The economic condition of the small farmer was totally different.  His crops were not big enough to warrant direct connection with English factors or the personal maintenance of a corps of artisans.  He needed local markets, and they sprang up to meet the need.  Smiths, hatters, weavers, wagon-makers, and potters at neighboring towns supplied him with the rough products of their native skill.  The finer goods, bought by the rich planter in England, the small farmer ordinarily could not buy.  His wants were restricted to staples like tea and sugar, and between him and the European market stood the merchant.  His community was therefore more self-sufficient than the seaboard line of great plantations.  It was more isolated, more provincial, more independent, more American.  The planter faced the Old East.  The farmer faced the New West.

=The Westward Movement.=—­Yeoman and planter nevertheless were alike in one respect.  Their land hunger was never appeased.  Each had the eye of an expert for new and fertile soil; and so, north and south, as soon as a foothold was secured on the Atlantic coast, the current of migration set in westward, creeping through forests, across rivers, and over mountains.  Many of the later immigrants, in their search for cheap lands, were compelled to go to the border; but in a large part the path breakers to the West were native Americans of the second and third generations.  Explorers, fired by curiosity and the lure of the mysterious unknown, and hunters, fur traders, and squatters, following their own sweet wills, blazed the trail, opening paths and sending back stories of the new regions they traversed.  Then came the regular settlers with lawful titles to the lands they had purchased, sometimes singly and sometimes in companies.

In Massachusetts, the westward movement is recorded in the founding of Springfield in 1636 and Great Barrington in 1725.  By the opening of the eighteenth century the pioneers of Connecticut had pushed north and west until their outpost towns adjoined the Hudson Valley settlements.  In New York, the inland movement was directed by the Hudson River to Albany, and from that old Dutch center it radiated in every direction, particularly westward through the Mohawk Valley.  New Jersey was early filled to its borders, the beginnings of the present city of New Brunswick being made in 1681 and those of Trenton in 1685.  In Pennsylvania, as in New York, the waterways determined the main lines of advance.  Pioneers, pushing up through the valley of the Schuylkill, spread over the fertile lands of Berks and Lancaster counties, laying out Reading in 1748.  Another current of migration was directed by the Susquehanna, and, in 1726, the first farmhouse was built on the bank where Harrisburg was later founded.  Along the southern tier of counties a thin line of settlements stretched westward to Pittsburgh, reaching the upper waters of the Ohio while the colony was still under the Penn family.