Hi, all, I haven't been following this thread closely, but want to say that water was the predominant way to travel in colonial days because ships or small boats could duck around easily across bodies of water. By the late 1700s certainly there were well established roads across New England, and the men who had marched across in the French and Indian War and Revolution would have known them. However I do know that a lot of people used the boat to go from Fall River to Albany. My own ancestor David Cook went that way to go back to Westport, Mass., for a second wife after the first one died in Schoharie Co., NY, in the 1830s. In compiling the Thomas Cooke Gen., I found some correspondence and bills of lading that showed relatives coming to visit around 1810, by boat down the coast and then up the Hudson to New Baltimore, where I guess they took off by foot or by horse. I can't imagine that the long overland trip would have been less expensive than the boat trip, given the number of days involved and the wear and tear on a horse. I grew up next to the Hudson River, and the "Landings" in various towns were still there although used only by the Dayboat between NY and Albany, and only a very few major ones for that. My grandfather was Capt. of a river boat in the mid to late 1800s, and they hauled freight as well as passengers, and stopped at all the little landings up and down the Hudson. Jane