It took strong wagons to travel such roads, and sometimes the wheels were cut solid by sawing off short sections of the butt of a great tree, much as the wheels of a toy cart have been made by many boys. When a driver was stuck in the mud he had to wait for other teams to come up, when they would hook on with him and drag him out upon hard ground again. They were a rough but sociable company, the teamsters of those days, feeding their horses and cracking their jokes at the taverns which lined the turnpikes. They would stand by one another loyally, but when they met some fine gentleman on the road they did not object to taking off a wheel or crushing the frame of his light carriage. [Illustration: FIG. 21. PENN SQUARE, LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA, LOOKING EAST ALONG THE “LANCASTER PIKE”] Out of West Philadelphia to-day leads a street known as Lancaster avenue. It is the eastern end of the old “Lancaster pike,” the town which gave name to the road being sixty-six miles to the west. This is the oldest turnpike road in the United States. When the pioneers were clearing up the forests and building the Genesee road in New York this region was already well settled. If you ride from Philadelphia to Lancaster to-day, you will see that it is an old country, and you will not think it strange when you learn that so long ago as 1730, two years before the birth of Washington, some of the inhabitants were moving out beyond Lancaster. This means that they went west of the Susquehanna, for Lancaster is only about twelve miles east of that great river. Many of the earlier settlers of this lowland region west of Philadelphia were Germans. William Penn had invited some of these people to come, and they had settled near by in the place now known as Germantown. In time many others settled both around Lancaster and farther west. Hence we hear of “Pennsylvania Dutch,” although they were not really Dutch, which is a term belonging rather to Hollanders and their descendants. There were also some Scotch-Irish, as they were called,--descendants of Scotch people who had migrated to the north of Ireland, whence their children had come to America. These were Presbyterians, and some of them had settled in New Jersey, where they founded Princeton College.