------------------------------------------------------------------ FORWARDED MESSAGE - Orig: 30-Jan-99 8:10 Subject: Early Roads IV ------------------------------------------------------------------ Another section of my Roads Folder -Western Pennsylvania ============================================================ III. THE ROADS USED BY THE BRETHREN FOR MIGRATION Merle C Rummel [I consider three things to have the greatest effect on people and events of history. There is the struggle for power: which results in wars or various types of struggle and conflicts; there are economics: depressions or hard times, good times and peaceful living, and the attendant results; there is movement and transportation: ease or difficulty of movement, including travel and commerce. There are other things that effect people and history (famines, severe weather or climatic changes, natural disasters of various kinds, and epidemics), but even most of these end with some result in the above three.] Early America used the rivers and waterways for much of its travel and transportation. Roads were worse than poor. Even Benj. Franklin, Poor Richards Almanac, complained about the pot holes and hog wallows, in Philadelphia. No road beyond the cities, was more than a pair of worn tracks through open land, usually with grass growing up in the center. The traveler was lucky if it was smooth, bad weather from storm or the thawing of spring would leave deep ruts, which dried into shaking and jaring to the steel-rimmed wagon. The roads of necessity wound around the huge forest trees, and the roots of such would lay huge bumps across the road. Trees were cut, to open the road, and the stumps left standing in the road. Ravines, gulleys, streams and rivers meant a descent to the bottom, and a climb out on the far bank, if not worse. But America moved west. Land travel was slow, seldom over 10 miles a day, often half that. It was considered that the children would easily keep up, walking nearby, and in the process find much to keep themselves entertained. (Nowhere like todays problems taking children in a long automobile trip.) The team of horses might travel a little faster, but long distance was with the ox team, which traveled even slower than a walk, but could keep going, with less food, long after the horses would quit. The normal trip took days and often months. These Roads I have traveled, some of them not in one solid stretch, and in occasion, missing some section. ========================================================= BRADDOCK'S ROAD Major General Edward Braddock, of the Coldstream Guards, was Supreme Commander of the British Forces in the American Colonies at the start of the French and Indian War, 1754-1763, the colonial phase of the Seven Years War between England and France, fought world wide. In an attempt to deter the Indian massacres and raids into the frontier settlements in the middle colonies, he determined to take the French Fort Duquesne (Pittsburg), at the forks of the Ohio River. In 1755, with an army of 1400 British Regulars and a militia of 700 provinicals under Lieut Col George Washington, he moved up the Baltimore Road to Frederick MD. There he took the settlers road through Middletown Valley to Hagerstown, and on to the frontier Fort Frederick, on the Potomac River. Under the guidance of the Colonial Scouts, following the path used by Col George Washington only the year before, he started for Fort Duquesne. The army had to cut their own road for the wagons and cannon. They went west, through Cumberland MD (old Fort Cumberland). They passed the tiny Fort Necessity, where Col Washington had escaped with his troops after surrendering to the French, just the year before. From the Redstone Creek (Uniontown), the army headed due north until it crossed the Youghiogheny River. It then followed the Monongahela River toward the Fort. At the town of Braddock, some 7 miles from Old Fort Duquesne (now called: the Point), there in a ravine, the British Army was ambushed by a combined French and Indian force, a slaughter ensued. The colonia militia was able to be reasonably clear -they knew how to fight the Indians. The British Regulars were destroyed. The remnants of the Army fled along the route of its approach. General Braddock, having been mortally injured in the fight, died and was buried in the road at Great Meadows, east of now Uniontown PA, about a mile from little Fort Necessity. His grave was covered and run over by the remaining wagons, to hide it from discovery by the enemy. Braddocks Road is essentially followed by US 40 from Frederick MD through Hagarstown MD, Cumberland MD to Grantsville MD and into Pennsylvania, past Fort Necessity National Battlefield, to Uniontown PA. There Braddock's Road went north to Pittsburg, the route now followed by US 51. The colonial Fort Frederick, the only stone fort on the frontier, is standing, a State Park on the banks of the Potomac River, about 15 miles west of Hagarstown MD. I-70 parallels Braddocks Road from Frederick to Hancock MD, I-66 continues on west through Cumberland MD to Grantsville and beyond, paralleling Braddocks Road that far. The early Brethren used Braddock's Road to move into western Pennsylvania. Settlements were already off the trace at the Antietam and Conococheague (East and West of Hagarstown). Brethren settlers moved north from the Road into Morrison's Cove and the Valleys of the Juniata, into Brother's Valley and Somerset County, and west from Uniontown to Fort Redstone on the Monongehela (now Brownsville PA) and on west to Washington Co PA. Elder George Wolfe and sons were only one of several at Fort Redstone, who built flatboats on the Monongehela River, for migration down the Ohio to the Western Frontier. This route was followed by the builders of the Cumberland Road, taking it through Old Fort Redstone to the Ohio River at Fort Henry (Wheeling) by 1818. This route is followed by US 40. ============================================================ Merle Rummel Church Historian ==== BRETHREN Mailing List ==== !^NavFont02F13EF0007NGHHZF071AF Maggie's World of Courthouse Dust & Genealogy Fever http://www.infinet.com/~dzimmerm/mindex.html *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* God Put Me On Earth to Accomplish a Certain Number of Things. Right Now I am so far behind, I will never die. --- Unknown *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*