318 THE PLANT LIFE OF MARYLAND 



lines of transportation need not lie taken up. But the use of roads, 

 in the place of the former trails, meant the widening of these to allow 

 the use of wheeled vehicles, which had previously been rare in the 

 hauling- of the colonial produce. The absence of iron in convenient 

 form for use, made the early wagons heavy and cumbersome affairs, 

 the wheels being sawed from logs of suitable sizes, and not built 

 with the modern method of spoked wheels. Spoked wheels were of 

 course in use on the coaches for passenger travel, but these were 

 imported, the freight vehicles being of domestic manufacture.* The 

 owners of the pack horse trains were opposed to the improvements 

 in roads for the accommodation of wagon traffic, as they supposed 

 it would ruin their trade, and at a later lime the wagon freighters 

 opposed the development of the railroad upon the same grounds. 

 That there developed a considerable freight business is shown by 

 the statement that in October, 1751, in two days, sixty wagons 

 loaded with flaxseed came into Baltimore from the "back country," 

 in the central part of the Colony (Frederick and Carroll counties 

 and the vicinity of York, Pa.) T 



Baltimore became the terminus of the roads extending into the 

 region just mentioned and as the trade increased, its importance in- 

 creased because of its position at the junction of the routes by land 

 and those by the Bay. Its business was rims practically assured, 

 from the time that there was recognized a possibility of traffic along 

 the routes named. 



The extension of the French settlements into the Ohio Valley is 

 responsible for the Washington and the Braddock Roads of 1753-4, 

 and 1755 respectively, from Fort Cumberland westward toward the 

 Ohio, a part of the route then laid out being later used for the Na- 

 tional Koad, but its steepest grades being avoided by relocation. 

 The road in this part of its route had but little to do with .Mary- 

 land farm life or the produce of the farms. It was not until a. 

 road was laid out to connect the settlements in the Valley, the 

 Hagerstown and Frederick region, with the country in the vicinity 

 of Fort Cumberland, that the plantations and farms in the older 



*See Schulz, First Settlement of Germans in Maryland, p. 19. 

 tMaryland Gazette. October 30, 1751, quoted in Mereness "Maryland as a 

 Proprietary Province." 



