Although the freight was very valuable sometimes and often carried great distances, robbing or molesting these trains was something unheard of. They were perfectly secure while on the move or in camp, even in the most sparsely settled districts, because there were no robbers or gangs of thieves organized in those days to plunder passing teams. It is quite doubtful whether the same would be true nowadays if a return to the old method of transportation was resorted to.
The country merchants in those days were contented and happy, I suppose, to be able to get their orders filled and goods delivered inside of from thirty to ninety days.
This great public highway, which was kept in such splendid condition in 1849 and prior thereto, and which had so many beautiful camping grounds where wood and water were convenient and not far apart, with little villages every ten or fifteen miles, where there were inns for travellers to rest and feed their horses has become a thing of the past along with that old system of travel and transportation. I have seen many men, called travelers in those days, pass over that old road going to, or from the South or West on horseback, with large saddlebags strapped behind them armed with a horse pistol, which was about twenty inches long and as large as an old flint musket. Usually they carried a pair of these pistols hanging down in front of them, one on each side of the horse’s neck.
That was the usual way of travel in those days when persons wished to go a long distance, particularly to the West or South. Signs of this old road can yet be seen in places, but the road has been almost deserted, and has grown up in forest.
In front of our old place, and in fact from Miller’s Store, a little village with a post-office, to Scofields, a similar place, a distance of ten miles, that old road was nearly on a straight line, was broad and almost level, and was the pride of that community; but when I saw it in July, 1893, and attempted with a horse and buggy to pass over it for a distance of a few miles I found it impassable. From John Queensbury’s Public Inn and Camping ground to our old home, a distance of three miles the old road has been entirely obliterated.
This road was kept in such a fine condition up to 1849 that many tobacco raisers used to put rollers around one or two hogs heads of tobacco, weighing about a thousand pounds each, then attach a pair of shafts and with a single horse draw them to Richmond, a distance of sixty miles.
I readily recall many different kinds of travel and trade which once thrived on this public highway. Richmond at that date being a great pork market and the most convenient one for the pork raisers of West Virginia and the Eastern portion of Kentucky, and this old public highway being the most direct route for travel from the West to Richmond, these hog raisers, in order to reach a market for their hogs, were compelled to drive them on foot over the road a distance of over two hundred miles. I have seen as many as three hundred hogs in one drove pass our old home in one day going towards Richmond. Usually these hog drivers brought along several wagon loads of corn to feed their hogs while en route. They could and did travel from ten to twelve miles a day, and from early fall to spring each year many thousand hogs were driven into Richmond over this public highway.
Besides supplying Richmond with pork, which in turn, furnished other places, especially in the South, these hog raisers sold hogs to planters on the road, who had failed to raise enough pork for home consumption. Pork was the principal meat diet at that time for both white and black, there being few sheep or beef cattle killed for table use, and then always for the table of the master classes.
To advise a farmer now living in West Virginia or Eastern Kentucky, who owns a hundred head of marketable hogs, to drive them two hundred miles to market, as his father had done, would be considered by him very foolish advice. But such was the only way of transportation of that kind of product prior to the year 1849, of which the writer has personal recollections.
These cases mentioned show clearly what railroads have done, not only for Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, but the whole country and especially the Southern portion of it.