Living close along the ocean where numerous excellent harbors and long stretches of sheltered water gave ample facilities for the little inter-colonial trade that existed, and where rivers afforded natural means of transportation from the interior to towns on the coast, the people of early colonial days had not found it necessary to give much time to the construction of roads. The gradual inland movement of the population had finally compelled them, however, to give some attention to the means of land transportation and many rude earth roads were built to replace the old Indian trails. These roads were unspeakably poor, sloughs of mire during the thaws of winter and spring and thick with dust in the summer, but bad as they were they carried considerable traffic and their use was constantly growing. Inland towns were beginning to grow up at the focusing points of the country roads, and the owners of general stores at such places derived large profits out of their position as middlemen between the farmers of the interior and the merchants at the nearest seaports. Three great roads had been built into the western country, one up the Mohawk Valley into western New York, and two across the Alleghany Mountains, the Pennsylvania Road from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and the Wilderness Road over which the early settlers of Kentucky had threaded their way up the Shenandoah Valley and through Cumberland Gap to the southern banks of the Ohio River. The transportation facilities of the times were, however, entirely inadequate to the needs of the country, and the lack of better means of getting products to market was a serious impediment to internal development. Tench Coxe wrote in 1792: "To a nation inhabiting a great continent not yet traversed by artificial roads and canals, the rivers of which above their natural navigation have hitherto been very little improved, many of whose people are at this moment closely settled upon lands, which actually sink from one-fifth to one-half of the value of their crops in the mere charges of transporting them to seaport towns, and others, of whose inhabitants cannot at present send their produce to a seaport for its _whole_ value, _a thorough sense of the truth of the position_ is a matter of _unequalled_ magnitude and importance."