Stage-Coach Days in the Bluegrass

University of Kentucky UKnowledge United States History History 1995 Stage-Coach Days In The Bluegrass J. Winston Coleman Jr. Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Coleman, J. Winston Jr., "Stage-Coach Days In The Bluegrass" (1995). United States History. 104. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_united_states_history/104 IN THE BLUEGRASS Being an Account ofStage-Coach Travel and Tavern Days in Lexington and Central Kentucky 1800-1900 J. WINSTON COLEMAN, JR. FOREWORD BY THOMAS D. CLARK THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Publication of this volume was made possible in part by grants from The Thomas D. Clark Foundation, the Lexington-Fayette County Historic Commission, and the Lexington Historical Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1935 by J. Winston Coleman, Jr. Originally published by the Standard Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 1935 Foreword copyright © 1995 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarminc College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication Data Coleman, J. Winston (John Winston), 1898- Stage-coach days in the bluegrass: being an account of stage-coach travel and tavetn days in Lexington and central Kentucky, 1800-1900 / J. Winston Coleman, Jr. ; foreword by Thomas D. Clark, p. cm. Originally published: Louisville, Ky. : Standard Press, 1935. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-1914-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Kentucky—Social life and customs. 2. Coaching—Kentucky—History— 19th century. 3. Taverns (Inns)—Kentucky—History—19th century. 4. Lexington (Ky.)—Social life and customs. 5. Coaching—Kentucky—Lexing- ton—History—19th century. 6. Taverns (Inns)—Kentucky—Lexington— History—19th century. I. Title. F455.C64 1995 976.9'403—dc20 95-21201 CONTENTS FOREWORD vii PREFACE xiii I PIONEER ROADS AND TRAVEL 15 II THE FIRST STAGE LINE 26 III IMPROVEMENTS OF STAGE TRAVEL 37 IV EARLY TAVERNS 53 V PALMY DAYS OF STAGE TRAVEL 73 VI OPPOSITION LINES AND DRIVERS 95 VII THE COMING OF THE RAILROAD 115 VIII INCIDENTS OF STAGE TRAVEL 127 IX EXPERIENCES OF TRAVELERS 149 X OTHERS USERS OF THE ROAD 162 XI TAVERNS OF A LATER TIME 177 XII ANTE-BELLUM DAYS 196 XIII THE STAGE AS A MAIL CARRIER 212 XIV TURNPIKES AND TOLL-GATES 230 XV LAST DAYS OF THE STAGE 247 APPENDIX 261 BIBLIOGRAPHY 273 INDEX 281 ILLUSTRATIONS FOLLOW PAGES 94 AND 190 To The Memory of My Father JOHN W. COLEMAN 1852-1929 FOREWORD hen Kentucky entered the Union of States on WJune 1, 1792, the face of its land was laced with an- cient game and Indian trails. Many of these at later dates converted into intersettlement roads as emigrants pushed westward. In 1792 few roads could accommodate more than packhorse trains, and certainly none were adapt- able to stagecoach travel for any distance. Not until 1787 and James Wilkinson's famous journey home from New Or- leans by way of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and by flatboat to Maysville was a wheeled vehicle brought to Kentucky. From Maysville, Wilkinson traveled over the Limestone Road to Lexington. During the second year of his administration as gover- nor, Isaac Shelby prevailed upon the Kentucky General As- sembly to enact legislation authorizing the widening and improving of a link of the old Wilderness Trail. This became the first publicly maintained road in Kentucky. Gov- ernor Shelby had raised private funds to pay for the project, which became known as Shelby's Wagon Road. A pressure for opening main roads in Kentucky was to facilitate the delivery of the United States Mail, first on horseback, then by stagecoach. At the opening of the nineteenth century, widened and slightly improved highways had been opened from Lexing- ton south to Cumberland Gap and north to Maysville and the Ohio River. The opening of these roads encouraged the organization of stagecoach companies, which endeavored viii Stage-Coach Days in the Bluegrass to establish a semblance at least of scheduled passenger and mail service. Stagecoach travel in Kentucky had more social and cul- tural significance than as a simple means of going from one place to another. The coaches were largely the conveyors of news from the outside world to the western settlements. This phase of Kentucky history was largely overlooked until J. Winston Coleman did the necessary research and writing of his book Stage-Coach Days in the Bluegrass. Coleman, an amateur historian with a burning zeal to know more of Kentucky's past, was in 1935 just beginning a distinguished career of writing and collecting Kentuckiana. He searched far and wide for