Bradford Argus, Towanda, Pa.
April 30, 1868
An Old Stage Coach. -While passing down Main Street a few evenings since, our attention was attracted to an old worn-out coach, whose dilapidated condition brought back to our memory days gone by.
Its wheels were all broken, and the tires rusted, as if they would hide from view their bright faces. Those wheels whose rumble once was a sign for this gathering of all the urchins and neighborhood in front of the country Post Office are now, spoke by spoke crumbling away as if too old to jolt over the stones or skim over the hard frosty ground.
A Stage Coach is a world in itself. In former days when it rolled swiftly on its way past houses, fields, and towns, the sunburnt laborer would shade his brown face with his still browner hand and look upon its well filled seats, as if he gained renewed strength thereby.
The lean, tired horses, whose strength seemed hardly able to hold them up, but who drew its cumbersome proportions after them as if they were no heavier than a feather, no longer will have its rattle follow them as if a ghost were upon their track. The times like these have passed. The coach-and-four which came rumbling into our sleepy town and deposited its few passengers, who taking a look at our peaceful slumber, proceeded to follow suit, is now superseded by the snorting engine, which brings its crowds into our midst, which acre swallowed up by our crowded streets, as if they were but a speck.
In the days of coaches Towanda was a village, but now it is almost a city. Let us not forget that the years the old coach rumbled over our hilly roads, were the years that have built up out now prosperous and go-ahead town.
