of pioneer roads did, undoubtedly, influence the beginnings of towns and cities. On the longer routes it will be found that the steep hills almost invariably became the sites of villages because of physical conditions. "Long-a-coming," a New Jersey village, bore a very appropriate name.[1]
The girls of Sussex, England, were said to be exceedingly long-limbed, and a facetious wag affirmed the reason to be that the Sussex mud was so deep and sticky that in drawing out the foot "by the strength of the ancle" the muscles, and then the bones, of the leg were lengthened! In 1708 when Prince George of Denmark went to meet Charles the Seventh of Spain traveling by coach, he traveled at the rate of nine miles in six hours—a tribute to the strength of Sussex mud. Charles Augustus Murray, in his Travels in North America, leaves us a humorous account of the mud-holes in the road from the Potomac to Fredericksburg, Maryland, and his experience upon it:
"On the 27th of March I quitted Wash-
- ↑ D. Hewett's American Traveller (1825), p. 222.
