Besides the court and its following, and the pampered travellers in stage-coaches, Haverhill taverns had by 1825 other classes of customers. Backward and forward from upper New Hampshire and Vermont to Boston, Portsmouth, and Salem, rolled the great covered wagons with teams of six or eight horses bearing the products of the soil and forest to the towns and the products of the whole earth in return. These wagons, which were the Conestoga wagons of Pennsylvania, made little appearance in New England till this century; they were brought there by the War of 1812; but they had there their day of glory and usefulness as elsewhere throughout our whole northern continent.
The two-wheeled cart of the earliest colonists, clumsily built and wasteful of power, was used long in New England for overland transportation; though the chief transfer of merchandise was in the winter by "sledding." There seems to have always been plentiful snow and good sledding every year in every part of New England in olden times, though it is far from being so to-day. The farmer, at that season of the year, had little else to do, and the ancient paths were soon made smooth by many sleighs and sleds.
Mr. Henry S. Miner gives me a very interesting account of these freight wagons in New England as he remembers them in ante-railroad days. Though the traffic was small in amount compared with that of the present day, it was carried on in a way which gave a sense of great life and action on the road. As even little towns furnished freight for several teams, the aggregate was large, and as they neared Boston the number of teams on the highway seemed enormous. These passed through towns on the turnpike every day, Sundays included. No vocation called for sturdier or better men. The drivers were almost invariably large, hearty, healthy Yankees, of good sense and regular habits, though they were seldom total abstainers. They could not be drunkards, for their life was too vigorous; long whip in hand, they walked beside their teams. The whip was a sign of office, seldom applied to a horse. They had to be keen traders, good merchants, to sell advantageously the goods they carried to town and to choose wisely for return trips. Country merchants seldom went to the cities, but depended wholly on these teamsters for supplies.