Ohio History Journal

THE OLD NATIONAL ROAD-THE HISTORIC

HIGHWAY OF AMERICA.*

 

BY ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT.

 

I.

 

"THE MIDDLE AGE."

"The middle ages had their wars and agonies, but

also their intense delights. Their gold was dashed with

blood, but ours is sprinkled with dust. Their life was

intermingled with white and purple; ours is one seam-

less stuff of brown." - RUSKIN.

A person can not live in the American central west and be

acquaintance with the generation which greets the new century

with feeble hand and dimmed eye without realizing that there

has been a time which, compared with to-day, seems as the Middle

Ages did to the England to which Ruskin wrote-when "life

was intermingled with white and purple."

The western boy, born to a feeble republic-mother with

exceeding suffering in those days which "tried men's souls,"

grew up as all boys grow up. For a long and doubtful period

the young west grew slowly and changed appearance gradually.

Then, suddenly, it started from its slumbering, and, in two

decades, could hardly have been recognized as the infant which,

in 1787, looked forward to a precarious and doubtful future. The

boy has grown into the man in the century, but the changes of the

last half are not, perhaps, so marked as those of the first, when

a wilderness was suddenly transformed into a number of imperial

commonwealths.

When this west was in its teens and began suddenly outstrip-

ping itself, to the marvel of the world, one of the momentous

factors in its progress was the building of a great National

Road, from the Potomac river to the Mississippi river, by the

 

* Copyrighted 1901, by Archer Butler Hulbert.

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United States Government - a highway seven hundred miles in

length, at a cost of seven millions of treasure. This ribbon of

road, winding its way through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio,

Indiana and Illinois, toward the Mississippi, was one of the most

important steps in that movement of national expansion which

followed the conquest of the west. It is probably impossible for

us to realize fully what it meant to this west when that vanguard

of surveyors came down the western slopes of the Alleghanies,

hewing a thoroughfare which should, in one generation,

bind distant and half-acquainted states together in bonds of com-

mon interest, sympathy and ambition. Until that day travelers

spoke of "going into" and "coming out of" the west as though

it were a Mammoth Cave. Such were the herculean difficulties

of travel that it was commonly said, despite the dangers of life

in the unconquered land, if pioneers could live to get into the

west, nothing could, thereafter, daunt them. The growth and

prosperity of the west was impossible, until the dawning of such

convictions as those which made the National Road a reality.

But if it meant something to the wilderness of the west,

how much more it meant to the east-opening for its posses-

sion the richest garden on the planet, the four million square miles

in the Mississippi basin. For this same prize two great powers

of the old world had yearned and fought. France and England

had studded the west with forts, and their arms had been reflected

in every stream from Presque Isle to the Holston, but neither

of them could conquer the Alleghanies. A century had proven

that the west could not be held by water ways. The question,

then, was, could it be held by land approaches? The ringing of

woodmen's axes, the clinking of surveyors' chains, the rattle of

tavern signs and the rumble of stage coach wheels, thundered

the answer - Yes!

So patriotic and so thoroughly American is the central west

to-day, that it is also difficult to realize by what a slender thread

it hung to the fragile republic east of the mountains, during the

two decades succeeding the Revolutionary war. The whole world

looked upon the east and west as realms distinct as Italy

and France, and for the same geographical reason. It looked

for a partition of the alleged "United States" among the powers

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as confidently as we to-day look for the partition of China, and

for identically similar reasons. England and France and Spain

had their well defined "spheres of influence," and the populated

and flourishing center of the then west, Kentucky, became, and

was for a generation, a hotbed of their wily emissaries. Through

all those years, when Burr and others "played fast and loose with

conspiracy," the loyalty of the west was far less sure than one can

easily believe. The building of the National Road was, undoubt-

edly, one of the influences which secured the west to the Union,

and the population which at once poured into the Ohio valley

undoubtedly saved the western states in embryo from greater

perils, even, than those they had known.

This road, conceived in the brain of Albert Gallatin, took its

inception in 1806, when commissioners to report on the project

were appointed by President Jefferson. In 1811 the first con-

tract was let for ten miles of the road west of Cumberland,

Maryland, which was its eastern terminus. The road was opened

to the Ohio river in 1818.

In a moment's time an army of emigrants and pioneers were

en route to the west over the great highway, regiment following

regiment as the years advanced. Squalid cabins, where the hunter

had lived beside the primeval thoroughfare, were pressed into

service as taverns. Indian fords, where the water had oft run

red with blood in border frays, were spanned with solid bridges.

Ancient towns, which had been comparatively unknown to the

world, but which were of sufficient commercial magnetism to

attract the great road to them, became, on the morrow, cities of

consequence in the world. As the century ran into its second

and third decades the National Road received an increasingly

heterogeneous population. Wagons of all descriptions, from the

smallest to the great "mountain ships" which creaked down the

mountain sides and groaned off into the setting sun, formed a

marvelous frieze upon it. Fast expresses, too realistically per-

haps called "shakeguts," tore along through valley and over hill

with important messages of state. Here, the broad highway

was blocked with herds of cattle trudging eastward to the

markets, or westward to the meadow lands beyond the mountains.

Gay coaches of four and six horses, whose worthy drivers were

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known by name even to the statesmen who were often their pas-

sengers, rolled on to the hospitable taverns where the company

reveled. At night, along the roadway, gypsy fires flickered in

the darkness, where wandering minstrels and jugglers crept to

show their art, while in the background crowded traders, huck-

sters, peddlers, soldiery, showmen and beggars-all picturesque

pilgrims on the nation's great highway.

It is a fair question whether our western civilization is more

wonderful for the rapidity with which new things under the sun

are discovered, or for the rapidity with which it can forget men

and things to-day which were indispensable yesterday. The era

of the National Road was succeeded in a half a century by that

of the railway, and a great thoroughfare, which was the pride

and mainstay of a civilization, has almost passed from human

recollection. A few ponderous stone bridges and a long line

of sorry looking mile-posts mark the famous highway of our

middle age from the network of cross-roads which now meet it

at every step. Scores of proud towns, which were thriving cen-

tres of a transcontinental trade, have dwindled into comparative

insignificance, while the clanging of rusty signs on their ancient

tavern posts tell, with inexpressible pathos, that

"There hath passed away a glory from the earth."

 

II.

 

THE WASHINGTON AND BRADDOCK ROADS.

In considering the rise and fall of the National Road, it is

necessary to describe briefly the three great routes from the east

to the west which served before its building, and particularly

the historic route upon which it was itself built.

It was for the buffalo, carrying a weight of a thousand pounds

and capable of covering two hundred miles a day, to mark out

the first continental highways of America. The buffalo's needs -

change of climate, new feeding grounds and fresher salt licks -

demanded thoroughfares. His weight demanded that they should

be stable, and his ability to cover great distances, that they should

be practicable. But one such course was open for passage for

the buffalo, and that on the summits of the hills. From the

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hilltops the water was shed most quickly, making that the dryest

land; from the hilltops the snows of winter were quickest blown,

lessening the dangers of drifted banks and dangerous erosions.

There were three great routes of the buffalo from the sea-

board to the central west; first, through northern New York;

second, through southern Virginia and Kentucky; third, through

northwestern Maryland and southwestern Pennsylvania.

Route one was practically the present course of the New York

Central railway. It was the old overland route on the lakes.

Route two ran southwest, through Virginia, between the

Alleghanies and Blue Ridge, and turned westward through Cum-

berland Gap. This old route of the buffaloes was first marked

out for white man's use by Daniel Boone, who was engaged in

1774 to mark out a road to lands in Kentucky purchased from

the aborigines by the Transylvania Company. This route through

the Gap became known as the Wilderness Road. Kentucky took

up the matter of improving and guarding the Wilderness Road

in 1793, a year after her admission into the Union. The two

main thoroughfares of Kentucky were along buffalo "traces";

one, diverging on Rockcastle creek, led to the Blue Grass country,

where Lexington was built, (Boone's route); another led to

Harrodsburg, Danville and Louisville, and westward to Vin-

cennes and St. Louis on the Mississippi (Logan's route).

Route three was a course from the Potomac to the Ohio

river, marked for the first Ohio Company, before the French

and Indian War by Nemacolin, a Delaware Indian. It was later

the general course of Washington's road and of Braddock's

road -the first great road built westward.

Each of these three routes found its terminus on a body of

water; the first at Buffalo on Lake Ontario, the second at St.

Louis on the Mississippi, the third at Pittsburg on the Ohio.

As for the Indians and whites they were merely portage paths.

The fact that when men ascended these American streams to

the portages, and found there already deeply worn, trails of

the buffalo, is interesting evidence that the brute had found the

great continental paths of least resistance (least elevation) with

marvelous accuracy. This must be judged one of the most won-

derful exhibitions of the utilitarianism of animal instinct. If

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the proposed great highway from the Atlantic to the Pacific is

built, wherever there is need of careful choice of route, it will

inevitably follow the general alignment of a buffalo trace.

Each of these three American continental routes were of the

utmost importance at one time or another. The first great tide

of immigration which set westward went largely over Boone's

blazed road through Cumberland Gap. Later the Wilderness

Road was eclipsed by the National Road, which served until the

mountains were spanned by the railways. The most northerly

route, through the state of New York, the least used and known

of the three, will probably entirely eclipse its southern rivals in

importance in the days to come. This route became well known

in the days of lake and land emigrations to the west. Hundreds

of pioneers of the Connecticut Western Reserve went up this

old route to Buffalo and passed on westward, traveling along

the beach of Lake Erie.

The course of the buffalo through Maryland and Pennsyl-

vania to the Ohio is the most historic route in America, and one

of the most famous in the world. Undoubtedly the route of the

buffalo and Indian were identical, for at least the length of the

portage between Cumberland on the Potomac and Brownsville

(Redstone Old Fort) on the Monangahela river. This was prob-

ably the main traveled path. From it, however, diverged (on

the summit of Laurel Hill) what was, undoubtedly, the original

buffalo trace, which coursed in a northwesterly direction toward

the site of Pittsburg on the Ohio river.

This trace of the buffalo and portage path of the Indian

from the headwaters of the Potomac to the headwaters of the

Youghiogany had no name of which record has been made, until

it took the name of a Delaware Indian, Nemacolin, who first

"blazed it" for white man's use. In 1749 a company of Virginia

gentlemen received from the King of England a grant of land

in the "Ohio country," on condition that they would settle it

within seven years. The first two necessary duties of the com-

pany were quickly undertaken. Christopher Gist, a reliable moun-

taineer, was sent into the Ohio valley to pick out the land for the

pioneers of the company, and a Captain Michael Cresap, who

lived on the upper Potomac, was entrusted with the work of

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marking out a road thither - " to lay out and mark a road from

Cumberland to Pittsburg."l The road to the Ohio had already

been laid out for centuries, but it was not "marked." Cresap

employed Nemacolin to "blaze" the old route.

Thus at the middle of the eighteenth century, as the curtain

of one of the greatest dramas in history was about to rise, a

line of gashed trees led into the west, for the possession of which,

the two enemies, France and England, were about to transfer

their immemorial war to the new continent.

To those who love to look back to beginnings and read great

things in small, this line of wounded trees, leading across the

first great "divide," into the rich empire of the central west,

is worthy of contemplation. Each tree, starred whitely by the

Indian's axe, speaks of Saxon conquest and commerce, one and

inseparable. In every act in the drama that so quickly followed,

this Indian path with its blazed trees lies in the foreground. Over

it came the young surveyor Washington, on his way to the

haughty St. Pierre, to ask that exceeding formal question why

the French were building forts on western territory (which was

legally theirs, and to which no people other than the French have

ever had a better right!) Then, the trail having been widened,

on came Washington's little Virginian army, the first conflict

of the war, and the erection of Fort Necessity near the broad-

ened Indian path.² Soon after, the route became immortalized

by the advent of Braddock's army, which was annihilated upon

it. The reader will recall that one of the three plans of the

British in the campaign of 1775, in the French and Indian War,

was the attempt of General Braddock to capture the French Fort

Duquesne, at the junction of the Alleghany and Monongahela,

in order to sever the line of French forts from Quebec to Louis-

iana, and break the "backbone of New France."

This important expedition landed at the port of Alexandria,

in Virginia, February 20, 1755. With the same dense ignorance

of the continent, which existed in the day when letters were

addressed to the "Island of New England," no thought was taken

 

1Jacob's Life of Captain Michael Cresap, p. 28.

