National Museum of American History
Conestoga Wagon
September 19, 2012 – Closed 2015
Covered wagons, which enabled settlement to spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific, have long held an iconic place in the real and storied past of the American nation. Until the 1850s, Conestoga wagons helped settlers just beyond the mid-Atlantic region compete in national and even world markets. They hauled supplies and finished goods over the Allegheny Mountains and returned to Philadelphia and Baltimore with agricultural bounty from the western frontier.
