My mother told me of trips she made with her father from West Hanover to
Richmond about 40 miles away in the 1910s. The trips were made only one time
per year to sell the tobacco crop and do the needed big city shopping. It was
an overnight trip, leaving early one day and returning late the next. Note
that a leisurely walking rate is about four miles per hour or 15 minutes for
a mile. Traveling by horse or horse and wagon was not much faster.

An interesting related story is the impact of rail travel when it was
instituted in the 1830s. Reading the papers from that era one sees that
everyone understood the enormous impact such "fast" travel would have on
society. Trains represented an increase in the rate of travel of nearly an
order of magnitude (a factor of 10), similar to going from automobiles to jet
airplanes. Construction of the railways was heavily underwritten by the
government, everyone seemed to support the underwriting and everyone seemed
to appreciate the change that trail travel would bring.

Charles Layne

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