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Happy Birthday to the National Road!
On March 29, 1806, the United States Congress authorized, and President Thomas Jefferson subsequently signed, the first law approving the construction of a federally-funded highway in the United States of America.
Annnd…not so fast.
Even back then, when the country had been in existence just a little over a quarter-century, and when one can assume the federal government was smaller and much more DOGE-y than it is today, it took some time for the bureaucrats to pull their fingers out and actually get going on the thing.
So it wasn’t until 1811 that the first contract was awarded (I can’t help wondering–given my twentieth-century perspective–if it was to someone’s relation), and the first ten miles of road were built, starting in Cumberland, Maryland. Seven years later, the “National Road” had reached its terminus a hundred-plus miles away in Wheeling, Virginia (it’s now in WV), a town which was then considered a vital gateway to the country’s Western expansion.
The process of road-building was slow and arduous. An excerpt from The National Road:
Burly axmen began the construction process by felling all trees along a clearing sixty-feet wide through the forest. They were followed by choppers, grubbers, and burners, whose work might take weeks to complete in heavily timbered sections…After grubbing, the road had to be leveled by pick-and-shovel wielding laborers. This earth-moving army cut into hillsides, flung tracks of fill across hollows, and hauled away excess earth and rock. Finally, the graders, stone crushers, and pavers laid the roadbed.
Laborers broke stones with round-headed, long-handled hammers, and sized them to fit through rings measuring seven and three inches. One Pennsylvania farmer observed workers descending “a thousand strong, with their carts, wheel-barrows, picks, shovels, and blasting tools, grading those commons, and climbing the mountainside, leaving behind them a roadway good enough for an emperor to travel over.” Indeed, construction activity dominated the local landscape, and area residents turned out in large numbers to view the work for themselves. It must have been an incredible sight to witness the large crews of men plowing, grubbing, and breaking stones for Uncle Sam’s Road.
What an achievement it was.
Over the next two decades, additional extensions to the National Road were authorized, and construction carried it into and through Ohio and Indiana, all the way to Vandalia, Illinois, where federal construction of the road was permanently ended in 1840. (It wasn’t until 1849 that the then-state of Virginia authorized the construction of the Wheeling Suspension Bridge which connected the two parts of the National Road that had been separated by the Ohio River. Prior to that time, all traffic passing through Wheeling on the National Road had to board a ferry to make the trip. From 1849 until 1851, the Wheeling Suspension Bridge was the largest in the world, although it’s had a checkered history, has collapsed more than once, and I think is currently closed to traffic. I’ve driven over it, and it is a very beautiful, if–at the moment, a rather useless–thing):
At the same time as the National Road was completing its westward-facing portions, the state of Maryland was building a state-owned toll road eastward from Cumberland to Baltimore, facilitating traffic from the East Coast port to the highway west. And–perhaps because they found the maintenance of a federal highway more expensive than they’d have liked in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century–the federal government began to sell off bits of its older sections to Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Soon, inns, taverns, and toll-houses were sprouting up left and right, and east and west, in an effort to make the Road pay for itself in ways more immediately visible to the locals than were those of the big-picture western expansion and interstate commerce objectives originally conceived by the federal government. The Road continued to play a vital role all round until the third quarter of the nineteenth century and the rise of the railroads, at which point its importance diminished, and “America’s Main Street” began to lose its position as the favored track and route for the engines and the wheels of national expansion in any form.
Today, it’s quite literally a “side road,” the one you take if you actually want to see America and stay off the Interstates and out of the truck lanes. Parts of it are still called “the National Road,” “the Cumberland Road,” “the National Pike,” or “Old Route 40,” but most don’t take much note of its place in history.
