%302.  Rapid Growth of Towns.%—­Fed by this never-ending stream of newcomers, the West was almost transformed.  Towns grew and villages sprang up with a rapidity which even in these days of rapid and easy communication would be thought amazing.  Mt.  Pleasant, in Jefferson County, Ohio, was in 1810 a little hamlet of seven families living in cabins.  In 1815 it contained ninety families, numbering 500 souls.  The town of Vevay, Ind., was laid out in 1813, and was not much better than a collection of huts in 1814.  But in 1816 the traveler down the Ohio who stopped at Vevay found himself at a flourishing county seat, with seventy-five dwellings, occupied by a happy population who boasted of having among them thirty-one mechanics of various trades; of receiving three mails each week, and supporting a weekly newspaper called the Indiana Register.  Forty-two thousand settlers are said to have come into Indiana in 1816, and to have raised the population to 112,000.

Letters from New York describe the condition of that state west of Utica as one of astonishing prosperity.  Log cabins were disappearing, and frame and brick houses taking their place.  The pike from Utica to Buffalo was almost a continuous village, and the country for twenty miles on either side was filling up with an industrious population.  Auburn, where twenty years before land sold for one dollar an acre, was the first town in size and wealth west of Utica, and land within its limits brought $7000 an acre.  Fourteen miles west was Waterloo, on the Seneca River, a village which did not exist in 1814, and which in 1816 had fifty houses.  Rochester, the site of which in 1815 was a wilderness, had a printing press, a bookstore, and a hundred houses in 1817.[1]

[Footnote 1:  McMaster’s History of the People of the United States, Vol.  IV., pp. 381-386.]

%303.  Scenes on the Western Highways.%—­By 1817 this migration was at its height, and in the spring of that year families set forth from almost every village and town on the seaboard.  The few that went from each place might not be missed; but when they were gathered on any one of the great roads to the West, as that across New York, or that across Pennsylvania, they made an endless procession of wagons and foot parties.

A traveler who had occasion to go from Nashville to Savannah in January, 1817, declares that on the way he fell in with crowds of emigrants from Carolina and Georgia, all bound for the cotton lands of Alabama; that he counted the flocks and wagons, and that—­carts, gigs, coaches, and wagons, all told—­there were 207 conveyances, and more than 3800 people.  At Haverhill, in Massachusetts, a train of sixteen wagons, with 120 men, women, and children, from Durham, Me., passed in one day.  They were bound for Indiana to buy a township, and were accompanied by their minister.  Within thirteen days, seventy-three wagons and 450 emigrants had passed through the same town of Haverhill.