What’s the talk mainly about?

About 200 years ago, the United States economy was growing quickly, mainly because of a booming trade in grain and cotton. This trade in grain and cotton went on in areas near or at the coast, or near navigable rivers. It took place there because it was so expensive to transport goods over the roads that existed. They were muddy, narrow, and hard to travel on. At that time, don’t forget there was only one continuous road that existed in the US, and it was made up of north to south local country roads, linked together to get one long road. Within a short time, the first east-to-west roads were built. They were called turnpikes. Private companies built these roads, and collected fees from all vehicles traveled on them. Eventually, a network of dirt, gravel or plank roadways connected some major cities and towns. But even these turnpike roads were still very slow, and traveling on them was too costly for farmers. They would spend more money to move their crops than they got by selling them. So, we see that even with some major improvement in roadways, farmers still had to rely on rivers to move their crops to markets.