Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 10).djvu/126

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126
THE CUMBERLAND ROAD

porations of its time, a greater trust than anything known in Ohio today.[1]

To know what the old coaches really were, one should see and ride in one. It is doubtful if a single one now remains intact. Here and there inquiry will raise the rumor of an old coach still standing on wheels, but if the rumor is traced to its source, it will be found that the chariot was sold to a circus or wild west show or has been utterly destroyed. The demand for the old stages has been quite lively on the part of the wild west shows. These old coaches were handsome affairs in their day—painted and decorated profusely without, and lined within with soft silk plush.[2] There were ordinarily three seats

  1. An old Ohio National Stage driver, Mr. Samuel B. Baker of Kirkersville, Ohio, is authority for the statement that the Ohio National Stage Company put a line of stages on the Wooster–Wheeling mail and freight route and "ran out" the line which had been doing all the business previously, after an eight months' bitter contest.
  2. The following appeared in the Ohio State Journal of August 12, 1837: "A Splendid Coach—We have looked at a Coach now finishing off in the shop of Messrs. Evans & Pinney of this city, for the Ohio Stage Company, and intended we believe for the inspection of the Post-Master General, who sometime since offered pre-