A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency
in Post-Independence Pennsylvania

Terry Bouton

Something remarkable happened in the Pennsylvania countryside in the years following the federal Constitutional Convention of 1787: large numbers of farmers closed the main roads that led into and out of their communities. During an eight-year period, fall 1787 through fall 1795, rural Pennsylvanians obstructed roads at least sixty-two times.1 The road closings were not confined to any particular county or region: farmers blocked highways in new backcountry settlements and in the established communities surrounding Philadelphia. And while road closings were more frequent in the central and frontier parts of the state, barriers appeared in roadways only twenty-five miles beyond the Quaker city. (See map.)	1
The obstructions were usually formidable, often making roads impassable for many months at a time. Throughout Pennsylvania, farmers constructed six-foot-high fences that stretched fifty feet across the highway. Some farmers felled trees across roads or hauled timber into log piles that sometimes measured thirty feet wide and forty feet long. Others blocked roads with heavy stones, brush, and decaying logs. Still others scarred roadways with eight-foot-wide, five-foot-deep ditches large enough to halt any wagon or coach. One group in the southeastern county of Chester shoveled enough dirt out of the main highway to Philadelphia that they created an impassable crater measuring fifty feet in circumference and seven feet deep. Farmers in two other eastern counties flooded roads by carving out canals to nearby waterways. On the western frontier, people dug into a hillside, causing an avalanche at a narrow passage. And on a highway in the central county of Cumberland, farmers dumped fifteen wagonloads of manure, creating a four-foot-high wall of stink.2	2
Sources: County quarter sessions court records, 1787 — 1795, for the thirteen counties whose records are complete for those years. Map by Terry Bouton.
In the late eighteenth century, when roads were lifelines for rural communities, closing any of the few highways that ran through the countryside was a serious matter. Roads brought wagons bearing spices, sugar, salt, kettles, axes, and plows to places where such necessities were not produced. They kept rural neighborhoods tied to the larger world by bringing news of grain prices, national politics, and wars in Europe, along with letters from distant relatives. They allowed farmers to take their wheat flour, corn whiskey, and livestock to market. In this way, roads brought the money that farmers needed to repay their mortgages and that artisans needed to purchase the tools of their trades. By themselves, the many petitions for new highways that Pennsylvanians drafted during the 1790s—even as they closed roads across the state—stand as a testament to how important highways were to rural people.	3
Given the significance of roadways in late-eighteenth-century America, why did farmers throughout Pennsylvania expend so much energy in obstructing highways and keeping them closed for long periods of time? Why would rural people sever lines of communication and willfully jeopardize their ability to supply their communities and get goods to market? In short, why did people so dependent upon the world outside their local neighborhoods take such extreme measures to isolate themselves?	. . .