2 Washington's Journal,1754 (Toner), pp. 42, 48, 50, 62, 95.

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as to how this army was to march through the dense wilderness

to the fort it was to capture. The port of debarkation, which

settled, necessarily, the matter of route, was decided upon, like

everything else, with little knowledge of the herculean task to

be accomplished.³ The road question was left to the colonies

through which the army was to march, and the first that Gov-

ernor Morris of Pennsylvania knew of Braddock's need of a road

was four days after the landing at Alexandria, instead of four

months before, as should have been the case.

On the twenty-fourth of February he received a letter from

Braddock's Deputy Quartermaster General, Sir John St. Clair,

urging him to "open a road toward the head of Youghheagang

or any other way that is nearer to the French forts."⁴  Morris

immediately replied that there was no "wagon road" but only

a "horse path" through his colony by way of Carlisle to the Ohio.

But by the twelfth of the next month, Morris was empowered

by his colony to appoint a commission to open a road "through

Carlisle and Shippensburg to the Yoijogain, and to the camp

at Will Creek."⁵ In the meantime Braddock's army had passed

by various courses to the headwaters of the Potomac, to Fort

Cumberland, the eastern terminus of the path blazed by Nemaco-

lin and widened by Washington. The commissioners appointed

by Governor Morris had "run their road to the Yoijogain" and

came home by way of Fort Cumberland without "running" the

road thither.⁶ Here they found St. Clair raging over the alleged

dilatory and unpatriotic policy of Pennsylvania. St. Clair imme-

diately sent a party forward to "find a road from there (Fort

Cumberland) to the point on the Youghiogany, which the road

being built by Pennsylvania would strike."⁷ No road was found

 

3 Cf. Woodrow Wilson's "George Washington," p. 85.

4Pennsylvania Colonial Records. Vol. VI, pp. 300, 378.

5 Idem Vol. VI, p. 318.

6"Pennsylvania Magazine of History," Vol. IX, p. 7.

7 From Ormes' Journal it would seem that Braddock always intended

to march by way of Washington's road; for he says Morris was asked to

build a road that would "fall into his road at the great meadows, or at

the Yoxhio Geni" which would serve for reinforcements and convoys.-

Orme's Journal in "History of Braddock's Expedition," p. 315.

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and the alternative of following the old route of Washington

was all that was left.

Thus it happened that the historic trail, made famous by

Washington's first expedition and battle in the Ohio valley,

became the course of Braddock's ill-starred army. On the thir-

tieth of May, having abandoned all idea of making a new road,

Sir John St. Clair, set out from Fort Cumberland with a body

of six hundred choppers to widen and improve Washington's

road. Behind it, often within sound of the axes, the van of

the army daily encamped.⁸ Indian trails were only wide enough

for but a single traveler. The path, though widened for hauling

Washington's swivels, would not have answered the needs of

Braddock's army. For this army, a roadway, averaging probably

twelve feet in width, was cut, over which the guns and wagons

were hauled with exceeding difficulty.9

It has been a matter of interest to the writer to know how

largely the Indian trail became the identical course of Braddock's

Road. It is more than probable that the two courses were gen-

erally identical. In Mr. Atkinson's most valuable study of Brad-

dock's route we read: "For reasons not easy to divine the

route across Wills mountain * * * was selected."¹⁰ Such

evidences as this, that the road followed the invariable laws of

Indian trails, is the strongest circumstantial proof that can be

asked. "Steep rugged hills were to be clomb," wrote one who

followed the army, "headlong declivities to be descended, down

which the cannon and wagons were lowered with blocks and

tackle."

On into the Alleghanies the little army marched through

 

8 "History of Braddock's Expedition," p. 355

9 Idem p. 203.

10 Atkinson's "Braddock's Route to the Battle of the Monongahela,"

Olden Time Vol. II, p. 544.

"There was but one practicable passage-way across the land for either

beast or man, and that, on the summits of the hills. Here on the hilltops,

mounting on the longest ascending ridges, lay the tawny paths of the

buffalo and the Indian. They were not only highways, they were the

highest ways, and chosen for the best of reasons." -Red Men's Roads,"

p. 8.

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the narrow aisle freshly hewn each day, unmindful of its doom

There is something doubly tragic in Braddock's defeat. The

army had undergone such exhaustive trials and was so near the

goal when it was suddenly swept by the lurking blast of fame!

The army followed the Indian trail until after the sixteenth

encampment. On the morning of the seventh of July, Braddock

"left the Indian track which he had followed so long,"¹¹ and

started for the fort in more direct line across country. Arriving

at Turtle Creek, he gave up the attempt and turned back to the

Monongahela and the death trap. Braddock's Road was com-

pleted, full twelve feet wide, to the northern bank of the Monon-

gahela, where the city of Braddock, Pennsylvania, now stands.

It was rough, winding swath of a road mowed by British grit,

ending at a slaughter pen and charnel ground, only seven miles

from Fort Duquesne.

 

 

III.

 

NATIONAL LEGISLATION.

For three score years Braddock's Road answered all the

imperative needs of modern travel, though the journey over it,

at most seasons, was a rough experience.¹² During the winter

the road was practically impassable.¹³

But with the growing importance of Pittsburg, the subject

of roads received more and more attention. As early as 1769

a warrant was issued for the survey of the Manor of Pittsburg,

which embraced 5766 acres. In this warrant an allowance of

six per cent. was made for roads.^l4 Six years later, or the first

 

11History of Braddock's Expedition pp. 203, 351.

12 An obituary notice which has come into the possession of the writer

dated 1796, reads: "Alligany County, Marriland July the 14th 1796 died

John P. Allen at the house of John Simkins at atherwayes bear camplain

broaddags old road half way between fort Cumberland & Union town."

13 Colonel Brodhead, commanding at Fort Pitt, wrote Richard Peters:

"The great Depth of Snow upon the Alleghany and Laurel Hills have

prevented our Getting every kind of Stores, nor do I expect to get any

now until the latter End of April." - "Pennsylvania Archives " Vol. VIII,

p. 120.

14 Craig's "History of Pittsburg," p. 104.

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year of the Revolutionary War, court met at Pittsburg, and

viewers were appointed to report on a large number of roads,

in the construction of which all males between the ages of sixteen

and forty-five, living within three miles of the road, were required

to work under the supervision of the commissioners. One of

these roads became, nearly half a century later, incorporated in

the National Road.15

The licensing of taverns by Youghiogheny county in 1778,

and of ferries about the same time, indicate the opening and use

of roads. Within ten years, the post from New York to Pittsburg

was established over the treacherous mountain road.¹⁶ In 1794

the Pittsburg postoffice was established, with mails from Phila-

delphia once in two weeks.¹⁷

Through all these years, the contest for the west was being

waged. The armies of the United States, after many defeats, had

won their final victory, and at Greenville, in 1795, General An-

thony Wayne wrung, from the disconcerted allied Indian nations,

a treaty, which secured to the whites the Ohio country. During

these years, a stream of pioneers had been flowing westward;

the current dividing at Fort Cumberland. Hundreds had wended

their tedious way over Braddock's Road to the Youghiogany

and passed down by water to Kentucky, but thousands had jour-

neyed south over Boone's Wilderness Road, which had been

blazed through Cumberland Gap in 1775. All that was needed

to turn the whole current toward the Ohio was a good thorough-

fare. When would it be built? Who would build it? These

 

15 History of Washington County, Pennsylvania, pp. 20-22. Cf. The

Old Pike, p. 244.

16Pittsburg Gazette of September 30, 1788.

17 Craig's "History of Pittsburg," p. 226. The mail route estab-

lished at this time had its destination at Louisville, Kentucky, and came

to Pittsburg over the road opened by Governor Morris through Pennsyl-

vania via Bedford, Pittsburg, Limestone (by Ohio river) Paris, Lexing-

ton, Frankfort, Harrodsburg, Danville, Bardstown to Louisville. It

is interesting to note that mail for the settlements at the end of the Wil-

derness Road (Kentucky) always came westward over the Pennsylvania

roads. Mr. James Lane Allen has unfortunately confounded the Wilder-

ness Road and the Old National Road in his delightful volume, In the

Blue Grass Country p.-.

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were the questions that were being asked, when the eighteenth

century closed.

With the nineteenth century came the answer. The thou-

sands of people who had gone, by one way or another, into the

trans-Ohio country soon demanded statehood. The creation of

the state of Ohio is directly responsible for the building of the

National Road. In an act passed by Congress April 30, 1802,

to enable the people of Ohio to form a state government and

for admission into the Union, section seven contained this pro-

vision:

"That one-twentieth of the net proceeds of the

lands lying within said State sold by Congress shall be

applied to the laying out and making public roads lead-

ing from the navigable waters emptying into the

Atlantic, to the Ohio, to the said state, and through the

same, such roads to be laid out under the authority of

Congress, with the consent of the several states through

which the roads shall pass."¹⁸

Another law passed March 3 of the following year, appro-

priated the three per cent. of the five to laying out roads within

the state of Ohio, and the remaining two per cent. for laying

out and making roads from the navigable waters, emptying into

the Atlantic, to the river Ohio to the said state.¹⁹

A committee, appointed to review the question, reported to

the Senate December 19, 180₅. At that time, the sale of land

from July, 1802, to September 30, 1805, had amounted to

$632,604.27, of which two per cent., $12,652, was available for

a road to Ohio. This sum was rapidly increasing. Of the routes

across the mountains, the committee studied none of those north

of Philadelphia, or south of Richmond. Between these points

five courses were considered:

1. Philadelphia - Ohio river (between Steubenville and Mouth

of Grave  Creek) .....................................  314  miles.

2. Baltimore - Ohio river (between Steubenville and Mouth

of  Grave  Creek) .....................................  275  miles.

 

18 United States at Large, Vol. II, p. 173.

19 United States at Large, Vol. II, p. 226.

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3. Washington - Ohio river (between Steubenville and Mouth

of  Grave  Creek) .....................................  275                               miles.

4.    Richmond  ............................................... 317                                        miles.

5.    Baltimore-Brownsville  ................................... 218                                 miles.

There were really but two courses to consider, those which

have already been described as the Wilderness Road and Brad-

dock's Road. The former led through a thinly populated part

of the country and did not answer the prescribed condition, that

of striking the Ohio river at a point contiguous to the state of

Ohio. Consequently, in the report submitted by the committee

we read as follows:

"Therefore the committee have thought it expe-

dient to recommend the laying out and making a road

from Cumberland, on the northerly bank of the Potomac,

and within the state of Maryland, to the Ohio river, at

the most convenient place on the easterly bank of said

river, opposite to Steubenville, and the mouth of Grave

Creek, which empties into said river, Ohio, a little below

Wheeling in Virginia. This route will meet and accom-

modate roads from Baltimore and the District of Colum-

bia; it will cross the Monongahela at or near Brownsville,

sometimes called Redstone, where the advantage of boat-

ing can be taken; and from the point where it will

probably intersect the river Ohio, there are now roads,

or they can easily be made over feasible and proper

ground, to and through the principal population of the

state of Ohio."²⁰

Immediately the following act of Congress was passed,

authorizing the laying out and making of the National Road:

 

 

AN ACT TO REGULATE THE LAYING OUT AND MAKING A ROAD FROM

CUMBERLAND, IN THE STATE OF MARYLAND, TO THE STATE

OF OHIO.

 

SECTION I. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Rep-

resentatives of the United States of America in Congress assem-

 

20Senate Reports, 9th Cong., Sess., Rep., No. 195.

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The Old Natioual Road.              419

 

bled, That the President of the United States be, and he is hereby

authorized to appoint, by and with the advice and consent of

the Senate, three discreet and disinterested citizens of the United

States, to lay out a road from Cumberland, or a point on the

northern bank of the river Potomac, in the state of Maryland,

between Cumberland and the place where the main road leading

from Gwynn's to Winchester, in Virginia, crosses the river, to

the state of Ohio; whose duty it shall be, as soon as may be,

after their appointment, to repair to Cumberland aforesaid, and

view the ground, from the points on the river Potomac herein-

before designated to the river Ohio; and to lay out in such

direction as they shall judge, under all circumstances the most

proper, a road from thence to the river Ohio, to strike the same

at the most convenient place, between a point on its eastern bank,

opposite to the northern boundary of Steubenville, in said state

of Ohio, and the mouth of Grave Creek, which empties into the

said river a little below Wheeling, in Virginia.

SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That the aforesaid road

shall be laid out four rods in width, and designated on each side

by a plain and distinguishable mark on a tree, or by the erection

of a stake or monument sufficiently conspicuous, in every quarter

of a mile of the distance at least, where the road pursues a

straight course so far or further, and on each side, at every point

where an angle occurs in its course.

SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, That the commissioners

shall, as soon as may be, after they have laid out said road, as

aforesaid, present to the President an accurate plan of the same,

with its several courses and distances, accompanied by a written

report of their proceedings, describing the marks and monuments

by which the road is designated, and the face of the country over

which it passes, and pointing out the particular parts which they

shall judge require the most and immediate attention and amelio-

ration, and the probable expense of making the same possible

in the most difficult parts, and through the whole distance; des-

ignating the state or states through which said road has been

laid out, and the length of the several parts which are laid

out on new ground, as well as the length of those parts laid out

on the road now traveled. Which report the President is hereby

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420       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

authorized to accept or reject, in the whole or in part. If he

accepts, he is hereby further authorized and requested to pursue

such measures, as in his opinion shall be proper, to obtain consent

for making the road, of the state or states through which the

same has been laid out. Which consent being obtained, he is

further authorized to take prompt and effectual measures to cause

said road to be made through the whole distance, or in any part

or parts of the same as he shall judge most conducive to the

public good, having reference to the sum appropriated for the

purpose.

SEC. 4. And be it further enacted, That all parts of the road

which the President shall direct to be made, in case the trees are

standing, shall be cleared the whole width of four rods; and

the road shall be raised in the middle of the carriageway with

stone, earth, or gravel or sand, or a combination of some or all

of them, leaving or making, as the case may be, a ditch or water

course on each side and contiguous to said carriage-way, and in

no instance shall there be an elevation in said road, when finished,

greater than an angle of five degrees with the horizon. But the

manner of making said road, in every other particular, is left to

the direction of the President.

SEC. 5. And be it further enacted, That said commissioners

shall each receive four dollars per day, while employed as afore-

said, in full for their compensation, including all expenses. And

they are hereby authorized to employ one surveyor, two chain-

men and one marker, for whose faithfulness and accuracy they,

the said commissioners, shall be responsible, to attend them in

laying out said road, who shall receive in full satisfaction for

their wages, including all expenses, the surveyor, three dollars

per day, and each chainman and marker, one dollar per day, while

they shall be employed in said business, of which fact a certificate

signed by said commissioners shall be deemed sufficient evidence.

SEC. 6. And be it further enacted, That the sum of thirty

thousand dollars be, and the same is hereby appropriated, to

defray the expenses of laying out and making said road. And

the President is hereby authorized to draw, from time to time,

on the treasury for such parts, or at any one time, for the whole

of said sum, as he shall judge the service requires. Which sum

• 16
 

The Old National Road.              421

 

of thirty thousand dollars shall be paid, first, out of the fund of

two per cent. reserved for laying out and making roads to the

state of Ohio, and by virtue of the seventh section of an act

passed on the thirtieth day of April, one thousand eight hundred

and two, entitled, "An act to enable the people of the eastern

division of the territory northwest of the river Ohio to form a

constitution and state government, and for the admission of

such state into the Union on an equal footing with the original

states, and for other purposes." Three per cent. of the appro-

priation contained in said seventh section being directed by a

subsequent law to the laying out, opening and making roads

within the said state of Ohio; and secondly, out of any money

in the treasury not otherwise appropriated, chargeable upon, and

reimbursable at the treasury by said fund of two per cent. as the

same shall accrue.

SEC. 7. And be it further enacted, That the President be,

and he is hereby requested, to cause to be laid before Congress,

as soon as convenience will permit, after the commencement of

each session, a statement of the proceedings under this act, that

Congress may be enabled to adapt such further measures as may

from time to time be proper under existing circumstances.

Approved March 29, 1806.

TH. JEFFERSON.

 

In execution of this act President Jefferson appointed

Thomas Moore of Maryland, Joseph Kerr of Ohio, and Eli Wil-

liams of Maryland commissioners to lay out the National Road.

Their first report was presented December 30, 1806. It is a

document of great importance in the historical development of

road building on this continent, throwing, as it does, many inter-

esting side lights on the great task which confronted the builders

of our first national highway.²¹

The suggestion contained in the act of Congress, that the

road might follow, in part, the previous route across the moun-

tains, was undoubtedly taken to mean, that so far as possible,

this rule should guide the commissioners in their task. Starting

 

21 Appendix No. 1.

• 17
 

422       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

• 18
 

The Old National Road.               423

from Cumberland the general alignment of Braddock's Road

was pursued, until the point was reached where the old thorough-

fare left the old portage trail, on the summit of Laurel Hill.

The course was then laid straight toward Brownsville (Redstone

Old Fort) probably along the general alignment of the old Indian

portage path, and an earlier road. From Brownsville to Wash-

ington was an old road, possibly the course of the Indian trail.

Albert Gallatin, father of the road, was at this time Secretary

of the Treasury, and property holder in Pennsylvania near the

probable route of the National Road. He was accused of attempt-

ing to bring the road near his lands. Mr. Gallatin immediately

wrote to the President asking him to decide the matter of route

between Brownsville and the Ohio river. Mr. Gallatin wrote to

Mr. David Shriver, the Superintendent of the National Road,

as follows: "You are authorized to employ a surveyor to view

the most proper road from Brownsville to Washington in Penn-

sylvania, and thence to examine the routes to Charleston, Steuben-

ville, mouth of Short Creek and Wheeling and report a correct

statement of distance and ground on each. If the county road

now established from Brownsville to Washington is not objec-

tionable, it would be eligible to prefer it to any other which might

be substituted."²² The National Road between Uniontown and

Brownsville followed a road laid out before the Revolutionary

War.²³

As has already been suggested, there was a dispute

concerning the point where the road would touch the Ohio river.

The rivalry was most intense between Wheeling and Steubenville.

Wheeling won through the influence of Henry Clay, to whom a

monument was erected at a later date near the town on the old

road.

On the fifteenth of January, 1808, the commissioners ren-

 

22 "The Old Pike," p. 373.

23 The country south of the Ohio from Steubenville and Wheeling

was historic ground, the first paths being well-worn routes of travel long

before the coming of the National Road. The main primeval thorough-

fares were the Monongahela trail and Girty's old trail southward from

Girty's Point on the Ohio River. See "Red Men's Roads " p. 17; also

DeHass' History of West Virginia, p. 342, note 1.

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424        Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

dered a second report in which it appears that timber and brush

had already been cleared from the proposed route and that con-

tracts were already let for the first ten miles west of Cumberland.²4

Permission to build the road was gained of each of the states

through which it passed,²⁵ Pennsylvania making the condition that

the route of the road should pass through the towns of Wash-

ington and Uniontown.

 

Iv.

 

POTOMAC TO THE OHIO.

The second report of the commissioners, as noted, assured

Congress that the preliminary work on the great road had begun.

This was in 1808, and contracts had been made for clearing the

surveyed route of brush and trees.      This indicates that the

National Road was not built on the bed of Braddock's road.

Though the two crossed each other frequently, as Mr. Middle-

ton's map shows, the commissioners reported that the two road-

beds were not identical in the aggregate for more than one mile

in the entire distance.²⁶

Contracts for the first ten miles west of Cumberland were

signed April 16 and May 11, 1811. They were completed in

the following year.   Contracts were let in 1812, 1813, 1815.

In 1817 contracts brought the road to Uniontown. In the same

year a contract was let from a point near Washington to the

 

24 Appendix No. 2.

25 Pennsylvania April 9, 1807; Maryland 1806, Chap. IX, "An act

vesting certain powers in the President of the United States." Ohio,

1824, XXII, 87, "An act to concede to the government of the United

States the power of extending the Cumberland Road through this state."

Chase, p. 1961.

26 Braddock's Road and the National Road were originally one as

they left Cumberland. The course met again at Little Meadows near Tom-

linson's Tavern and again at eastern foot of Negro mountain. The courses

were identical at the Old Flenniken tavern two miles west of Smithfield

(Big Crossing) and on summit of Laurel Hill, at which point Braddock's

Road swung off northwesterly toward Pittsburg, following the old buffalo

trail toward the junction of the Ohio and Alleghany, and the National

Road continued westward along the course of the old portage path toward

Wheeling on the Ohio.

• 20
 

The Old Natioual Road.                      425

 

Virginia line. In the following year United States mail coaches

were running from Washington, D. C., to Wheeling, and 1818

is considered the year of the opening of the road to the Ohio

river.

The cost of the eastern division of the road was enormous.

The commissioners in their report to Congress estimated the cost

at $6,000 per mile, not including bridges. The cost of the road

from Cumberland to Uniontown was $9,745 per mile. The cost

of the entire division east of the Ohio river was about $13,000

per mile. Too liberal contracts was given as the reason for the

greater proportional expense between Uniontown and Wheeling.

An idea of the difficulties of putting the great road through

the Pennsylvania mountain ranges can be gained from a table

of heights (above Cumberland) which the road crossed, given

by the commissioners in their report of 1808:

FEET.

Summit of Savage  mountain ..................................                                   2,022-24

Savage  river  ..................  ........................... ...                                         1,741-6

Summit Little Savage mountain ...............................                                 1,900-  4

Branch Pine Run, first western water ......................... 1,699- 9

Summit of Red Hill (afterward called Shades of Death)....... 1,914- 3

Summit Little Meadow mountain............................. 2,026-16

Little Youghiogeny river ...................................... 1,322- 6

East Fork  of  Shade  Run ......................................                                   1,558-92

Summit of Negro mountain, highest point ...................                             2,328-12

Middle branch of White's creek, at the west foot of Negro

mountain  ...............................................                                           1,360-  5

White's creek ................................................                                           1,195- 5

Big Youghiogheny ...........................................                                         645- 5

Summit of ridge between Youghiogheny river and Beaver waters. 1,514- 5

Beaver Run ................................................. 1,123- 8

Summit of Laurel Hill ....................................... 1,550-16

Court House  of Uniontown ...................................  274-65

A point ten feet above the surface of low water in the Monon-

gahela river, at the mouth of Dunlap's creek ..............  119-26

 

A flood of traffic swept over the great highway immediately

upon its completion. As early as the year 1822 it is recorded that

a single one of the five commission houses at Wheeling unloaded

1,081 wagons, averaging 3,500 pounds each, and paid for freight-

age of goods the sum of $90,000.

• 21
 

426       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

But the road was hardly completed when a spectre of con-

stitutional cavil arose, threatening its existence. In 1822 a bill

was passed by Congress looking toward the preservation and

repair of the newly built road. It should be stated that the road

bed, though completed in one sense, was not in condition to be

used extensively unless continually repaired. In many places

only a single layer of broken stone had been laid, and, with

the volume of traffic which was daily passing over it, the road

did not promise to remain in good condition. In order to secure

funds for the constant repairs necessary, this bill ordered the

establishment of turnpikes with gates and tolls. The bill was

immediately vetoed by President Monroe on the ground that

Congress, according to his interpretation of the constitution, did

not have the power to pass such a sweeping measure of internal

improvement.

The President based his conclusion upon the following

grounds, stated in a special message to Congress, dated May 4,

1822:

"A power to establish turnpikes, with gates and

tolls and to enforce the collection of the tolls by pen-

alties, implies a power to adopt and execute a complete

system of internal improvements. A right to impose

duties to be paid by all persons passing a certain road,

and on horses and carriages, as is done by this bill,

involves the right to take the land from the proprietor

on a valuation, and to pass laws for the protection of

the road from injuries; and if it exist, as to one road,

it exists as to any other, and to as many roads as

Congress may think proper to establish. A right to leg-

islate for the others. It is a complete right of juris-

diction and sovereignty for all the purposes of internal

improvement, and not merely the right of applying

money under the power vested in Congress to make

appropriations (under which power, with the consent

of the states through which the road passes, the work

was originally commenced, and has been so far exe-

cuted). I am of the opinion that Congress does not

possess this power- that the states individually cannot

• 22
 

The Old National Road.               427

grant it; for, although they may assent to the appro-

priation of money within their limits for such purposes,

they can grant no power of jurisdiction of sovereignty,

by special compacts with the United States. This power

can be granted only by an amendment to the constitu-

tion, and in the mode prescribed by it. If the power

exist, it must be either because it has been specially

granted to the United States, or that it is incidental to

some power, which has been specifically granted. It has

never been contended that the power was specifically

granted. It is claimed only as being incidental to some

one or more of the powers which are specifically granted.