Unless you happen to live in, or near, one of its places in history. (Image from Britannica, 1916):
The original National Road came out of Cumberland, traveled through the Alleghenies northwesterly to Uniontown, PA, on to Brownsville and Washington, and then took an easterly trek all the way to Wheeling, Virginia. Along the way, it passed through the small town of Claysville, named for “the Great Compromiser” Henry Clay who, while a Kentucky senator in 1838, cast the deciding vote against continuing federal funding for the further expansion of the National Road. (In another interesting historical note, Claysville was known during the American Civil War as “Little Richmond” because of its enthusiastic support of the Confederacy–Richmond, VA being the capital of the thing–whereas West Alexander, just a few miles west, and also on the National Road, was reputedly a stop for escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad. The familial divisions in the area still run wide and deep.)
The first time I ever drove through Claysville and its roughly three blocks long National Road Main Street, probably in 1985, I was charmed to be greeted by a sign upon entering that advertised the services of “Marshall Little, Dentist,” and–a breath or two later upon leaving–another one promoting the services of “Fred D. Large, Doctor.” Sadly, neither Dr. Little nor Dr. Large is still with us. (I’m including the links here, just in case you think I made this up.)
I never met Dr. Little, but Dr. Large was a total lovebug and a real character. He was discharged as a Lt. Col. from the US Army Medical Corps after WWII, and–in addition to his solo medical practice–served as the mayor of Claysville for almost three decades. The hospital I worked for bought his practice together with his accounts receivable (I think it was the last time we did that) and we spent quite some time trying to square his accounting methods into the new system. Since he was often paid in honey, pigs, bacon, and chickens, this was harder than you might think.
But I digress. It’s the first time ever, I promise you!
Back to the National Road. (Happy Birthday, BTW.)
The part of Pennsylvania where I live is full of National Road history. There are the aforementioned Uniontown (in neighboring Fayette County) and Brownsville (right here in Washington County). Dear Lord, I hope there are no photos anywhere on the Internet of Ricochet She, a dues-paying National Grange member, dressed up like Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn in the Grecian Urn tableau; performing for the masses at the PA State Grange meeting at the State Theater in Uniontown in what must have been about 1989. 🤣
Then there is Scenery Hill, a charming village with an historic inn and restaurant. West Alexander enjoyed a couple of decades as something of a destination for historic ambience and shops in the 1980s and 1990s, although–like many others–it’s fallen on hard times since. Ditto, Washington, which has fallen victim to many of the societal ills that are visited upon small towns in the United States, but which struggles to overcome them and which has, over the past decade, embarked on a thriving and historic rye whiskey distillery revival.
Then, there’s Claysville.
When the late Mr. She and I moved into a field a couple of miles away and started digging a hole to contain the house foundation, Claysville was still a bustling little town. There was the enormous Sprowls Country Hardware, where you could buy anything from tractor parts to bedding, or from well pumps to lounge chairs. There was the super-useful Campsey’s Seed and Feed. And Gashel’s supermarket and meat market, whose primary claim to fame was the excellent local butcher shop at the back of the store. It was only after we moved out here–decades after the fact–that I found out that Gashel’s delivered to the very butcher shop where (probably in the early 1970s) Dad persuaded Mr. Myers to provision him with a pig’s head so that Dad–a butcher’s son himself–could cook up, in the best sense of the words, the centerpiece for a Hogmanay party:
All gone now.
But the buildings remain. Here’s a rather substantial one:
I like the carved inscription across the entablature: The National Bank of Claysville. Proof, if any such were needed, that this was once an important town. (Washington County, PA, was, for a time in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the largest producer of sheep and wool in the United States.)
Then, just down the National Road a bit from me in the other direction, is the Claysville S-Bridge.
“S” Bridges were a regular feature of the National Road and were designed to cope with frequent creek and stream crossings. Since–given the irregular terrain of the Eastern United States–one could never guarantee that the creek or stream would present itself at clear right angles to the best trajectory for the road, the builders put the bridge perpendicular to the stream and then adjusted the road’s entrance and exit ramps to what was usually a one-lane bridge accordingly, thus forming a shallow “S” shape when the whole thing was viewed from above. This had the additional benefit of allowing the builders to create an “apron” at either end, which facilitated the flow of traffic by allowing potential crossers to line up to go next.
Here are a few photos I took earlier today:
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One of the things I do like about living in this part of the world is that my neighbors share a love of, and a respect for, history with me. Thus, we’re all very clear about the pronunciation of the name of the road which originates at the Claysville S Bridge.
