How did coach service in 18th century America work?
score:7
I wasn't intending to write an answer here - but my comments got out of hand:
Two things to remember on feeder service: A 10 mile walk was literally nothing, just a daily commute; and people were far more likely to ride a horse either owned or borrowed to travel a middling distance. There was unlikely to be any profit in feeder services except in high density urban areas.
The first stagecoaches appeared briefly in Connecticut in the years immediately preceding the American Revolution. ... Interrupted by the war, stagecoach service resumed in the last decade of the 18th century. Thereafter, it spread rapidly with the proliferation of the turnpike roads that made stage service faster and more reliable.
If accurate, your traveler is out of luck; and must either walk or acquire a riding horse for his journey, or delay until ~1790.
- Another source notes the extremely uncomfortable travel conditions in effect when coach service resumed in the 1790's:
Even near the largest towns main highways were at times so hard and rutted that they threatened to shake a vehicle to pieces and at other times so muddy as to be virtually impassable. An English traveler during the fall of 1795 had his vehicle sink to the hubs near the same place ... the President of the United States recently had suffered a similar indignity.
...
In 1783 [Levi Pease] decided to start a stage line between Boston and Hartford despite the warning of at least one skeptic that there would not be sufficient patronage for such a line “in your day or mine. There were then only about a dozen stage lines in New England, the longest of which ran between Boston and Portsmouth.
- Another source
In 1783 [Levi Pease] decided to start a stage line between Boston and Hartford despite the warning of at least one skeptic that there would not be sufficient patronage for such a line “in your day or mine. There were then only about a dozen stage lines in New England, the longest of which ran between Boston and Portsmouth.
- Another source outlines the history of the Colonies' main roads through the 17th and 18th Centuries.
So, for the most part, there was no coach service for your time period of interest; though there is sufficient ambiguity in the sources above that perhaps a very small number of coach services were running over very short lines. Long haul coaching awaits the combination of steel springs, better roads, and the end of the Revolutionary War.
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