The following are the powers from which it is said

to be derived: (1) From the right to establish post

offices and post roads; (2) from the right to declare

war; (3) to regulate commerce; (4) to pay the debts

and provide for the common defense and the general

welfare; (5) from the power to make all laws necessary

and proper for carrying into execution all the powers

vested by the constitution in the government of the

United States, or in any department or officer thereof;

(6) and lastly from the power to dispose of and make all

needful rules and regulations respecting the territory

and other property of the United States. According to

my judgment it cannot be derived from either of these

powers, nor from all of them united, and in consequence

it does not exist."²⁷

During the early years of this century, the subject of inter-

nal improvements relative to the building of roads and canals

was one of the foremost political questions of the day. No

sooner were the debts of the Revolutionary war paid, and a

surplus accumulated, than a systematic improvement of the

country was undertaken. The Old National Road was but one

of several roads projected by general government.  Through

the administrations of Adams, Jefferson and Madison large

 

27 Richardson (Ed) Message and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. II,

p. 142. (May 4, 1822.)

• 23
 

428       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

appropriations had been made for numerous improvements. The

bill authorizing the levying of tolls was a step too far, as Pres-

ident Monroe held that it was one thing to make appropriations

for public improvements, but an entirely different thing to assume

jurisdiction and sovereignty over the land whereon those improve-

ments were made. This was one of the great public questions

in the first half of the present century. President Jackson's course

was not very consistent. Before his election he voted for internal

improvements, even advocating subscriptions by the government

to the stock of private canal companies, and the formation of

roads beginning and ending within the limits of certain states.

In his message at the opening of the first Congress after his

accession, he suggested the division of the surplus revenue among

the states, as a substitute for the promotion of internal improve-

ments by the general government, attempting a limitation and

distinction too difficult and important to be settled and acted upon

on the judgment of one man, namely, the distinction between

general and local objects.

"The pleas of the advocates of internal improvement," wrote

a contemporary authority of high standing on economic questions,

"are these: That very extensive public works, designed for the

benefit of the whole Union, and carried through vast portions

of its area, must be accomplished. That an object so essential

ought not to be left at the mercy of such an accident as the

cordial agreement of the requisite number of states, to carry such

works forward to their completion; that the surplus funds accru-

ing from the whole nation cannot be well employed as in pro-

moting works in which the whole nation will be benefitted; and

that as the interests of the majority have hitherto upheld Congress

in the use of this power, it may be assumed to be the will of

the majority that Congress should continue to exercise it.

The answer is that it is inexpedient to put a vast and increas-

ing patronage into the hands of the general government; that

only a very superficial knowledge can be looked for in members

of Congress as to the necessity or value of works proposed to

be instituted in any parts of the states, from the impossibility or

undesirableness of equalizing the amount of appropriation made

to each; that useless works would be proposed from the spirit

• 24
 

The Old National Road.               429

 

of competition or individual interest; and that corruption, co-ex-

tensive with the increase of power, would deprave the functions

of the general government." * * *

*  *  *  "To an impartial observer it appears that Congress

has no constitutional right to devote the public funds to internal

improvements, at its own unrestricted will and pleasure; that

the permitted usurpation of the power for so long a time indicates

that some degree of such power in the hands of the general

government is desirable and necessary; that such power should

be granted through an amendment of the constitution, by the

methods therein provided; that, in the meantime, it is perilous

that the instrument should be strained for the support of any

function, however desirable its exercise may be."

"In case of the proposed addition being made to the consti-

tution, arrangements will, of course, be entered into for the deter-

mining the principles by which general are to be distinguished

from local objects or whether such distinction can, on any prin-

ciple, be fixed; for testing the utility of proposed objects; for

checking extravagant expenditure, jobbing and corrupt patron-

age; in short, the powers of Congress will be specified, here

as in other matters, by express permission and prohibition."²⁸

In 1824, however, President Monroe found an excuse to

sign a bill which was very similar to that vetoed in 1822, and

the great road, whose fate had hung for two years in the balance,

received needed appropriations. The travel over the road in the

first decade after its completion was heavy and before a decade

had passed the road-bed was in wretched condition. It was the

plan of the friends of the road, when they realized that no revenue

could be raised by means of tolls by the government, to have the

road placed in a state of good repair by the government and

then turned over to the several states through which it passed.²⁹

The liberality of the government, at this juncture, in insti-

tuting thorough repairs on the road was an act worthy of the

road's service and destiny.

 

28 Harriet Martineau's "Society in America " Vol. II, pp. 31, 35.

29 See Appropriation No. 27, p. 143.

• 25
 

430        Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

In order to insure efficiency and permanency these repairs³⁰

were made on the Macadam system; that is to say, the pave-

ment of the old road was entirely broken up, and the stones

removed from the road; the bed was then raked smooth, and

made nearly flat, having a raise of not more than three inches

from the side to the centre, in a road thirty feet wide; the ditches

on each side of the road, and the drains leading from them,

were so constructed that the water could not stand at a higher

level than eighteen inches below the lowest part of the surface

of the road; and, in all cases, when it was practicable, the drains

were adjusted in such manner as to lead the water entirely from

the side ditches. The culverts were cleared out, and so adjusted

as to allow the free passage of all water that tended to cross

the road.

Having thus formed the bed of the road, cleaned out the

ditches and culverts, and adjusted the side drains, the stone was

reduced to a size not exceeding four ounces in weight, was spread

on with shovels, and raked smooth. The old material was used

when it was of sufficient hardness, and no clay or sand was

allowed to be mixed with the stone.

In replacing the covering of stone, it was found best to lay

it on in strata of about three inches thick, admitting the travel

for a short interval on each layer, and interposing such obstruc-

tions from time to time as would insure an equal travel over every

portion of the road; care being taken to keep persons in constant

attendance to rake the surface when it became uneven by the

action of wheels of carriages. In those parts of the road, if any,

where materials of good quality could be obtained for the road

in sufficient quantity to afford a course of six inches, new stone

was procured to make up the deficiency to that thickness; but

it was considered unnecessary, in any part, to put on a covering

of more than nine inches. None but limestone, flint or granite,

were used for the covering, if practicable; and no covering was

placed upon the bed of the road till it had become well compacted

and thoroughly dried. At proper intervals, on the slopes of hills,

 

30 For specimen advertisement for repairs on National Road see Ap-

pendix No. 4.

• 26
 

The Old National Road.              431

 

drains or paved catch-waters were made across the road, whenever

the cost of constructing culverts rendered their use inexpedient.

These catch-waters were made with a gradual curvature, so as to

give no jolts to the wheels of carriages passing over them; but

whenever the expense justified the introduction of culverts, they

were used in preference, and in all cases where the water crossed

the road, either in catch-waters or through culverts, sufficient

pavements and overfalls were constructed to provide against the

possibility of the road or banks being washed away by it.

The masonry of the bridges, culverts and side-walls were

ordered to be repaired, whenever required, in a substantial man-

ner, and care was taken that the mortar used was of good quality,

without admixture of raw clay. All the masonry was well

pointed with hydraulic mortar, and in no case was the pointing

allowed to be put on after the middle of October. All masonry

finished after this time was well covered, and pointed early in

the spring. Care was taken, also, to provide means for carrying

off the water from the bases of walls, to prevent the action of

frost on their foundations; and it was considered highly import-

ant that all foundations in masonry should be well pointed with

hydraulic mortar to a depth of eighteen inches below the surface

of the ground.

By the year 1818 travel over the first great road across the

Alleghany mountains into the Ohio basin had begun. The sub-

sequent history of this highway and all the vicissitudes through

which it has passed, has, in a measure, perhaps, dimmed the

lustre of its early pride. The subject of transportation has

undergone such marvelous changes in these eighty years since

the National Road was opened, that we are apt to forget the

strength of the patriotism which made that road a reality. But

compare it with the roadways built before it to accomplish similar

ends, and the greatness of the undertaking can be appreciated.

Over the beginnings of great historical movements there often

hangs a cloud of obscurity. Over this heroic attempt, to make

a feeble republic strong through unity, there is no obscurity.

America won the west from England as England had won it from

France - by conquest. Brave men were found who did what

neither England nor France did do, settle the wilderness and

• 27
 

432        Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

• 28
 

The Old National Road.                 433

 

begin the transformation of it. Large colonies of hardy men

and women had gone into the Ohio valley, carrying in their hands

the blessed Ordinance and guided by the very star of empire.

Old Virginia had given the best of her sons and daughters to

the meadow land of Ken-ta-kee, who were destined to clinch

the republic's title to the Mississippi river. The Old Bay State

had given her best blood to found the Old Northwest, at historic

Marietta.  New   Jersey and Connecticut had sent their sons

through vast wildernesses to found Cincinnati and Cleveland,

names which to-day suggest the best there is in our American

state. Without exaggeration, the building of the National Road

from the Potomac to the Ohio river was the crowning act of

all that had gone before. It embodied the prime idea in the

Ordinance of 1787, and it proved that a republic of loyal people

could scorn the old European theory that mountains are impera-

tive boundaries of empire.

 

 

v.

 

OHIO TO THE MISSISSIPPI.

The stories of those who knew the road in the west and those

who knew it in the east are much alike. It is probable that there

was one important distinction-the passenger traffic of the road

between the Potomac and Ohio, which gave life on that por-

tion of the road a peculiar flavor, was doubtless much smaller on

the western division.

For many years the centre of western population was in the

Ohio valley, and good steamers were plying the Ohio when the

National Road was first opened. Indeed the road was originally

intended for the accommodation of the lower Ohio valley.³1

 

31 The early official correspondence concerning the route of the road

shows plainly that it was really built for the benefit of the Chillicothe and

Cincinnati settlements, which embraced a large portion of Ohio's popula-

tion. The opening of river traffic in the first two decades of the century,

however, had the effect of throwing the line of the road further north-

ward through the capitals of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Zane's trace,

diverging from the National Road at Zanesville, played an important

part in the development of southwestern Ohio, becoming the course of

the Lancaster and Maysville pike.

• 29
 

434       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

Still, as the century grew old and the interior population became

considerable, the Ohio division of the road became a crowded

thoroughfare. An old stage driver in eastern Ohio remembers

when business was such that he and his companion Knights of

Rein and Whip never went to bed for twenty nights, and more

than a hundred teams might have been met in a score of miles.

When the road was built to Wheeling its greatest mission

was accomplished-the portage path across the mountains was

completed to a point where river navigation was almost always

available. And yet less than half of the road was finished. It

now touched the eastern extremity of the great state whose public

lands were being sold in order to pay for its building. Westward

laythe growing states of Indiana and Illinois, a per cent.of the sale

of whose land had already been pledged to the road. Then came

another moment when the great work paused and the original am-

bition of its friends was at hazard.

In 1820 Congress appropriated $141,000 for completing the

road from Washington, Pennsylvania, to Wheeling. In the same

year $10,000 was appropriated for laying out the road between

Wheeling, Virginia, and a point on the left bank of the Missis-

sippi river, between St. Louis and the mouth of the Illinois river.

For four years the fate of the road west of the Ohio hung in the

balance, during which time, the road was menaced by the spectre

of unconstitutionality, already described. But on the third day

of March, 1825, a bill was passed by Congress appropriating one

hundred and fifty thousand dollars for building the road to Zanes-

ville, Ohio, and the extension of the surveys to the permanent

seat of government in Missouri, to pass by the seats of govern-

ment of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.³² Two years later $170,000

was appropriated to complete the road to Zanesville, Ohio, and in

1829 an additional appropriation for continuing it westward was

made.³³

It has been noted that the National Road from Cumberland to

Wheeling was built on a general alignment of a former thorough-

fare of the red men and the pioneers. So with much of the

course west of the Ohio. Between Wheeling and Zanesville the

 

32 See Appropriation No. 14, p. 141.

33 See Appropriations Nos. 20 and 21, p. 142.

• 30
 

The Old National Road.              435

 

National Road followed the course of the first road made through

Ohio, the celebrated route, marked out, by way of Lancaster and

Chillicothe, to Kentucky, by Colonel Ebenezer Zane, and which

bore the name of Zane's Trace. This first road built in Ohio

was authorized by an act of Congress passed May 17, 1796.34

This thoroughfare was rendered necessary by the large amount

of return traffic from the southwestern Ohio settlements and

Kentucky. The vast number of immigrants which, by 1796, had

journeyed to Kentucky, needed an overland thoroughfare to Penn-

sylvania and the east, which afforded a shorter course than the

roundabout Wilderness Road. It was easy to descend the Ohio,

but a tedious task to return by water, and steam packets were not

plying in that day (1796).

