Perhaps it was of the Virginian roads here mentioned that Thomas Moore wrote:
"Dear George! though every bone is aching, After the shaking I've had this week, over ruts and ridges, And bridges, Made of a few uneasy planks, In open ranks Over rivers of mud, whose names alone Would make the knees of stoutest man knock."[14]
David Stevenson, an English civil engineer, leaves this record of a corduroy road from Lake Erie to Pittsburg: "On the road leading from Pittsburg on the Ohio to the town of Erie on the lake of that name, I saw all the varieties of forest road-making in great perfection. Sometimes our way lay for miles through extensive marshes, which we crossed by corduroy roads, ...; at others the coach stuck fast in the mud, from which it could be extricated only by the combined efforts of the coachman and passengers; and at one place we travelled for upwards of a quarter of a mile through a forest flooded with water, which stood to the height of several feet on many of the trees, and occasionally covered the naves of the coach-wheels. The distance of the route from Pittsburg to Erie is 128 miles, which was accomplished in forty-six hours ... although the conveyance ... carried the mail, and stopped only for breakfast, dinner, and tea, but there was considerable delay caused by the coach being once upset and several times mired."[15]
"The horrible corduroy roads again made their appearance," records Captain Basil Hall, "in a more formidable shape, by the addition of deep, inky holes, which almost swallowed up the fore wheels of the wagon and bathed its hinder axle-tree. The jogging and plunging to which we were now exposed, and occasionally the bang when the vehicle reached the bottom of one of these abysses, were so new and remarkable that we tried to make a good joke of them.... I shall not compare this evening's drive to trotting up or down a pair of stairs, for, in that case, there would be some kind of regularity in the development of the bumps, but with us there was no wavering, no pause, and when we least expected a jolt, down we went, smack! dash! crash! forging, like a ship in a head-sea, right into a hole half a yard deep. At other times, when an ominous break in the road seemed to indicate the coming mischief, and we clung, grinning like grim death, to the railing at the sides of the wagon, expecting a concussion which in the next instant was to dislocate half the joints in our bodies, down we sank into a bed of mud, as softly as if the bottom and sides had been padded for our express accommodation."