Westward Cork Migration by Sail 1815-1860 by John Sutton

PART II EMIGRANT PERSPECTIVE

HISTORY 1783. Treaty of Paris and Migration to the Ohio River watershed.

The ‘second’ Treaty of Paris granted the Confederation of American States the territory between Canada and Florida east of the Mississippi. The Eastern Continental (Appalachian) Divide, however, continued to impede migration and commerce between the eastern Atlantic coastal States and the fertile Ohio watershed on the west, as only poorly developed Indian and fur-trapper wilderness paths existed. Two notable east-west trail enhancements were completed during the 1754-63 French and Indian War to reach and displace the French from strategic Fort Duquesne, where the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers form the Ohio River. The Braddock Road was inspired by a pathway blazed in 1748-50 by trader Thomas Cresap and his Indian scout Nemacolin for the Ohio Company of Virginia, passing across the Appalachians from Cumberland Maryland to Redstone Creek (future site of Brownsville) on the Monongahela River. The Road was built in 1755 by General Braddock with British regulars and George Washington's Virginia militia from Fort Cumberland, on the upper Potomac River, through the Cumberland Narrows, to reach Turtle Creek on the Monongahela River below Brownsville just short of Fort Duquesne, where his forces were ambushed and defeated. The second road was the Forbes Road , built in 1758 by Brigadier-General Forbes through Pennsylvania from Carlisle, west of Harrisburg on the Susquehanna River, using a more direct westerly route over the ridges of the Alleghenies. The French were surprised and abandoned Fort Duquesne, which the British replaced with Fort Pitt, inspiring the subsequent development of Pittsburgh at that site. These two roads were crude military roads, poorly suited to civilian use, and often unpassable in the rainy season, though improved during the 1790s. Not before pioneer migration occurred as discussed on the Braddock Road in the 1760s (ll, 1A), and before forty-eight select members of the Ohio Company of New England under General Rufus Putnam traversed the Alleghenies via the Forbes Road in January 1788 . Putnam’s party, mostly Revolutionary War veterans, made the 700-mile trek on foot from New England during December 1787 and January 1788, cutting to Sumerill’s Ferry, up-river from Pittsburgh on the Youghiogheny River, where, once a thaw allowed for the functioning of a sawmill, they built two flatboats and three dugout canoes to float down the Ohio River to the confluence of the Muskingum River and the Ohio, the site chosen subsequent to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 for Marietta, the first US settlement in Ohio (McCullough, 2019, 28-44). The up-graded Forbes Road opened as the Pennsylvania State Road in 1791 and was initially limited to pedestrians and packhorses travelling between inns from Carlisle west to Pittsburgh. The road eastward from Carlisle via Harrisburg to Philadelphia and Delaware River communities was already established. "Covering 30 or more miles a daily, a pedestrian could walk from one city to the other (Philadelphia to Pittsburgh) in 10 days, which was better time than the average packhorse made" (Ritenour, 1921) Well to the south the third major road, the Wilderness Road , traversed the Appalachians through the Cumberland Gap near the intersect of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky and was favored by migrants from the Tidewater States of Virginia and the Carolinas. This route was blazed in 1775 by Daniel Boone into the Ohio watershed, crossing the Cumberland River upstream from the future Fort Nashborough (later Nashville) Tennessee, constructed in 1779, and passing north to Fort Boonesborough on the Kentucky River. Both the Cumberland and Kentucky rivers flow into the Ohio River. A further western trail branched off to Louisville