The Old Pike: A History of the National Road, with Incidents, Accidents, and Anecdotes ThereonSearight, Thomas B. (Thomas Brownfield)
History
The Old Pike: A History of the National Road, with Incidents, Accidents, and Anecdotes Thereon
Searight, Thomas B. (Thomas Brownfield)
Cumberland Road; Pennsylvania -- Biography
[Illustration: HENRY FARWELL.]
Henry Farwell, father of the Broadway printer, was an old stage driver.
He came to Uniontown in 1839, "the winter of the deep snow." He came on
the Oyster Line from Little Crossings, working his way through the snow,
which averaged a depth of four feet on the level, and was three days on
the way. The oyster boxes were placed on a sled, drawn by six horses,
and the Oyster Line made as good time as the stage lines while the deep
snow lasted, and passenger coaches, like oyster boxes, were moved on
sleds. Farwell came to Uniontown in obedience to an order of one of the
stage lines, to take charge of a team at that place. He drove stage for
ten years, one-half of the time in Ohio. When the staging days were over
on the old road, Farwell located in Uniontown, and carried on the trade
of shoemaking, which he learned before he took to stage driving. He
owned the lot on which the National Bank of Fayette county now stands.
He has been dead several years, and is well remembered by the older
citizens of Uniontown.
Archie McNeil was of the class of merry stage drivers, and enlivened the
road with his quaint tricks and humorous jokes. His service as a driver
was confined for the most part to the western end of the road, between
Brownsville and Wheeling. An unsophisticated youth from the back
country, of ungainly form and manners, near the close of the forties,
sauntered into Washington, Pennsylvania, to seek employment, with an
ambition not uncommon among young men of that period, to become a stage
driver. In his wanderings about the town he halted at the National
House, then kept by Edward Lane, where he fell in with Archie McNeil,
and to him made known the object of his visit. Archie, ever ready to
perpetrate a joke, encouraged the aspirations of the young "greenhorn,"
and questioned him concerning his experience in driving horses and
divers other matters and things pertaining to the work he proposed to
engage in. Opposite the National House, on the Maiden street front,
there was a long wooden shed, into which empty coaches were run for
shelter, the tongues thereof protruding toward the street. McNeil
proposed to the supplicating youth that he furnish a practical
illustration of his talent as a driver, to which he readily assented,
and crossing the street to the shed where the coaches were, he was
commanded to climb up on the driver's seat, which he promptly did.
McNeil then fastened a full set of reins used for driving, to the end of
the coach tongue, and handed them up to the young man. He next placed in
his hands a driver's whip, and told him to show what he could do. The
coach bodies, it will be remembered, were placed on long, wide, and
stout leather springs, which caused a gentle rocking when in motion. The
young weakling, fully equipped as a driver, swayed himself back and
forth, cracked the whip first on one side, and then on the other of the
tongue, rocked the coach vehemently, manipulated the reins in various
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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