travel on snow was common and in the central portion of the state, where there was much wet ground in the olden time, it was easier to move heavy freight in the winter than in summer when the soft ground was treacherous. Even as late as the building of the Erie Canal in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century—long after the building of the Genesee Road—freight was hauled in the winter in preference to summer. In the annual report of the comissioners of the Erie Canal, dated January 25, 1819, we read that the roads were so wretched between Utica and Syracuse in the summer season that contractors who needed to lay up a supply of tools, provisions, etc., for their men, at interior points, purchased them in the winter before and sent the loads onward to their destinations in sleighs.[1] One of the reasons given by the Erie Canal commissioners for delays and increased expenses in the work on the canal in 1819, in their report delivered to the legislature February 18, 1820, was that
- ↑ Public Documents Relating to the New York Canals (New York, 1821), p. 312.
