As will be seen later, the amounts handled by the gate-keepers were no small sums. In the best days of the road the average amount handled by tollgate-keepers in Pennsylvania was about eighteen hundred dollars per annum. In Ohio, with gates every ten miles, the average (reported) collection was about two thousand dollars in the best years. It is difficult to reconcile the statement made by Mr. Searight concerning the comparative amount of business done on various portions of the Cumberland Road, with the figures he himself quotes. He says: "It is estimated that two-fifths of the trade and travel of the road were diverted at Brownsville, and fell into the channel furnished at that point by the slackwater navigation of the Monongahela River, and a similar proportion descended the Ohio from Wheeling, and the remaining fifth continued on the road to Columbus, Ohio, and points further west. The travel west of Wheeling was chiefly local, and the road presented scarcely a tithe of the thrift, push, whirl and excitement which characterized it east of that point."[50] On another page Mr. Searight gives the account of the old-time superintendents of the road in Pennsylvania in its most prosperous era, one dating from November 10, 1840 to November 10, 1841,[51] the other from May 1, 1843 to December 31, 1844.[52] In the first of these periods the amount of tolls received from the eastern division of the road (east of the Monongahela) is two thousand dollars less than the amount received from the western division. Even after the amounts paid by the two great stage companies are deducted, a balance of over a thousand dollars is left in favor of the division west of the Monongahela River. In the second report, $4,242.37 more was received on the western division of the road than on the eastern, and even after the amounts received from the stage companies are deducted, the receipts from the eastern division barely exceed those of the western. How can it be that "two-fifths of the trade and travel of the road were diverted at Brownsville?" And the further west Mr. Searight goes, the more does he seem to err, for the road west of the Ohio River, instead of showing "scarcely a tithe of the thrift, push, whirl and excitement which characterized it east of that point," seems to have done a greater business than the eastern portion. For instance, when the road was completed as many miles in Ohio as were built in Pennsylvania, the return from the portion in Ohio (1833) was $12,259.42-4 (in the very first year that the road was completed), while in Pennsylvania the receipts in 1840 were only $18,429.25, after the road had been used for twenty-two years. In the same year (1840) Ohio collected $51,364.67 from her Cumberland Road tollgates--about three times the amount collected in Pennsylvania. Again Mr. Searight gives a Pennsylvania commissioner's receipts for the twenty months beginning May 1, 1843, as $37,109.11, while the receipts from the road in Ohio in only