A description is left us of this first white man's public high-

way beyond the Ohio which is interesting in this connection:

"We came back by Cincinnati, and from there went

to the mouth of Soldier's Run, on Brush Creek, seven

miles from its mouth  *  *  * we started back to

Pennsylvania on horseback, as there was no getting up

the river at that day  *  * * There was one house

(Treiber's) on Lick branch five miles from where West

Union now is *   * * The next house is where Sink-

ing Spring or Middleton is now. The next was at Chil-

licothe, which was just then commenced. We encamped

one night on Massie's Run, say two or three miles from

the falls of Paint Creek where the trace crossed that

stream. From Chillicothe to Lancaster, the trace then

went through Pickaway Plains * * * There was a cabin

some three or four miles below the plains and another

at their eastern edge, and one or two more between that

and Lancaster *  *  * Here we staid the third night.

From Lancaster we went the next day to Zanesville,

passing several small beginnings. I recollect no im-

provement between Zanesville and Wheeling except one

 

34 Private laws of the United States, May 17, 1796.

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436       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

small one at the mouth of Indian Wheeling Creek,

opposite Wheeling."³⁵

This route through Ohio was a well worn road a quarter of

a century before the National Road was extended across the Ohio

river.

The act of 1825, authorizing the extension of the great road

into the state of Ohio, was greeted with intense enthusiasm

by the people of the west. The fear that the road would not

be continued beyond the Ohio river was generally entertained,

and for good reasons. The debate of constitutionality, which had

been going on for several years, increased the fear. And yet it

would have been breaking faith with the west by the National

Government to have failed to continue the road.

The act appropriated $150,000 for an extension of the road

from Wheeling to Zanesville, Ohio, and work was immediately

undertaken. The Ohio was by far the greatest body of water

which the road crossed, and for many years the passage from

Wheeling to the opposite side of the Ohio, Bridgeport, was made a

ferry. Later a great bridge, the admiration of the country side,

was erected. The road entered Ohio in Belmont county, and,

eventually, crossed the state in a due line west, not deviating its

course even to touch cities of such importance as Newark or Day-

ton, although, in the case of the former at least, such a course

would have been less expensive than the one pursued. Passing

due west the road was built through Belmont, Guernsey, Muskin-

gum, Licking, Franklin, Madison, Clark, Montgomery and Preble

counties, a distance of over 300 miles. A larger portion of the

National Road which was actually completed lay in Ohio than in

all other states through which it passed combined.

The work on the road between Wheeling and Zanesville was

begun in 1825-26. Ground was broken with great ceremony op-

posite the Court House at St. Clairsville, Belmont county, July

4, 1825. An address was given by Mr. Wm. B. Hubbard.

The average cost per mile of the road in eastern Ohio was much

less than the cost in Pennsylvania, averaging only about $3,400

 

35 "American Pioneer," Vol. II, p. 158. Cf. "Franklinton (Ohio)

Centennial," p. 22.

• 32
 

The Old National Road.              437

 

per mile. This included three inch layers of broken stone, ma-

sonry bridges and culverts. Large appropriations were made for

the road in succeeding years and the work went on from

Zanesville, due west to Columbus. The course of the road be-

tween Zanesville and Columbus was perhaps the first instance

where the road ignored, entirely, the general alignment of a pre-

vious road between the same two points. The old road between

Zanesville and Columbus went by way of Newark and Granville,

a roundabout course, but probably the most practicable, as any one

may attest who has traveled over the National Road in the western

part of Muskingum county. A long and determined effort was

made by citizens of Newark and Granville, than whom there were

no more influential in Ohio, to have the new road follow the

course of the old, but without effect. Ohio had not, like Pennsyl-

vania, demanded that the road should pass through certain towns.

The only direction named by law was that the road should go west

on the straightest possible line through the capital of each state.

The course between Zanesville and Columbus was located by

the United States Commissioner, Jonathan Knight, Esq., who

accompanied by his associates (one of whom was the youthful

Joseph E. Johnson) arrived in Columbus, October 5, 1825. Bids

for contracts for building the road from Zanesville to Columbus

were advertised to be received at the Superintendent's office at

Zanesville, from the 23rd to the 30th of June, 1829. The road

was fully completed by 1833. The road entered Columbus on

Friend (now Main) street. There was great rivalry between the

North End and South End over the road's entrance into the city.

The matter was compromised by having it enter on Friend

street and take its exit on West Broad, traversing High to make

the connection.

Concerning the route out of Columbus, the Ohio State Journal

said:

"The adopted route leaves Columbus at Broad

Street, crosses the Scioto river at the end of that street

and on the new wooden bridge erected in 1826 by an

individual having a charter from that state. The bridge

is not so permanent nor so spacious as could be desired,

yet it may answer the intended purposes for several

• 33
 

438       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

years to come. Thence the location passes through the

village of Franklinton, and across the low grounds to the

bluff which is surrounded at a depression formed by a

ravine, and at a point nearly in the prolongation in the

direction of Broad Street; thence by a small angle, a

straight line to the bluffs of Darby creek; to pass the

creek and its bluffs some angles were necessary; thence

nearly a straight line through Deer Creek Barrens, and

across that stream to the dividing grounds, between the

Scioto and the Miami waters; thence nearly down to

the valley of Beaver Creek."

The preliminary survey westward was completed in 1826 and

extended to Indianapolis, Indiana. Bids were advertised for

contract west of Columbus in July 1830. During the next seven

years the work was pushed on through Madison, Clark, Mont-

gomery and Preble counties and across the Indiana line. Propo-

sals for bids for building the road west of Springfield, Ohio,

was advertised for, during August 1837, a condition being that

the first eight miles be finished by January 1838. These proposals

are interesting to-day. The following is the advertisement for

proposal of bids referred to above.

NATIONAL ROAD IN OHIO.-Notice to contrac-

tors.-Proposals will be received by the undersigned,

until the 1₉th of August inst., for clearing and grubbing

eight miles of the line of National Road west of this

place, from the 55th to the 62nd mile inclusive west of

Columbus-the work to be completed on or before the

1st day of January, 1838.

The trees and growth to be entirely cleared away to

the distance of 40 feet on each side of the central axis

of the road, and all trees impending over that space to be

cut down; all stumps and roots to be carefully grubbed

out to the distance of 20 feet on each side of the axis, and

where occasional high embankments, or spacious side

drains may be required, the grubbing is to extend to the

distance of 30 feet on each side of the same axis. All

the timber, brush, stumps and roots to be entirely re-

moved from the above space of 80 feet in width and

• 34
 

The Old National Road.              439

the earth excavated in grubbing, to be thrown back into

the hollows formed by removing the stumps and roots.

The proposals will state the price per linear rod or

mile, and the offers of competent, or responsible indi-

viduals only will be accepted.

Notice is hereby given to the proprietors of the land,

on that part of the line of the National Road, lying be-

tween Springfield and the Miami river to remove all fen-

ces and other barriers now across the line a reasonable

time being allowed them to secure that portion of their

present crops which may lie upon the location of the

road.

G. DUTTON,

Lieutenant U. S. Engineers Supt.

National Road Office, Springfield, Ohio.

August 2nd, 1837.36

Indianapolis was the centre of National Road operations in

Indiana, and from that city the road was built both eastward and

westward. The road entered Indiana through Wayne county

but was not completed until taken under a charter from the state,

by the Wayne County Turnpike Company, and finished in 1850.

When Indiana and Illinois received the road from the national

government it was not completed, though graded and bridged as

far west as Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois.

The National Road was not to Indiana and Illinois what it

was to Ohio, for somewhat similar reasons that it was less to

Ohio than to Pennsylvania, for the further west it was built the

older the century grew, and the newer the means of transportation

which were coming rapidly to the front. This was true, even,

from the very beginning. The road was hardly a decade old in

Pennsylvania, when two canals and a railroad over the portage,

offered a rival means of transportation across the state from

Harrisburg to Pittsburg.³⁷ When the road reached Wheeling,

Ohio river travel was very much improved, and a large proportion

of traffic went down the river by packet. When the road entered

36 Springfield Pioneer, August 1837; also Ohio State Journal, August

8, 1837.

37 Martineau's "Society in America. Vol. I. p. 17.

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440       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

Indiana, new dreams of internal improvements were underway

beside which a turnpike was almost a relic. In 1835-36, Indiana

passed an internal improvement bill, authorizing three great canals

and a railway.³⁸ The proposed railway, from the village of Ma-

dison on the Ohio river northward to Indianapolis, is a pregnant

suggestion of the amount of traffic to Indiana from the east which

passed down the Ohio from Wheeling, instead of going overland

through Ohio.³⁹ This was, undoubtedly, mostly passenger traffic,

which was very heavy at this time.⁴⁰

But the dawning of a new era in transportation had already

been heralded in the national hall of legislation In 1832 the

House Committee on Roads and Canals had discussed in their

report the question of the relative cost of various means of inter-

communication, including railways. Each report of the com-

mittee for the next five years mentioned the same subject, until,

in 1836, the matter of substituting a railway for the National

Road between Columbus and the Mississippi was very seriously

considered.

In that year a House Bill (No. 64) came back from the

Senate amended in two particulars, one, authorizing that the

appropriations made for Illinois should be confined to grading and

bridging only, and should not be construed as implying that Con-

gress had pledged itself to macadamize the road.

The House Committee struck out these amendments and

substituted a more sweeping one than any yet suggested in the

history of the road. This amendment provided that a railroad be

constructed west of Columbus with the money appropriated for

a highway. The committee reported, that, after long study

of the question, many reasons appeared why the change should

be made. It was, they said, stated to the committee by re-

spectable authority, that much of the stone for the masonry and

covering for the road east of Columbus had to be transported

for considerable distances over bad roads across the adjacent

 

38Wabash-Erie, Whitewater and Indiana Central Canals and the

Madison and Indianapolis railway.

39 "Illinois in '37," p. 766-7. This was probably passenger and freight

traffic as the mails went overland from the very first, until the building

of railways. Cf. Note 17.

40 Ohio State Journal, January 8, 1836.

• 36
 

The Old National Road.             441

 

country at very great expense, and that, in its continuance west-

ward through Ohio, this source of expense would be greatly

augmented. Nevertheless the compact with the admission of the

western states supposed the western termination of the road

should be the Mississippi. The estimated expense of the road's

extension to Vandalia, Illinois, sixty-five miles east of the Mississ-

ippi, amounted to $4,732,622.83, making the total expense of the

entire road amount to about ten millions. The committee said

it would have been unfaithful to the trust reposed in it, if it had

not bestowed much attention upon this matter, and it did not hes-

itate to ground on a recent report of the Secretary of War, this

very important change of the plan of the road. This report of the

War Department showed that the distance between Columbus

and Vandalia was 334 miles and the estimated cost of complet-

ing the road that far would be $4,732,632.83, of which $1,120,-

320.01 had been expended and $3,547,894.83 remained to be ex-

pended in order to finish the road to that extent according to plans

then in operation; that after its completion it would require an

annual expenditure on the 334 miles of $392,809.71 to keep it in

repair, the engineers computing the annual cost of repairs of the

portion of the road between Wheeling and Columbus (127 miles)

at $99,430.30.

On the other hand the estimated cost of a railway from Co-

lumbus to Vandalia on the route of the National Road was

$4,280,540.37, and the cost of preservation and repair of such

a road, $173,718.25. Thus the computed cost of the railway ex-

ceeded that of the turnpike but about 20 per cent., while the annual

expense of repairing the former would fall short of more than 56

per cent. In addition to the advantage of reduced cost was that

of faster time consumed in transportation, for, assuming, as the

committee did, a rate of speed of fifteen miles per hour (which

was five miles per hour less than the then customary speed of rail-

way traveling in England on the Liverpool and Manchester rail-

road, and about the ordinary rate of speed of the American loco-

motives) it would require only 23 hours for news from Baltimore

to reach Columbus, forty-two hours to Indianapolis, fifty-four to

Vandalia, and fifty-eight to St. Louis.

• 37
 

442       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

• 38
 

The Old National Road.              443

 

One interesting argument for the substitution of the railway

for the National Road was given as follows:

"When the relation of the general government to

the states which it unites is justly regarded; when it is

considered it is especially charged with the common de-

fense; that for the attainment of this end and the militia

must be combined in time of war with the regular army

and the state with the United States troops; that mutual

prompt and vigorous concert should mark the efforts of

both for the accomplishment of a common end and the

safety of all; it seems needless to dwell upon the import-

ance of transmitting intelligence between the state and

federal government with the least possible delay and con-

centrating in a period of common danger their joint

efforts with the greatest possible dispatch. It is alike

needless to detail the comparative advantages of a rail-

road and an ordinary turnpike under such circumstances.

