Toll House
Hempfield Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Just northeast of here stood 1 of 5 gates of Greensburg-Pittsburgh Turnpike Road Co. The turnpike, a section of the Pittsburgh-Philadelphia road, was completed in 1817. Over it, passed goods in trade between east and west.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Crossing the mountains between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh once meant passing through a series of tollgates run by private turnpike companies. Just northeast of here stood one of five gates on the Greensburg-Pittsburgh Turnpike, completed in 1817 as a link in that great east-west road. Over its surface rolled the wagons of goods exchanged between the seaboard and the growing settlements of the Ohio Valley.
Why it matters
It marks a piece of the turnpike network that bound eastern and western Pennsylvania together commercially in the early republic, foreshadowing the nation's later transportation boom.
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Related events
- · Greensburg-Pittsburgh Turnpike
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Toll House
Greensburg, PA · est. 1955
Before public highways, long-distance roads were built and maintained by private turnpike companies that recouped their costs at tollgates. This spot held the toll house of the Stoyestown-Greensburg Turnpike, part of the vital Philadelphia-to-Pittsburgh road completed in 1819 at the then-steep price of roughly $6,000 a mile. Travelers, drovers, and freight wagons paid their way west here for nearly a century, until the state finally took the road over in 1911.
Rural Free Delivery
New Stanton, PA · est. 2001
For most of the 19th century, country families had to travel miles to a town post office to collect their mail. That changed on November 24, 1896, when the Post Office Department launched two of the nation's earliest rural routes here in Westmoreland County — one from New Stanton, another from nearby Ruffsdale. The experiment, begun weeks earlier in West Virginia, spread with astonishing speed: by 1905 some 32,000 routes reached into the American countryside.
Forbes Road
Murrysville, PA · est. 1960
In November 1758, as the British pushed toward the French stronghold at the Forks of the Ohio, a young Colonel George Washington established a supply camp on the hill south of here to help feed the advance along the newly cut Forbes Road. He did so under orders from Colonel Henry Bouquet, describing himself as commanding the troops "to ye Westward." The camp was one link in the long logistical chain that carried Forbes's army across the Pennsylvania mountains during the French and Indian War.
Twelve Mile Camp
Unity Township, PA · est. 1946
In 1758, as British and colonial forces cut Forbes Road through the wilderness toward the French stronghold at the Forks of the Ohio, a young George Washington helped set up an encampment near this spot. The rough military road was a decisive artery of the French and Indian War, opening the western country to armies and, later, settlers. A generation on, in 1774, Fort Shippen rose on the same ground as the frontier remained contested.