It’s “Ess Bridge Road.”
Outlanders, and those who make their way here by listening to the narrator on Google Maps, are easy to spot. They think that–in order to get here–they have to traverse “South Bridge Road.” LOL.
I wish there were more history left in full view than there sometimes seems to be. Many in this neck of the woods are doing their best to revive it. There’s the annual National Road Pike Days Festival. The Whiskey Rebellion Festival. The Covered Bridge Festival. The Running of the Wools. And much, much more.
Please check out, and support, similar efforts in your community. Only by respecting our history and keeping it alive can we 1) keep the current mess in perspective; and 2) pass along our values to future generations.
In January, my wife and I moved to Martins Ferry, Ohio, across the river from Wheeling, WV. I drive on the National Road regularly (and signage marks it by that name.)
I grew up on the National Road, but never gave much thought to its eastward origination.
Madonna of the Trail
The DAR placed a number of these statues along the National Road in commemoration, and one happens to be in my hometown.
Great post, thanks.
I’m most familiar with Route 40 (and Interstate 68 and 70) moving west from Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland. I still find the view of the Cumberland Gap thrilling even at 70mph.
Did Jefferson spend all the money allocated for the road?
Later: I guess so, seeing as Clay acted to block more funding later.
That is interesting. Do these divisions express themselves in party alignment these days? If so, which is which?
This old highway engineer really enjoyed your post. Colonial methods sounded not too far from what must have been employed by the Romans. I also enjoyed the map showing the roads going down through the Valley of Virginia. I remember long hot trips by car as a kid going to visit the grandparents. Only millionaires had AC in those days. Winchester was a place I longed to get to because it was where we usually stopped for lunch. For me lunch was a hot dog with brown mustard on a toasted bun. Maybe by then we were far enough south to get Dr. Pepper. You couldn’t get it up north then. It seemed so much better than it is now. From there it was on to Staunton, Natural Bridge and at last Roanoke.
I’m not sure if it shows up in party alignment. Although I think it’s fair to say that the majority of my neighbors (Claysville) are firmly in the Trump camp there are enough that aren’t–even among the very old timers with several generations in play–to make generalization difficult. It tends to show up in conversations about families one knows are related, but whose relationships are denied by both sides for reasons unspecified, but with some dark muttering ensuing therefrom. It’s not all that many generations back, after all.
Although my family history is Brit-centered, my great-granny was born in 1869, only four years after the US Civil War ended, and she died 1968, when I was fourteen, so I remember her very clearly. And there’s a fair amount of animus between and among certain sides in my own family going back at least that far.
I think it was all spent developing a website.
The Claysville S Bridge passes over Buffalo Creek. The several small streams and springs on my little property decant into a slightly larger waterway which meanders along, picking up a few more small tributaries as it goes, until about half a mile away, down at the end of my road, it pours into that same Buffalo Creek.
Buffalo Creek then flows westward to Wellsburg, WV, where it empties into the Ohio River.
And the Ohio River travels south to Wheeling, and on for several hundred more miles, forming a few state borders along the way until just south of Cairo, Illinois, where it meets the mighty Mississippi.
That’s why I like to (fancifully) refer to the little streams that pour down my hill as The Headwaters of the Mississippi.
Well, if we’re going to get into cross-country roads, I’ll stick my oar in for The Bankhead Highway, authorized in 1916 as the first transcontinental automobile highway (Washington, D.C. to San Diego, California). The Bankhead Highway passes through my little town of Weatherford in north-central Texas, and is still identified by that name as it does so.
And the more commonly thought of U.S. Highway 66 (“Route 66”) from Chicago to Santa Monica (California), originally passed through our son’s town of Los Lunas, New Mexico before it was rerouted on a more northerly path through Albuquerque (about 25 miles to the north). The small town museum in Los Lunas keeps some photos and other memorabilia associated with the 1930s when Route 66 passed through the town.
