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.