502 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 9 



command the baggage of the expedition and the canoes were carried 

 across the portage path on the backs of the common laborers or 

 engages. The packs were balanced by tumplines encircling the fore- 

 heads of the burden bearers. 



While the French in the north and the Spaniards in the southwest 

 were extending their dominions in North America, the English were 

 establishing lucrative possessions along the Atlantic seaboard. 

 Throughout the southern group of Colonies the plantation system 

 retarded road development. The extensive acreages of privately 

 owned farms bordered upon navigable streams, on the banks of which 

 were private docks where the products of the soil were loaded on 

 board ocean-going ships. Tobacco was the money crop of the Vir- 

 ginia planters, and hogsheads filled with the precious weed were 

 rolled (pi. 2, fig. 2) from field warehouses over tobacco-rolling roads 

 to the river landings for shipment to the English mother country far 

 across the sea. A rope attached to the hogshead and held in the 

 hands of a Negro was used as a brake to prevent the hogshead from 

 overrunning the oxen when traveling downhill. 



Toward the close of the eighteenth century road improvement in 

 the northern colonies was undertaken by the township authorities. 

 This work speeded the Colonial mail service which had been estab- 

 lished in North America first, in 1673, on the famous Boston Post 

 Road leading from New England to New York. In less than a cen- 

 tury the postal system had become so extensive that Colonial Post- 

 master Benjamin Franklin (pi. 3, fig. 1), in 1763, seated in a well-kept 

 one-horse shay and accompanied by his daughter on horseback, made 

 a long inspection tour of the Colonial post offices. While he was 

 journeying over the Boston Post Road, a tireless post rider delivered 

 an urgent message to his chief. 



The growth of the mail service in the eighteenth centuj.y was the 

 natural accompaniment of a corresponding increase in the volume of 

 business carried on between the Colonies. Although the bulk of the 

 passenger and freight movement was cared for in coastwise vessels, 

 attempts to improve land transportation began at an early date. The 

 first venture in rapid transportation was made, in 1766, by the crude 

 box-shaped covered wagon called the Flying Machine (pi. 3, fig. 2), 

 on the road between the cities of Philadelphia and New York. This 

 lumbering vehicle, with springs only under the crosswise board seats, 

 covered in 2 days the 90-mile distance between the Quaker City and 

 the Paulus Hook Ferry, now known as Jersey City. The two trips 

 a week were multiplied into daily runs by 1773. 



For the century and a half and more outlined in the preceding 

 paragraphs the British settlements in North America had been con- 

 fined to a narrow strip of land, 150 miles wide, sprawled along the 



