Wagons would have been useless to the first settlers of the Genesee Country because there were no roads. If somehow the Yankee emigrants on their exodus from the stony hillsides of New England rode as far as Schenectady, N.Y., in wagons, they rode them no further. From that jumping-off place, they would travel either by water or over old Indian trails by packhorse.

As more settlers arrived, the old Iroquois trails were cleared of underbrush and widened sufficiently to permit the passage of an ox-drawn cart or sledge. During the 1790s, these primitive roads were gradually upgraded and new ones were surveyed and built.

There was work for the wagonmaker in the Genesee Country. He was not far behind the blacksmith in setting up shop in the larger villages, often locating near the smith on whom he depended for iron tires for his wagon wheels and iron runners for the sleighs and bobsleds he made. The blacksmith might make minor wagon repairs, but the skills of the wagonmaker/wheelwright were required to mend a broken wheel.

The settler's initial demand was an ox-cart, rather than a wagon. A two-wheeled cart was more maneuverable over and around stumps and boulders in newly cleared fields — only one pair of wheels to manage and protect. If the pioneer had not brought such an indispensable vehicle with him, the wagonmaker could make him one. Then, in time, as his fortunes progressed, the farmer could go to the wagonmaker for a 4-wheeled wagon — to be horse-drawn to and from the fields and back and forth to the village. The farm wagon was so constructed to permit the box to be lifted from its wheeled undercarriage and mounted upon a pair of bobsleds. Heavy loads could then be easily moved over frozen fields and roads during the winter.

The wheels of a farm wagon were of such a height to enable it to clear furrowed harvest-fields, the outcroppings of bumpy meadows, rough and rutted lanes, and gateways trodden deep in mud by cattle. But they should not be of too great a diameter lest the box be too high for pitching hay onto it or for loading sacks from it onto a man's shoulders. Necessity shaped the requirements for the wheels, shafts, axles, carriages, boxes — everything. The American farm wagon at its evolutionary best was a useful and portable example of folk art — carrying, in addition to the farmer and his cargo, a distinctive beauty in which form followed function.