There are a few museums in western Texas and eastern New Mexico along Interstate 40 (which largely supplanted U.S. 66) that try to keep the memory of U.S. 66 alive. And a couple of original motels in Albuquerque maintain their U.S. 66 connections.
Back in the 1990s I was a traveling E-Commerce consultant working at an Electric Commerce Resource Center in Palestine, TX. Our territory included Oklahoma. One time I went to Miami Oklahoma in the northeast corner of the state. There was a strip of the Route 66 just north of the town. Local tourist information stated it had the original pavement from when it was first built. For grins, in the evening after I was done with work, I went to see it. It was narrow for a two lane, and had curbs. I drove it for a mile or so, just because.
Well, this is a really enjoyable thread. So time to spoil it!:)
Route 40 just outside of Frederick MD heading west to Boonsboro and Hagerstown has something known as The Golden Mile. It is a very long stretch of strip malls, hotels, fast food joints, and . . . just about everything.
Aware of being the butt of jokes from the insensitive, something called The Golden Mile Alliance was formed as a support mechanism. In support of The Golden Mile, I give a list of the current businesses.
Yes, it’s quite awful. There’s something similar when approaching Pittsburgh from the East on the William Penn Highway, although it’s past its sell-by date now: Its heyday was in the 1950s through the 70s sometime and it was was known as the “Miracle Mile.” The current version is nothing like the original, which was anchored by a cocktail lounge and restaurant whose name escapes me at the moment, at which everyone who was anyone in popular entertainment performed at one time or another.
Just about my only truck with Frederick, MD has been due to the huge annual Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival which is held about 25 miles down the road in West Friendship. I exhibited and sold there for several years, and often ended up staying in Frederick, because there wasn’t anywhere available closer by for a decent price.
UPDATE: The Holiday House! I googled “frank sinatra monroeville,” because I was sure he’d have performed there, and sure enough….
Online survey and DEI consultants.
I’ve spent lots of time in Frederick–probably more than advisable. Hood College (all women back in the day) was an attractant, as were all things Barbara Fritchie (see John Greenleaf Whittier), whom Ogden Nash also memorialized:
We used to call it Fredneck before the arts and crafts folk discovered it. I preferred the former for music and general rowdiness.
The Beer Corner LLC. May have to check it out on our next trip through there.
Another terrific article, She.
Now, you are going to have to educate us on what in tarnation a Hogmanay party is.
There were some Constitutional objections that had to be overcome first, but Jefferson had already broken the ice on that with the Louisiana Purchase, which was the beginning of our downfall. It has been picking up speed ever since.
I’ve ridden on some small portions of the National Road in eastern Indiana and eastern Illinois, but that’s about it.
I’m pretty sure Wellsburg gets its name from the same Wells family whose name has been on several editions of Wells Hall at Michigan State University. The Michigan Wells was a leader of the Abraham Lincoln for President movement in Michigan. He (or his father) was a friend of Philander Chase, the founder of Kenyon College, when Chase left Kenyon in a huff and came to Michigan to found a new college at the time of the Black Hawk War scare. The site of that short-lived seminary is now a farm, just a half mile down the road from an old brick school, behind which a local guy tried to bury his murdered wife back in 1990. The grandfather of the Michigan Wells was at the time of the Whiskey Rebellion a whiskey distiller somewhere in She’s backyard or thereabouts, but doesn’t seem to have been one of the Whiskey Rebels.
Fascinating tidbits of information, as there are in many of the comments here. Thanks, all!
Hogmanay is the seeing out of the old year in Scotland, and its date is (unsurprisingly) December 31. Its best-known tradition in the English speaking world is probably the singing of–yes–Auld Lang Syne at the stroke of midnight. It goes along with another Scottish tradition, that of “first-footing,” which says that the first person to cross a home’s threshold after midnight at the change of year will bring good luck and gifts with him. I can’t say it ever worked for me (at least once it has had the opposite effect), but you never know….
