Conestoga Wagons and the Fertile Ground

Before the wagon trains rolled west, they were built right here, in the valleys around Intercourse. The Conestoga wagon, that great broad wheeled freight wagon with its curved bed and white canvas top, takes its name from the Conestoga River region of Lancaster County, where German immigrants first built them in the seventeen hundreds. The earliest known record dates to December of seventeen seventeen, when James Logan, once William Penn's secretary, wrote in his account book that he had bought a Conestoga wagon.

These were the tractor trailers of their day. Local craftsmen stretched the beds to about sixteen feet long and curved them upward at each end so heavy loads would not shift on hilly roads. Teams of horses hauled flour and iron from Lancaster to Philadelphia, returning with salt, gunpowder, and tools.

Their heyday came before the railroads, with some authors placing the golden age between eighteen twenty and eighteen forty, first between Lancaster and Philadelphia, then westward toward Pittsburgh and beyond. The spread of railroads finally retired them, and they faded from use. What made all of it possible was the ground itself.

The limestone soil of Lancaster County is among the most fertile in the nation, and it is why the Amish and their neighbors have farmed here so successfully for three centuries, and why these fields still feed the country.