A few weeks, nay, a very few days, or hours, may de-

termine the issue of a campaign, though happily for the

United States their distance from a powerful enemy may

limit the contingency of war to destruction short of that

by which the events of an hour had involved ruin of an

empire."

Despite the weight of argument presented by the house com--

mittee their amendment was in turn stricken out, and the bill of

1836 appropriated $600,000 for the National Road, both of the

Senate Amendments which the House Committee had stricken

out being incorporated in the bill.

 

VI.

 

OPERATION AND CONTROL.

The National Road was built by the United States govern-

ment under the supervision of the War Department. Of its build-

ers, whose names will ever live in the annals of the central west,

Brigadier-General Gratiot, Captains Delafield, McKee, Bliss, Bart-

lett Hartzell, Williams, Colquit and Cass and Lieutenants Mans-

• 39
 

444       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

field, Vance and Pickell are best remembered on the eastern divi-

sion. Nearly all became heroes of the Mexican or Civil wars,

McKee falling at Buena Vista, Williams at Monterey, and Mans-

field, then Major-general, at Antietam.

Among the best known supervisors in the west were Commis-

sioners C. W. Weaver, G. Dutton and Jonathan Knight.

The road had been built across the Ohio river but a short

time, when it was realized that a revenue must be raised for its sup-

port from those who traveled upon it. As we have seen, a law

was passed in both houses of Congress, in 1824, authorizing the

government to erect toll gates and charge toll on the National

Road as the states should surrender this right to the govern-

ment.⁴¹ This bill was vetoed by President Monroe, on grounds

already stated, and the road fell into a very bad condition. But

what the National government could not do the individual states

could do, and, consequently, as fast as repairs were completed,

the government surrendered the road to the states through which

it passed. Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia, accepted

completed portions of the road between 1831 and 1834.42  The

Legislatures of Ohio and Pennsylvania at once passed laws con-

cerning the erection of toll gates, Ohio authorizing one gate every

twenty miles, February 4, 1831,43 and Pennsylvania authorizing

the erection of six toll gates by an act passed April 11, of the same

year.⁴⁴

The gates in Pennsylvania were located as follows: Gate No.

1 at the east end of Petersburg. No. 2 near Mt. Washington,

No. 3 near Searights, No. 4 near Beallsville, No. 5 near Wash-

ington, and No. 6 near West Alexander.

The National Road was under the control of commissioners

appointed by the President of the United States, the state legisla-

tures, or governors.⁴⁵ Upon these commissioners lay the task

of repairing the road, which included the making of contracts,

 

41 Laws of Pennsylvania (pamphlet), p. 500.

42 See Appropriation No. 27, p. 143.

43 Laws of Ohio XXIX, p. 76. For specimen advertisement for bids

for erection of toll gates in Ohio see Appendix No. 4, p. 147.

44Laws of Pennsylvania (pamphlet), p. 419.

45 Laws of Pennsylvania (pamphlet), p. 523.

• 40
 

The Old National Road.               445

 

reviewing the work done, and rendering payment for the same.

None of the work of building the road fell on the state officials.

Therefore, in Ohio, two great departments were simultaneously

in operation, the building of the road by the government officials,

and the work of operating and repairing the road, under state offi-

cials. Two commissioners were appointed in Pennsylvania, in

1847, one acting east, and the other west, of the Monongahela

river.⁴⁶ In 1836 Ohio placed all her works of internal improve-

ment under the supervision of a Board of Public Works, into

whose hands the National Road passed.⁴⁷  Special commissioners

were appointed from time to time by the state legislatures to

perform special duties, such as overseeing work being done, audit-

ing accounts or settling disputes.⁴⁸ Two resident engineers were

appointed over the eastern and western divisions of the road in

Ohio, thus doing away with the continual employment and dis-

missal of the most important of all officials. These engineers

made quarterly reports concerning the road's condition.⁴⁹

The road was conveniently divided by the several states into

departments. East of the Ohio river, the Monongahela river was

a division line, the road being divided by it into two divisions.⁵⁰

West of the Ohio the eighty-seventh mile post from Wheeling

was, at one time, a division line between two departments in

Ohio.⁵¹ Later, the road in Ohio was cut up into as many divi-

sions as counties through which it passed.⁵² The work of repair-

ing was let by contract, for which bids had been previously adver-

tised. Contracts were usually let in one mile sections, sometimes

for a longer space, notice of the length being given in the adver-

tisement for bids.  Contractors were compelled to give testi-

monials of good character and reliability; though one contract,

previously quoted, professed to be satisfied with "competent or re-

sponsible individuals only"! Time limit was usually named in

 

46 Idem, p. 477.

47 Laws of Ohio XXXIV, p. 41; XXV, p. 7.

⁴⁸ Idem XXIII, p. 447.

49 Idem XLIII, p 89.

50 Laws of Pennsylvania (pamphlet), p. 477.

51 Laws of Ohio XLIII, p. 140.

52 Idem LVIII, p. 140.

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446       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

the contract, with penalties for failure to complete the work in

time assigned.

The building of the road was hailed with delight by hun-

dreds of contractors and thousands of laborers, who now had

employment offered them worthy of their best labor, and the

work, when well done, stood as a lasting monument to their skill.

Old papers and letters speak frequently of the enthusiasm awak-

ened among the laboring classes by the building of the great

road, and of the lively scenes witnessed in those busy years.

Contractors, who early earned a reputation, followed the road

westward, taking up contract after contract as opportunity offered.

Farmers who lived on the route of the road engaged in the work

when not busy in their fields, and for their labor, and the use

of the teams received good pay. Thus not only in its heyday

did the road prove a benefit to the country through which it

passed, but at the very beginning it became such, and not a little

of the money spent upon it by the government went into the

very pockets from which it came by the sale of land.

The great pride taken by the states in the National Road is

brought out significantly in the laws passed concerning it. Penn-

sylvania and Ohio legislatures passed laws as early as 1828,

and within three days of each other (Pennsylvania, April 7,53

and Ohio, April 11⁵⁴), looking toward the permanent repair and

preservation of the road. There were penalties for breaking

or defacing the mile-stones, culverts, parapet walls and bridges.

A person found guilty of such act of vandalism was "fined in

a sum of not more than five hundred dollars, or be imprisoned

in a dungeon of the jail of the county, and be fed on bread and

water only, not exceeding thirty days, or both, at the discretion

of the court."⁵⁵ There were penalties for allowing the drains

to become obstructed, for premature traveling on unfinished por-

tions of the road bed;56; for permitting a wagon to stand over

53Laws of Pennsylvania (pamphlet), p. 500.

54 Laws of Ohio XXVI, p. 41.

55 Laws of Ohio XXVI, p. 41.

56 Concerning the celerity of opening the road after the completion

of contracts, Captain Weaver, Superintendent in Ohio, made the follow-

ing statement in his report of 1827:

"Upon the first, second and third divisions, with a cover of metal

• 42
 

The Old National Road.                    447

 

night on the road bed, and for locking wheels, except where ice

made this alternative necessary. Local authorities were ordered

to build suitable culverts wherever the roads connected with the

National Road. "Directors" were ordered to be set up, to warn

drivers to turn to the left when passing other teams.⁵⁷ The rates

of toll were ordered to be posted where the public could see them.⁵⁸

"Beacons" were erected along the margin of the road bed to keep

teams from turning aside. Laws were passed forbidding the

removal of these.⁵⁹

The operation of the National Road included the establish-

ment of the toll system, which provided the revenue for keeping

it in repair; and from the tolls the most vital statistics concern-

ing the old road are to be obtained. Immediately upon the passing

of the road into the control of the individual states, toll gates

were authorized, as previously noted. Schedules of tariff were

 

of six inches in thickness, composed of stone reduced to particles of not

more than four ounces in weight, the travel was admitted in the month

of June last. Those divisions that lie eastward of the village of Fairview,

together embrace a distance of very nearly twenty-eight and a half miles,

and were put under contract on the first of July, and first and thirty-first

of August, 1825. This portion of the road has been in pursuance of con-

tracts made last fall and spring, covered with the third stratum of metal

of three inches in thickness, and similarly reduced. On parts of this

distance, say about five miles made up of detached pieces, the travel was

admitted at the commencement of the last winter and has continued on

to this time to render it compact and solid, it is very firm, elastic and

smooth. The effect has been to dissipate the prejudices which existed

very generally, in the minds of the citizens, against the McAdam system,

and to establish full confidence over the former plan of constructing roads.

"On the first day of July, the travel was admitted upon the fourth

and fifth divisions, and upon the second, third, fourth and fifth sections

of the sixth division of the road, in its graduated state. This part of the

line was put under contract on the eleventh day of September, 1826, ter-

minating at a point three miles west of Cambridge, and embraces a dis-

tance of twenty-three and a half miles. On the twenty-first of July the

balance of the line to Zanesville, comprising a distance of a little over

twenty-one miles, was let."

57 Laws of Pennsylvania (pamphlet), p. 419.

58 Laws of Ohio XXVI, p. 41; Laws of Pennsylvania (pamphlet),

p. 102.

59 Idem XXVI, p. 41.

• 43
 

448         Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

published by the various states. The schedule of 1831 in Penn-

sylvania was as follows:

For  every  score                    of             sheep                                                                                                          orhogs ..................................       .06

. " "         cattle             ..................... ................                                                                                                .12

"            "        led or driven horse ....................................                                                                                    .03

"            "                                horse and rider ...................................... .                                                                .04

"            "        sleigh or sled, for each horse or pair of oxen drawing

the  same  ..........................................  .03

" "                dearborn, sulky, chair or chaise with one horse .......... .06

"         chariot, coach, coachee, stage, wagon, phaeton, chaise,

with  two  horses and  four wheels .....................  .12

" either of the carriages last mentioned with four horses .......... .18

"every other carriage of pleasure, under whatever name it may

go, the like sum, according to the number of wheels

and horses drawing the same.

"    "  cart of wagon whose wheels shall exceed two and one-

half inches in breadth, and not exceeding four inches. .04

"    "  horse or pair of oxen drawing the same, and every other

cart or wagon, whose wheels shall exceed four inches,

and not exceed five inches in breadth ................  .03

"    "  horse or pair of oxen drawing the same, and for every

other cart or wagon, whose wheels shall exceed six

inches, and not more than eight inches ..............  .02

"    "  horse or pair of oxen drawing the same, all other carts

or wagons whose wheels shall exceed eight inches in

breadth  .............................................  free

The tolls established the same year in Ohio (see table, page

59) were higher than those charged in Pennsylvania.

The philosophy of the toll system     is patent.  Rates of toll

were determined by the wear on the road. Tolls were charged

in order to keep the road in repair, and, consequently, each

animal or vehicle was taxed in proportion as it damaged the road-

bed. Cattle were taxed twice as heavily as sheep or hogs, and,

according to the tariff of 1845, hogs were taxed twice as much

as sheep.   The tariff on vehicles was determined by the width

of the tires used, for the narrower the tire the more the roadbed

was cut up. Wide tires were encouraged, those over six inches

(later eight) went free, serving practically as rollers,

• 44
 

The Old National Road.                       449

 

TOLLS ON THE NATIONAL ROAD IN OHIO (1831-1900.)

1831   1832    1836    1837  184560 1900

.05

Score sheep or hogs.........                 .10        .05       .061/4    .0614     .10       .12

Score cattle ...............                      .20        .10        .121/2    .121/2    .20        .25

Every horse, mule or ass, led

or driven .............     .03                           .01½          .02      .03      .03    .05

Every horse and rider ........ .061/4                     .04             .061/4      .061/4         .05                .06

Every sled or sleigh drawn by

one horse or ox...........  .12½                          .061/4       .08             .06                .05                .12

Every horse in addition....... .061/4                   .04             .04             .04                .05                .06

Every dearborn, sulky, chair

or chaise, 1 horse .........  .121/2                   .08             .121/2      .12½            .10                .12

Every horse in addition....... .061/4                   .04             .061/4      .04                .05                .06

Every chariot, coach, coachee,

horses ....................                   .183/4  .121/2 .183/4    .183/4    ...      .30

Every horse in addition ......                     .061/4       .03             .061/4         .061/4         ...                .12

Every vehicle wheels under 2½

in. in breadth .............  .121/2  ...   .121/2    .10     ...    .

