Paul, I would be interested in the source for your statements. What you said was certainly true of the frontier. However, for most of the 18th Century, VA invested time and money on internal improvements primarily to facilitate the tobacco trade. For example by 1732: ".....Caroline's magistrates went doggedly ahead with a road building program to unite the three parishes which formed their county and to furnish the planters with overland routes to transport their tobacco to Tidewater. Public thoroughfares fell into three classes: bridle paths for riders on horseback, cart roads for horse-drawn vehicles, and rolling roads for rolling hogsheads packed with tobacco, usually propelled by oxen hitched to an axle driven through the center. Rolling roads were the most costly to build, since causeways had to be constructed across marshes and bridges over streams to keep the tobacco dry in transit" Colonial Caroline by T.E. Campbell The county governments in VA and NC built and maintained roads. The workers were the people who lived near the roads, who were ordered to build and maintain them. Contractors built the bridges. Virginia's system of tobacco warehouses could not have functioned with simple bridle paths. One of the early problems with NC was that they decided to build roads that only led to waterways. Thus people could travel locally, but not long distances very easily. Is there a source for the statement that there were only four or five vehicles with more than 2 wheels in NC before the Revolution? It is a bit incredible. The military would have had to have wagons to carry on operations. How did they carry on trade? How did the furniture and other goods shipped from England get from the ships to the interior plantations? They couldn't do it very efficiently with carts. What happened to the wagons that the Scots-Irish and Germans used to get to the Carolinas as in this description: "In the last sixteen years of the colonial era, southbound traffic along the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road was numbered in tens of thousands; it was the most heavily traveled road in all America and must have had more vehicles jolting along its rough and tortuous way than all other main roads put together." Carl Bridenbaugh.