Goshen Road - History

History

The Goshen Road started as a natural, or pioneer, trace: a route that was used by Native Americans and migrating animals. The road was not a definite, marked out path. It was, rather, a collection of vague, parallel paths that crossed, shifting with the season and over the years.

Eventually the demand for salt solidified the road's importance. "The builders of Goshen Road looked east, striving toward a place where they could obtain their necessity - salt," wrote historian Barbara Burr Hubbs. Salt was one of the dearest commodities that early settlers had and one of the most difficult to obtain. Settlers at Goshen at one time bought it eagerly for $9 a barrel. Hubbs explains further:

"In the east beyond the Ohio, men looked west, striving toward new homes and better living . . . The Goshen Road funneled new residents into Illinois Territory at such a rate, its citizens became ambitious to have a state. They came by horse-drawn wagons, by two-wheeled ox-carts; they rode horses and donkeys and 'shank's mares;' they pushed wheelbarrows and carried their wealth on their backs. But they came and many stayed. Not all went the length of the road, but in 1818 when a census was taken to determine whether the Illinois population was sufficient for statehood, settlers lined the old route. It was a belt settlement from the Ohio at Shawneetown to the Mississippi at Alton . . . All across the state the generation whose fathers had traveled the Goshen Road blessed the men of Goshen who needed salt and built a road."

John Reynolds, later Governor of Illinois, adds, "In the fall of 1808 a wagon road was laid off from Goshen settlement to the Ohio River salt works which in olden times was called The Goshen Road." The southern stretch of the road was permanently laid out in an interesting way to find a direct route without surveying. They led a mare a day's journey away from her foal - then turned her loose. Rough blazes were cut on trees as the mare took the instinctive straightest course back to her foal.