Every vehicle wheels under 4

in. in breadth .............. 061/4                        .061/4       .08             .08

Every horse drawing same ... .03                        .02             .04             .05     ...    ...

Every vehicle wheels exceed-

ing four and not exceeding

five inches ................ .04    ..    ...     ..

Every vehicle wheels exceed-

ing four and not exceeding

six  inches  ................ ...  .02    .04     .061/4

Every horse or ox drawing

same .....................  .02    .02    .02     .05

Every vehicle wheels exceed-

ing  six  inches ............    .. ...           .04     ...    ...

Every person occupying seat

in  mail stage..............  .04  .03

Estimates differed in various states but averaged up quite

evenly. To the rising generation, to whom toll gates are almost

unknown, a study of the toll system affords novel entertainment,

helping one to realize something of one of the most serious

 

60 Tolls for 1845 were based on number of horses, each additional

horse being taxed about .20. Tolls for 1900 (in Franklin county, Ohio)

practically identical with tolls of 1845.

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450       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

questions of public economics of two generations ago. Toll

gates averaged one in eighteen or twenty miles in Pennsylvania

and one in ten miles in Ohio, with tolls a little higher than half

the rate in Pennsylvania.

Toll gate keepers were appointed by the Governor in the

early days in Ohio,⁶¹ but, on most of the road, by the commission-

ers. These keepers received a salary which was deducted from

their collections, the remainder being turned over to the commis-

sioners. The salary established in Ohio in 1832 was $180,000

per annum.⁶² In 1836 it was increased to $200,000 per annum,

and toll keepers were also allowed to retain five per cent.

of all tolls received above one thousand dollars.63 In

1845 toll keepers were ordered to make returns on the first

Monday in each month, and the allowance of their per cent. on

receipts over one thousand dollars was cut off, leaving their

salary at $200.00 per annum.⁶⁴  Equally perplexing with the

question of just tolls was found to be the question of determining

what and who should have free use of the National Road. This

list was increased at various times, and, in most states, including

the following at one time or another: Persons going to, or

returning from public worship, muster, common place of business

on farm or woodland, funeral, mill, place of election, common

place of trading or marketing within the county in which they

resided. This included persons, wagons, carriages and horses

or oxen drawing the same. No toll was charged school children

or clergymen, or for passage of stage and horses carrying United

States mail, or any wagon or carriage laden with United States

property, or cavalry, troops, arms or military stores of the United

States, or any single state, or for persons on duty in the military

service of the United States, or of the militia of any single state.

In Pennsylvania, a certain stage line made the attempt to carry

passengers by the toll gates free, taking advantage of the clauses

allowing free passage of the United States mail by putting

 

61 Laws of Ohio XXX, p. 321.

62Idem XXX, p. 8.

63 Idem XXXIV, p. 111.

64Idem XLIII, p. 89.

• 46
 

The Old National Road.               451

 

a mail sack on each passenger coach. The stage was halted and

the matter taken into court, where the case was decided against

the stage company, and persons traveling with mail coaches were

compelled to pay toll.65 Ohio took advantage of Pennsylvania's

experience and was forward in passing a law that passengers

on stage coaches should pay toll.⁶⁶ Pennsylvania exempted per-

sons hauling coal for home consumption from paying toll.⁶⁷ Many

varied and curious attempts to evade payment of tolls were made,

and laws were passed inflicting heavy fine upon all convicted

of such malefaction. In Ohio, toll gate keepers were empowered

to arrest those suspected with such attempts, and, upon convic-

tion, the fine went into the road fund of the county wherein the

offense occurred.⁶⁸

Persons making long trips on the road could pay toll for the

entire distance and receive a certificate guaranteeing free passage

to their destination.69  Compounding rates were early put in

force applying, in Ohio, to persons residing within eight miles

of the road, 70 the radius being extended, later, to ten.⁷¹ Pas-

sengers in the stages were counted by the toll gate keepers and

the company operating the stage charged with the toll. At the

end of each month, stage companies settled with the authorities.

Thus it became possible for the stage drivers to deceive the gate

keepers, and save their companies large sums of money. Drivers

were compelled to declare the number of passengers in their stage,

and in the event of failing to do so, gate keepers were allowed to

charge the company for as many passengers as the stage could

contain.72

Stage lines were permitted to compound for yearly passage

of stages over the road and the large companies took advantage

of the provision, though the passengers were counted by the

 

65 Laws of Pennsylvania (pamphlet), pp. 534, 164, 430-1.

66 Laws of Ohio XXXV, p. 7.

67 Laws of Pennsylvania (pamphlet), p. 353.

68 Laws of Ohio XXX, p. 8.

69 Idem XXIX, p. 76.

70 Idem XXX, p. 8.

71 Idem XXX, p. 7.

72 Idem XXXII, p 265; XXX, p. 7.

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452        Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

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The Old National Road.              453

 

gate keepers. It may be seen that gate keepers were in a position

to embezzle large sums of money if they were so minded, and

it is undoubted that this was done in more than one instance.

Indeed, with a score and a half of gates, and a great many travel-

ing on computation rates, it would have been remarkable if some

employed in all those years during which the toll system was in

general operation did not steal. But this is lifting the veil from

the good old days.

As will be seen later the amounts handled by the gate keepers

were no small sums. In the best days of the road the average

amount handled by toll gate keepers in Pennsylvania

was about $1800.00 per annum. In Ohio, with gates

every ten miles, the average (reported) collection was about

$2,000.00 in the best years. It is difficult to reconcile the state-

ment made by Mr. Searight concerning the comparative amount

of business done on various portions of the National Road, with

the figures he himself quotes. He says: "It is estimated that

two-fifths of the trade and travel of the road were diverted at

Brownsville, and fell into the channel furnished at that point

by the slack water navigation of the Monongahela river, and a

like proportion descended the Ohio from Wheeling, and the

remaining fifth continued on the road to Columbus, Ohio, and

points further west. The travel west of Wheeling was chiefly

local, and the road presented scarcely a tithe of the thrift, push,

whirl and excitement which characterized it east of that point."73

on another page Mr. Searight gives the account of the old time

superintendents of the road in Pennsylvania in its most pros-

perous era, one dating from November 10, 1840, to November

1O, 1841,⁷4 the other from May 1, 1843, to December 31, 1844^.75

In the first of these the amount of tolls received from the eastern

division of the road (east of the Monongahela) is two thousand

dollars less than the amount received from the western division!

Even after the amounts paid by the two great stage companies

are deducted, a balance of over a thousand dollars is left in favor

of the division west of the Monongahela river. In the second

73 The Old Pike, p. 298.

⁷⁴ Idem, p. 362-6.

75 Idem, p. 367-70.

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454       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

report, $4,242.37 more was received on the western division of

the road than on the eastern, and even after the amounts received

from the stage companies are deducted, the receipts from the

eastern division barely exceed those of the western. How can

it be that "two-fifths of the trade and travel of the road were

diverted at Brownsville"? And the further west Mr. Searight

goes, the more does he seem to err, for the road west of the Ohio

river, instead of showing "scarcely a tithe of the thrift, push,

whirl and excitement which characterized it east of that point"

seems to have done a greater business than the portion east of

the Ohio river. For instance, when the road was completed as

many miles in Ohio as were built in Pennsylvania, the returns

from the portion in Ohio (1833) was $12,259.42-4 (in the very

first year that the road was completed), while in Pennsylvania

the receipts in 1840 were only $18,429.25, after the road had

been used for twenty-two years. In the same year (1840) Ohio

collected $51,364.67 from her National Road toll gates-about

three times the amount collected in Pennsylvania. Again Mr.

Searight gives a Pennsylvania commissioner's receipts for the

twenty months beginning May 1, 1843, as $37,109.11, while the

receipts from the road in Ohio in only the twelve months of

1843 was $32,157.02! At the same time the tolls charged in

Ohio were a trifle in excess of those imposed in Pennsylvania,

therefore, Ohio's advantage must be curtailed slightly. On the

other hand it should be taken into consideration that the National

Road in Pennsylvania was almost the only road across the portion

of the state through which it ran, while in Ohio other roads were

used, especially clay roads running parallel with the National

Road, by drivers of sheep and pigs, as an aged informant testifies.

As Mr. Searight has said, the travel of the road west of the Ohio

may have been chiefly of a local nature, yet his seeming error

concerning the relative amount of travel on the two divisions

in his own state, makes his statements less trustworthy in the

matter. Still it can be readily believed that a great deal of con-

tinental trade did pass down the Monongahela after traversing

the eastern division of the road and that increased local trade

on the western division rendered the toll receipts of both divisions

quite equal. Local travel on the eastern division may have been

• 50
 

The Old National Road.                      455

light, comparatively speaking. Mr. Searight undoubtedly meant

that two-fifths of the through trade stopped at Brownsville and

Wheeling and one-fifth only went on into Ohio. The total amount

of tolls received by Pennsylvania from all roads, canals, etc., in

1836 was about $50,000, while Ohio received a greater sum than

that in 1838 from tolls on the National Road alone, and the road

was not completed further west than Springfield.

A study of the amounts of tolls taken in from       the National

Road by the various states will show at once the volume of

the business done. Ohio received from the National Road in

forty-seven years nearly a million and a quarter dollars.          An

itemized list of this great revenue is interesting, showing, as

it does, the varying fortunes of the great road:

 

YEAR                                                   TOLLS                         YEAR                                                    TOLLS

1831   .............                 $2,777 16         1856     .............                6,105 00

1832 .    ............               9,067 99           1857     .............                6,105 00

1833   ............                   12,259 42-4      1858 .         ............           6,105 00

1834 .    ............               12,693 65         1859     .............                5,551 36

1835    .........                    16,442 26         1860 .         ............           11,221 74 .

1836    .........                    27,455 13         1861     .............                21,492 41

1837 .    ............                39,843 35         1862     .............                19,000 00

1838     .........                    50,413 17         1863     .............                20,000 00

1839     .........                    62,496 10         1864 .    ............                20,000 00

1840     .........                    51,364 67         1865     .............                20,000 00

1841     .........                    36,951 33         1866     .........                    19,000 00

1842     .........                    44,656 18         1867     .............                20,631 34

1843     .........                    32,157 02         1868     .............                18,934 49

1844 .    ........                    30,801 13         1869     .............                20,577 04

1845   .........                      31,439 38         1870     .............                19,635 75

1846 .    ........                    28,946 21         1871 .............                    19,244 00

1847     .............                42,614 59         1872   ...........                    18,002 09

1848     ...........                  49,025 66         1873 .............                    17,940 37

1849     .............                46,253 38         1874     .............                17,971 21

1850     .............                37,060 11         1875     .............                17,265 12

1851     .............                44,063 65         1876     .............                9,601 68

1852 .............                    36,727 26         1877     .............                288 91

1853  .............                   35,354  40

1854 .        ............            18,154 59          Total ...... $1,139,795 30-4

1855     .............                6,105 00

About 1850 Ohio began leasing portions of the National

Road to private companies.       In 1854 the entire distance from

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456       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

Springfield to the Ohio river was leased for a term of ten years

for $6,105 a year. Commissioners were appointed to view the

road continually and make the lessees keep it in good condition

as when it came into their hands.⁷⁶ Before the contract had half

expired, the Board of Public Works was ordered (April, 1859)

to take the road to relieve the lessees.⁷⁷  In 1870 the proper

limits of the road were designated to be "a space of eighty feet

in width, and where the road passed over a street in any city

of the second class, the width should conform to the width of

that street" and such cities should own it so long as it was

kept in repair.⁷⁸

Finally, in 1876, the state of Ohio authorized commissioners

of the several counties to take so much of the road as lay in

each county under their control. It was stipulated that toll

gates should not average more than one in ten miles, and that

no toll be collected between Columbus and the Ohio Central

Lunatic Asylum. The county commissioners were to complete

any unfinished portions of the road.⁷⁹

Later (1877) the rates of toll were left to the discretion of

the county commissioners, with this provision:

"That when the consent of the Congress of the

United States shall have been obtained thereto, that the

county commissioners of any county having a popula-

tion under the last Federal census of more than fifteen

thousand six hundred and less than fifteen thousand

six hundred and fifty shall have the power when they

deem it for the best interest of the road, or when the

people whom the road accommodates wish to submit

to the legal voters of the county, at any regular or

special election, the question, Shall the National Road

be a free turnpike road? And when the question is so

submitted, and a majority of all those voting on said

question, shall vote yes, it shall be the duty of said

 

76 Laws of Ohio LII, p. 126.

77 Idem LVI, p. 159.

78 Idem LXX, p. 194.

79 Idem LXXIII, p. 105.

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The Old National Road.                      457

 

commissioners to sell gates, toll-houses and any other

property belonging to the road to the highest bidder,

the proceeds of the sale to be applied to the repair of

the road, and declare so much of the road as lies within

their county a free turnpike road to be kept in repair

in the way and manner provided by law for the repair of

free turnpikes."80

The receipts from the Franklin county, Ohio, toll gate, now

in operation, for the year 1899 was as follows:

January      .........................................                                       $36              00

February    ............' ................... ........                                      32 80

M arch       ...........................................                                     39 90

April ............................................                                            80 75

May    ............................................                                           67 25

June    ............................................                                           54 85

July     .............................................                                          47 15

August       ........................................ .                                      35 75

September  .......................................                                         29 27

October .........................................                                           29 26

November   .......................................                                       35 05

December .......................................                                          34 05

 

Total  .....................................                                       $522            08

It will be noted that April was the heaviest month of the

year. The gate keeper receives a salary of $30.00 per month.