Many years ago we were friends with a couple in which the husband was a Scotsman. One year he decided to throw a Hogmanay party. It was memorable. The centerpiece on the table was, as is quite traditional, the “boar’s head.” The head itself had all the bones removed, and was stuffed and reshaped with a sausage-like filling. The ears were shaped and tied round a couple of carrots. At this point, the thing was wrapped in cheesecloth, lowered into a vat and steamed for hours.
When it had cooled, Dad unwrapped, it, removed the carrots, and applied several coats of aspic glaze, making it shiny, and preventing it from drying out. The decorative piping was a butter mixture, and the tusks were carved from coconut. The final bit of the presentation was to put a lemon in his mouth. You slice it, starting from the back and moving forward.
Dad, who was a ferociously good cook also cured a ham, and did several platters of sausages. My mother (who was neither a willing, nor a particularly competent or inventive, cook) complained about the mess and the smell of it all in the kitchen for weeks.
Fascinating. I didn’t know nothing about no National Road, I thought it all began before WWII with the Interstate Highway System and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, not almost 150 years earlier.
I think I have so very many good memories of activities along that route. From hiking most of the C&O canal as a young scout, then later biking that path up into West Virginia as a teen. As an adult leader taking my boys when they were in Scouting with various activities in Cumberland, crossing Keyser Ridge, seeing the Falling Waters house, camping next to, and riding down the Cheat River, and visiting various cave attractions located on the west side of the Alleghenies (heck I even spent a evening the ER at Union Town with a severe gastrointestinal event that later got me moved to Pittsburg while on one of those scouting excursions). While not exactly on the east west Rt 40 corridor that She is citing, I spending many miles hiking the Appalachian trail with my boys which crosses Rt 40 at old South Mountain Inn.
I regularly drive thru that region on my annual trip to Oshkosh Wisconsin following I 70 to I 68 then back up to I 70 then out to and around Chicago.
Pretty country, with lots of history, lots of good personal memories (but not the trip to the ER).
More on the “Madonna of the Trail” statues that accompany US 40 into Colorado and then their trace heads south to complete the westward journey via the Santa Fe Trail: https://pioneermonuments.net/highlighted-monuments/madonna-of-the-trail/
I grew up three blocks from Route 40, and the college I went to is near it on the other side of the state, the same college my Dad attended. He’d put on a suit and hitchhike home along 40 in the late 50’s, early 60’s. The three cities it passes through in Indiana (Richmond, Indianapolis, Terre Haute) have downtowns built around it. Indianapolis’s Monument Circle, the true center of the city, is the block immediately north of 40 (Washington Street in Indy) with US 31 intersecting via the circle.
Edit: I should have included Greenfield and Plainfield as cities on 40, but, in my defense, they weren’t the sprawling suburbs of Indianapolis they’ve become when they were considering where to place the statue. Honorable mention to Brazil, Indiana as well, and my old college pal Stace and his family’s third-generation roofing business (located right on Route 40).
Okay, so the bucket-list road trips I now have to plan for my wife and I:
If we decide to buy a boat, then I guess we’ll also have to sail the Great Loop.
I loathe the PA Turnpike (“America’s First Superhighway”) with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns. First off, I’ve had the opportunity to drive it one way or the other, from its westernmost point at the Ohio Turnpike handoff in Lawrence County PA, to its eastern endpoint at the Delaware River, crossing into New Jersey, more times than I care to count.
And while Pennsylvania is–across much of its expanse–a lovely state, the Turnpike is an ugly, old, pothole-ridden highway that has not improved with the times, and about which the most positive thing that can be said of it is that it’s a prolific exhibitor of the state flower–the orange traffic cone–and that other easily-recognized state emblem, the orange traffic barrel. In addition, for a considerable portion of its length, there’s no median strip, not even one which was lucky enough to be planted with native flora in a Fit of Enthusiasm by Lady Bird Johnson somewhere in the mid 1960s. So the whole thing is just an unpleasant slog from start to finish. (The late Mr. She was fond of remarking–in this case in the Interstate-70 context–that even a blind driver would have been able to spot the moment he entered Pennsylvania from either West Virginia or Maryland on I-70, because of the change (and not in a positive sense) in road surface. The same is true of the turnpike system.)
