except in the boatmen on the western rivers who were almost their
contemporaries. Fit for the severest toil, weathered to the color
of the red man, at home under any roof that harbored a demijohn
and a fiddle, these hardy nomads of early commerce were the
custodians of the largest amount of traffic in their day.

The turnpike era overlaps the period of the building of national
roads and canals and the beginning of the railway age, but it is
of greatest interest during the first twenty-five years of the
nineteenth century, up to the time when the completion of the
Erie Canal set new standards. During this period roads were also
constructed westward from Baltimore and Albany to connect, as the
Lancaster Turnpike did at its terminus, with the thoroughfares
from the trans-Alleghany country. The metropolis of Maryland was
quickly in the field to challenge the bid which the Quaker City
made for western trade. The Baltimore-Reisterstown and
Baltimore-Frederick turnpikes were built at a cost of $10,000 and
$8,000 a mile respectively; and the latter, connecting with roads
to Cumberland, linked itself with the great national road to Ohio
which the Government built between 1811 and 1817. These famous
stone roads of Maryland long kept Baltimore in the lead as the
principal outlet for the western trade. New York, too, proved her
right to the title of Empire State by a marvelous activity in
improving her magnificent strategic position. In the first seven
years of the nineteenth century eighty-eight incorporated road
companies were formed with a total capital of over $8,000,000.
Twenty large bridges and more than three thousand miles of
turnpike were constructed. The movement, indeed, extended from
New England to Virginia and the Carolinas, and turnpike companies
built all kinds of roads--earth, corduroy, plank, and stone.