenders and to the farmers and woodsmen about them. But it meant almost as much to the fortresses far beyond in the wilderness of the Ohio Valley—Forts McIntosh, Patrick Henry, Harmar, Finney, and Washington. The vast proportion of stores and ammunition for the defenders of the Black Forest of the West passed over Forbes’s Road, and its story is linked more closely than we can now realize with the occupation and the winning of the West.
Mr. McMaster has an interesting paragraph on Forbes’s Road in pioneer days:
“From Philadelphia ran out a road to what was then the far West. Its course after leaving the city lay through the counties of Chester and Lancaster, then sparsely settled, now thick with towns and cities and penetrated with innumerable railways, and went over the Blue Ridge mountains to Shippensburg and the little town of Bedford. Thence it wound through the beautiful hills of western Pennsylvania, and crossed the Alleghany mountains to the head-waters of the Ohio. It was known to travelers as the northern route, and was declared to be execrable. In reality it was merely a passable road, broad and level in the lowlands, narrow and dangerous in the passes of the mountains, and beset with steep declivities. Yet it was the chief highway between the Mississippi valley and the East, and was constantly travelled in the summer months by thousands of emigrants to the western country, and by long trains of wagons bringing the produce of the little farms on the banks of the Ohio to the markets of Philadelphia and Baltimore. In any other section of the country a road so frequented would have been considered as eminently pleasant and safe. But some years later the traveler who was forced to make the journey from Philadelphia to Pittsburg in his carriage and four, beheld with dread the cloud of dust which marked the slow approach of a train of wagons. For nothing excited the anger of the sturdy teamsters more than the sight of a carriage. To them it was the unmistakable mark of aristocracy, and they were indeed in a particularly good humor when they suffered the despised vehicle to draw up by the road-side without breaking the shaft, or taking off the wheels, or tumbling it over into the ditch. His troubles over, the traveler found himself at a small hamlet, then known as Pittsburg.”[84]
Forbes’s Road, strictly speaking, began at Bedford, as Braddock’s Road began at Cumberland. In these pages the main route from Philadelphia—the Pennsylvania Road—has been considered under the head of Forbes’s Road. The eastern extremity of this thoroughfare, or the portion, sixty-six miles in length, between Philadelphia and Lancaster, became the first macadamized road in the United States and demands particular attention in another volume of this series[85].