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Lehigh-Susquehanna Turnpike


The Lausanne–Nescopeck Turnpike or Susquehanna & Lehigh Turnpike (1804–1840s) also mentioned often as the Lehigh–Susquehanna Turnpike (or Lehigh & Susquehanna Turnpike) and opened in 1805 was a highly profitable foot traffic toll road established during the earliest days of the American canal age—one of the many privately funded road (and transport infrastructure) projects established after the 1890s in the first years of the young United States era to open up and promote growth along either side of the American Frontiers by building connecting transport infrastructure. To the new Homesteader, a road meant a way to send excess product east for monies, a way to buy necessaries and desired goods to ease the strains of a hard life. The needs of the easterners left behind were for foods, raw materials, while to the manufacturing industrialists, the settlers represented a market in need of their wares. Both needed a way to convey their respective needs, and the manifold ways such needs are slaked are what makes commerce superior to barter.

Like many others of the era, the toll road consisted generally of improvements along the path of an ancient Susquehannock Amerindian trail traveling generally south-southeast to north-northwest across the parallel barrier ridges and steep valleys in the Ridge and Valley Appalachians connecting the center waters of the Lehigh River valley on the opposite shore from the Lehigh Gorge exit to Nescopeck, Pennsylvania (and Berwick on the opposite shore of the (Main Branch) Susquehanna River. Ultimately Berwick to Tioga & Elmira, New York would be connected via the Susquehanna & Tioga Turnpike which was purpose built to provide communication from the cities and towns along the Delaware River including communities in New Jersey and Delaware in the Delaware Valley and Philadelphia and Buffalo, New York


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