5th. Dispatched my Waggon (with the Baggage) at day light; and at 7 Oclock followed it. Bated at one Snodgrasses, on Back Creek and dined there;1 About 5 Oclock P.M. we arrived at the Springs, or Town of Bath—after travelling the whole day through a drizling rain, 30 Miles.2
1. Robert Snodgrass ran the tavern which his father, William Snodgrass, an emigrant from Scotland, had built on Back Creek about 1740. The tavern site is near present-day Hedgesville, W.Va. ( , 25, 39).
2. Bath, despite ambitious plans for its development, had hardly changed during the war years. In the fall of 1783 Johann David Schoepf reported that it was a “little place . . . as yet in poor circumstances, made up of little, contracted, wooden cabins or houses scattered about without any order, most of them with no glass in the windows, being only summer residences” ( , 1:310). With the close of the war, a building boom had begun which would result in 164 houses being erected in four years’ time ( , 34).