their employ for such work.

While the coastwise trade between the colonies was still
preeminently important as a means of transporting commodities, by
the beginning of the eighteenth century the land routes from New
York to New England, from New York across New Jersey to
Philadelphia, and those radiating from Philadelphia in every
direction, were coming into general use. The date of the opening
of regular freight traffic between New York and Philadelphia is
set by the reply of the Governor of New Jersey in 1707 to a
protest against monopolies granted on one of the old widened
Indian trails between Burlington and Amboy. "At present," he
says, "everybody is sure, ONCE A FORTNIGHT, to have an
opportunity of sending any quantity of goods, great or small, at
reasonable rates, without being in danger of imposition; and the
sending of this wagon is so far from being a grievance or
monopoly, THAT BY THIS MEANS AND NO OTHER, a trade has been
carried on between Philadelphia, Burlington, Amboy, and New York,
which was never known before."

The long Philadelphia Road from the Lancaster region into the
Valley of Virginia, by way of Wadkins on the Potomac, was used by
German and Irish traders probably as early as 1700. In 1728 the
people of Maryland were petitioning for a road from the ford of
the Monocacy to the home of Nathan Wickham. Four years later Jost
Heydt, leading an immigrant party southward, broke open a road
from the York Barrens toward the Potomac two miles above Harper's
Ferry. This avenue by way of the Berkeley, Staunton, Watauga, and
Greenbrier regions to Tennessee and Kentucky--was the longest and
most important in America during the Revolutionary period. The