the basic source materials pertaining to local stagecoach travel. In his diligent search for documentary materials, Coleman was able to produce not only an incisive depic- tion of stagecoach travel during the formative years of Ken- tucky history but also an account of the roadside accom- modations for travelers. The Kentucky county court order books contain scores of applications for licenses to operate taverns. These houses were combinations of lodging and dining rooms, bars, and appended livery stables. They were so much a part of the social and economic fabric of their communities that both the Kentucky General Assembly and the county courts exercised control over them by estab- lishing annually a scale of prices that tavernkeepers could charge for everything from a bottle of wine to horse feed. Stagecoach travel over the early nineteenth-century Ken- tucky roads was at best rugged and physically trying. Spend- ing a night in a roadside tavern was hardly a relaxing expe- rience. During winter seasons the roads were rutted Foreword ix quagmires, and in summer rough and dusty. It was not un- usual for passengers to be forced to disembark and walk around mud holes. Traveling at rates of speed that ranged from three to seven miles an hour, stagecoaches from Lex- ington took three days to reach Cumberland Gap and most of two to reach Maysville. Numerous foreign observers came west to view the ex- panding American democracy. Those who traveled through Kentucky prior to the railway age in 1850 described dining and lodging in a roadside stagecoach tavern as an ordeal approaching primitivism itself. Meals were served in the most informal manner. Backwoods dining habits lacked refine- ments; food, though plentiful, was often indifferently pre- pared, and diners gulped down their meals as if famine itself were impending. Lodging was equally crude; many times travelers were forced to sleep two and three abed with total strangers or to bed down on the barroom floor. Perhaps the only picturesque features of the early Kentucky taverns were their quaint names and colorful signs, and the fact that prices were officially regulated. All the taverns kept on hand a sur- prising selection of alcoholic beverages, some of them down- right exotic. In no aspect of frontier American life was the practice of democracy more visible than among stagecoach travelers. Lawyers, statesmen, preachers, laborers, and soldiers of high rank were all crowded into cramped stagecoaches shoulder to shoulder. None among them experienced the ordeals of travel more intimately than Henry Clay, who traveled back and forth from his Lexington estate, Ashland, to Washington aboard stagecoaches. On one occasion he was trapped in an overturned coach. Stage-Coach Days in the Bluegrass There were the elite among the stage lines and their drivers. Those carrying the United States Mail lorded it over their less fortunate competitors. The drivers, or jehus, of mail coaches believed they had license to take the road at will and sometimes treated passengers with contempt. The mail coaches were perhaps better maintained than other coaches because of postal inspection, and they held more faithfully to published schedules. Moving around in Kentucky—and the nation, for that matter—and to places away from navigable streams prior to the building of railroads required a certain amount of daring and a nonchalance for the passage of time and for personal safety. The Kentucky General Assembly was typi- cally reluctant to enact internal improvement laws. Most of the legislators were too tax shy or unimaginative to sanc- tion the building of better roads. They were tolerant of the inefficient plan of warning "tithes," which required men be- tween the ages of sixteen and sixty to contribute two or three days of labor to work the roads. It was not until the early decades of the nineteenth century, especially 1830- 1850, that the macadam process of building and surfacing roads was introduced in Kentucky. Along with the introduction of the modern process of building roads, toll companies were chartered by the state to operate segments of the public roads and collect tolls to finance them. Throughout almost all the latter half of the nineteenth century, turnpike companies virtually controlled most of Kentucky's public roads. In time, toll company of- ficials became arbitrary, toll collectors impatient, and stagecoach drivers arrogant. There resulted in the 1880s and early 1890s a so-called toll gate war in which vigilantes destroyed Foreword xi toll gates, burned toll houses, and threatened toll collectors with violence.

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