TRANSPORTATION FACILITIES.[13]

Good roads, always of immeasurable importance to the farmer, were
early made necessary by the tremendous crops of marketable products
harvested from Loudoun lands. Though this need, in time, became
imperative the roads were never hastily and imperfectly constructed;
they were built with an eye single to permanence and with due
allowance for generations of unintermittent and augmentative traffic.

These roads yielded their promoters modest dividends, but with the
completion in 1832 of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, bordering the
county just across the Potomac, transportation to and from Washington
(Georgetown) and Alexandria was materially cheapened and the earnings
of the turnpike companies suffered a corresponding decrease, the
income, in many cases, being barely sufficient to defray the expense
of maintenance. Tolls are now collected at only two points, in the
County.

[Footnote 13: No apology is offered for the omission of vital
statistics that might and would have been included in this department
had earnest appeals addressed to State officers and the State
Corporation Commission met with more courteous and, I might add,
dutiful consideration. Not the least assistance was vouchsafed by any
of them.--THE AUTHOR.]

The turnpike craze spread to Loudoun not long after the War of
Independence and culminated about forty years later. It wrought a
revolution in public travel, relatively nearly as great as that
brought about by the railway craze in more recent years. The corporate
names of some of the roads constructed through Loudoun before its