No longer does the PA Turnpike Commission have the power to park, in the form of grace-and-favor positions, summer jobs in the Turnpike toll booths for young relations of state lawmakers, as the state has progressed to electronic monitoring of who’s going where (via license plate scanning) and they bill one–at a much higher rate than previously–accordingly.
I’m not bitter.
Interstate 80 (also crossing East-West across Pennsylvania, north of the Turnpike) isn’t a picnic either, as it’s basically the truck route for all the heavy traffic that doesn’t want to pay state turnpike tolls.
My fondest memories of trips across Pennsylvania are those involving the “back roads,” those which were once major highways in their own right, but which have fallen out of favor in past decades because they’re just not fast enough to suit the moderns. Sometimes, the Family She would split the difference, travelling on the superhighways just until we could get off, and then we’d mosey around until we found the real America.
A favorite memory of such a thing (family visitations to the east being what they were) would regularly take place in Shartlesville PA , where there were some lovely Pennsylvania Dutch family restaurants, and–just a couple of minutes down the road, Roadside America, a lifelong fascination for the late Mr. She, and one he was eager to pass down to the next generation.
Roadside America is gone now. Perhaps it was a casualty of COVID. Perhaps that was just an excuse.
But I’ll never forget the days on the model railroad, from the coming up of the sun until its going down. Or the chills down my spine or the tears in my eyes, at nightfall. Where the hell is Kate Smith when we need her? (Note to the wise or the unwary: She’s not nearly as prevalent on YouTube as she used to be, because, reasons.)
God Bless America.
Perhaps the best roundup of the spirit of the place these days can be found here:
https://theopenroadahead.com/2018/07/24/roadside-america/
PS: The experience recounted above may have inspired (from about 1978 onwards) my passion for collecting cookbooks from every place I’ve ever visited, in the US and worldwide. This one:
is a modest little paperback number which contains the recipe for a very simple potato soup which the family enjoyed at an inn in Shartlesville one year. If you’re fond of cooking, this is both a fun pursuit, and an easy way to remember your travels.
Pretty sure the family visited this road side memory sometime in the mid 60’s when dad was regularly supporting S/C components testing at GE Valley Forge, and we would do the scenic trip crossing Manhattan from Long Island cutting into PA then heading south. I have recollections of the seeing the miniature village, but until your post I never knew where it was…
If my post has enlivened, or resuscitated, a family memory on your account, then I’ve done my job!
Ah, the PA Turnpike, the highway responsible for the longest road delay I ever experienced of the 14 countries I’ve driven in.
In the early 1980s, before cell phones but in the age of CB radio, I drove from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and spent 4.5 hours parked on the Turnpike due to an 18-wheeler filled with bananas overturning miles ahead of us. That’s what I heard from a fellow delayee, at least, but there were contradictory reports that in fact two 18-wheelers had overturned. It turned into a very social occasion—people walking around and chatting with their neighbors, strangers sharing food, children playing games, old-timers dragging folding chairs out of their cars and relaxing beside the road—everyone patient and pleasant and civil. As always, I had a book with me so was quite happy to sit back and read. Eventually we moved off, but despite looking closely for evidence of the cause of our enormous delay I saw nothing on or beside the road that might have explained it. One of life’s mysteries.
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For me, the biggest benefit of getting an E-ZPass transponder was never thereafter having to interact with the toll-both lady at the Norristown exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike who had luridly decorated fingernails, so long they curled and bent in odd directions away from the plane of her extended fingers. For a year or two I saw her often on work-related trips, but never without feeling dread at having to place money into her disgusting, repellent claws or receive from them change or a receipt. The stuff of nightmares, but E-ZPass put an end to it forever, and I’m grateful for that.
Another good read about the US highway system is ” American Road”. Post WWI, the US Army decided to drive cross country to see how well the American road system would work in case of invasion or mobilization. A young (Captain or Lieutenant, can’t remember which) Dwight D. Eisenhower was part of the group. They mostly followed the Lincoln Highway. Another early attempt to have a cross country highway.