Billed as a history of inns and taverns, this treatise is much broader in scope, presenting information from a variety of sources on travel along major thoroughfares, on early stage and postal routes, modes of transportation, as well as the roads and taverns. Detailed, graphic descriptions of methods of travel, the accommodations from food to furniture, fellow travelers, and innkeepers are drawn from numerous diaries, travelogues and local histories and it is the reference to these that many researchers will find of most value. The author begins with inns from New York City to Springfield, Massachusetts, and on to Boston following the Boston Post Road; a second Post Road from New York to New Haven, is followed by a brief sojourn in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, before turning south to Long Island, Staten Island and New Jersey. Pennsylvania inns are given extensive coverage before moving on to Delaware, Maryland and Washington, D.C. The south is given rather short shrift with a single chapter taking one from Virginia to Louisiana. Then its north to the National Road through Ohio, the old Iroquois Trail in New York state and on to the Midwest from Indiana to Iowa and north to Wisconsin before doubling back to pick up Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri. Replete with first hand accounts of travel from the 1600s through the late 1800s, this is both an entertaining and an educational journey.



The CD includes high-quality images of every page as originally published (not just a transcript) and is fully searchable using Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 5 or later recommended) on any Windows, Macintosh, or Unix computer. The data on this CD is completely self-contained, and requires no installation.