It is hardly necessary to say that the great American high-

way was never a self-supporting institution. The fact that it

was estimated that the yearly expense of repairing the Ohio

division of the road was $100,000.00 while the greatest amount

of tolls collected in its most prosperous year (1839) was hardly

half that amount ($62,496. 10) proves this conclusively. Inves-

tigation into the records of other states shows the same condition.

In the most prosperous days of the road the tolls in Maryland

(1837) amounted to $9,953.00 and the expenditures $9,660.5181

In 1839 a "balance" was recorded of $1,509.08, but a like amount

was charged up on the debtor side of the account. The receipts

reported each year in the Auditor's reports of the state of Ohio

 

80 Laws of Ohio LXXIV, p. 62.

81"Report of the Superintendent of the National Road, with Ab-

stract of Tolls for the fiscal year" (1837).

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458       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

show that equal amounts were expended yearly upon the road.

As early as 1832 the Governor of Ohio was authorized to borrow

money to repair the road in that state.⁸²

 

VII.

 

STAGE COACHES, AND FREIGHTERS.

The great work of building and keeping in repair the Na-

tional Road, and of operating it, developed a race of men as

unknown before its era as afterward. For the real life of the

road, however, one will look to the days of its prime-to those

who passed over its stately stretches and dusty coils as stage and

mail coach drivers, express carriers and "wagoners," and the

tens of thousands of passengers and immigrants who composed

the public which patronized the great highway. This was the

real life of the road-coaches numbering as many as twenty

traveling in a single line; wagon-house yards where a hundred

tired horses rest over night besides their great loads; hotels

where seventy transient guests have been served breakfast in a

single morning; a life made cheery by the echoing horns of hurry-

ing stages; blinded by the dust of droves of cattle numbering into

the thousands; a life noisy with the satisfactory creak and crunch

of the wheels of great wagons carrying six and eight thousand

pounds of freight east or west.

The revolution of society since those days could not have

been more surprising. The change has been so great it is a won-

der that men deign to count their gain by the same numerical

system. As Macauley has said, we do not travel to-day, we

merely "arrive." You are hardly a traveler now unless you cross

a continent. Travel was once an education. This is growing

less and less true, perhaps, with the passing years. Fancy a jour-

ney from St. Louis to New York in the old coaching days, over the

National Road and the old York roads. How many persons the

traveler met! How many interesting and instructive conversa-

tions were held with fellow travelers through the long hours;

What customs, characters, foibles, amusing incidents would be

noticed and remembered, ever afterward furnishing the informa-

 

82 Laws of Ohio XXX, p. 8.

• 54
 

The Old National Road.             459

 

tion necessary to help one talk well and the sympathy necessary to

render one capable of listening to others. The traveler often sat

at the table with statesmen whom the nation honored, as well

as with stage coach drivers whom a nation knew for their skill and

prowess over six galloping horses. Henry Clays and "Red" Bun-

tings dined together, and each made the other wiser, if not better.

The greater the gulf grows between the rich and poor, the more

ignorant do both become, particularly the rich. There was un-

doubtedly a monotony in stage coach journeying, but the con-

tinual views of the landscape, the ever-fresh air, the constantly

passing throngs of countless description, made such traveling an

experience unknown to us "arrivers" of to-day. How fast it has

been forgotten that travel means seeing people rather than things.

The age of sight seeing has superseded that of traveling. How

few of us can say with the New Hampshire sage, "We have trav-

eled a great deal 'in Concord.'" Splendidly are the old coaching

days described by Thackeray who caught their spirit:

"The Island rang, as yet, with the tooting horns

and rattling teams of mail coaches; a gay sight was the

road in merry England in those days, before steam en-

gines arose and flung its hostelry and chivalry over.

To travel in coaches, to drive coaches, to know coachmen

and guards, to be familiar with inns along the road, to

laugh with jolly hostess in the bar, to chuck the pretty

chambermaid under the chin, was the delight of men

who were young not very long ago. The road was an

institution, the ring was an institution. Men rallied

around then; and, not without a kind of conservatism,

expatiated upon the benefits with which they endowed

the country, and the evils which would occur when they

should be no more:-decay of English spirit, decay of

manly pluck, ruin of the breed of horses, and so forth.

To give or take a black eye was not unusual or deroga-

tory in a gentleman; to drive a stage coach the enjoy-

ment, the emulation of generous youth. Is there any

young fellow of the present time who aspires to take the

place of a stoker? You see occasionally in Hyde Park

one dismal old drag with a lonely driver. Where are you,

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460       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

charioteers ? Where are you, 0 rattling Quicksilver, O

swift Defiance? You are passed by racers stronger and

swifter than you. Your lamps are out, and the music

of your horns has died away.^"83

In the old coaching days the passenger and mail coaches

were operated very much like the railways of to-day. A vast

network of lines covered the land. Great companies owned hun-

dreds of stages operating on innumerable routes, competing with

other companies. These rival stage companies fought each other

at times with great bitterness, and competed, as railways do

to-day, in lowering tariff and in out-doing each other in points

of speed and accommodation.⁸⁴ New inventions and appliances

were eagerly sought in the hope of securing a larger share of

public patronage. This competition extended into every phase

of the business-fast horses, comfortable coaches, well known

and companionable drivers, favorable connections.

However, competition, as is always the case, sifted the compe-

titors down to a small number. Companies which operated upon

the National Road between Indianapolis and Cumberland became

distinct in character and catered to a steady patronage which

had its distinctive characteristics and social tone. This was in

part determined by the taverns which the various lines patronized.

Each line ordinarily stopped at separate taverns in every town, as

our railways formerly entered individual depots. There were

also found Grand Union taverns on the Old National Road. Had

this system of communication not been abandoned, coach lines

would have gone through the same experience that the railways

have, and for very similar reasons.

The largest coach line on the National Road was the National

Road Stage Company, whose most prominent member was Lucius

W. Stockton. The headquarters of this line was at the National

House on Morgantown street, Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The

principal rival of the National Road Stage Company was the

"Good Intent" line, owned by Shriver, Steele and Company, with

 

83 "The Newcomes," pp. 132-133.

84 In one instance a struggle between two stage coach lines in In-

diana resulted in carrying passengers from Richmond to Cincinnati for

fifty cents. The regular price was five dollars.

• 56
 

The Old National Road.                461

headquarters at the McClelland House, Uniontown. The Ohio

National Stage Company, with headquarters at Columbus, Ohio,

operated on the western division of the road. There were many

smaller lines, as the "Landlords," "Pilot," "Pioneer," "Defiance,"

"June Bug," etc.

Some of the first lines of stages were operated in sections,

each section having different proprietors who could sell out at

any time. The greater lines were constantly absorbing smaller

lines and extending their ramifications in all directions. It will

be seen there were trusts in the "good old days" of stage coaches,

when smaller firms were "gobbled up" and "driven out" as hap-

pens to-day, and will ever happen in mundane history, despite the

nonsense of political garblers. One of the largest stage com-

panies on the old road was that of Neil, Moore and Company of

Columbus, which operated hundreds of stages throughout Ohio,

It was unable to compete with the Ohio National Stage Com-

pany to which it finally sold out, Mr. Neil becoming one of the

magnates of the latter company, which was, in its day, a greater

trust than anything known in Ohio to-day.⁸⁵

To know what the old coaches really were, one should see

and ride in one. It is doubtful if a single one now remains intact.

Here and there inquiry will raise the rumor of an old coach still

standing on wheels, but if the rumor is traced to its source, it

will be found that the chariot was sold to a circus or wild west

show or has been utterly destroyed. The demand for the old

stages has been quite lively on the part of the wild west shows.

These old coaches were handsome affairs in their day-

painted and decorated profusely without, and lined within with

soft silk plush.86 There were ordinarily three seats inside, each

capable of holding three passengers. Upon the driver's high

outer seat was room for one more passenger, a fortunate posi-

 

85 An old Ohio National Stage driver, Mr. Samuel B. Baker of

Kirkersville, Ohio, is authority for the statement that the Ohio National

Stage Company put a line of stages on the Wooster-Wheeling mail and

freight route and "ran out" the line which had been doing all the business

previously, after an eight months' hitter contest.

86 The following appears in the Ohio State Journal of August 12,

1837:-A SPLENDID COACH -We have looked at a Coach now finishing

off in the shop of Messrs. Evans & Pinney of this city, for the Ohio Stage

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462       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

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The Old National Road.                   463

tion in good weather. The best coaches like their counterparts

on the railways of to-day, were named; the names of states,

warriors, statesmen, generals, nations and cities, besides fanciful

names, such as "Jewess," "Ivanhoe," "Sultana," "Loch Lomond,"

were called into requisition.

The first coaches to run on the old National Road were long,

awkward affairs, without braces or springs, and with seats placed

crosswise. The door was in front, and passengers, on entering,

had to climb over the seats. These first coaches were made at Lit-

tle Crossings, Pennsylvania.

The body of succeeding coaches was placed upon thick, wide

leathern straps which served as springs and which were called

"through braces."   At either end of the body was the driver's

boot and the baggage boot. The first "Troy" coach put on the

road came in 1829. It was a great novelty, but some hundreds

of them were soon throwing the dust of Maryland and Pennsyl-

vania into the air. Their cost then was between four and six

hundred dollars. The harness used on the road was of giant pro-

portions. The backbands were often fifteen inches wide, and the

hip bands, ten. The traces were chains with short thick links

and very heavy.

But the passenger traffic of the Old National Road played

the same relation to the freight traffic as passenger traffic does to

freight on the modern railway-a small item, financially con-

sidered. It was for the great wagons and their wagoners to haul

over the mountains and distribute throughout the west the pro-

ducts of mill and factory and the rich harvests of the fields.

And this great freight traffic created a race of men of its own,

strong and daring, as they well had need to be. The fact that

teamsters of these "mountain ships" had taverns or "wagon

 

Company, and intended we believe for the inspection of the Post-Master

General, who sometime since offered premiums for models of the most

approved construction, which is certainly one of the most perfect and

splendid specimens of workmanship in this line that we have ever beheld,

and would be a credit to any Coach Manufactory in the United States.

It is aimed, in its construction, to secure the mail in the safest manner

possible, under lock and key, and to accommodate three outside pas-

sengers under a comfortable and complete protection from the weather.

It is worth going to see."

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464       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

houses" of their own, where they stopped, tended to separate them

into a class by themselves. These wagon houses were far more

numerous than the taverns along the road, being found as often

as one in every mile or two. Here, in the commodious yards,

the weary horses and their swarthy Jehus slept in the open air.

In winter weather the men slept on the floors of the wagon

houses. In summer many wagoners carried their own cooking

utensils. In the suburbs of the towns along the road they would

pull their teams out into the roadside and pitch camp, sending into

the village to replenish their stores.

The bed of the old road freighter was long and deep, bending

upward at the bottom at either end. The lower broad side was

painted blue, with a movable board inserted above, painted red.

The top covering was white canvas drawn over broad wooden

bows. Many of the wagoners hung bells of a shape much similar

to dinner bells, on a thin iron arch over the hames of the harness.

Often the number of bells indicated the prowess of a teamster's

horses, as the custom prevailed, in certain parts, that when a

team became fast, or was unable to make the grade, the wagon,

rendering the necessary assistance, appropriated all the bells of

the luckless team.

The wheels of the freighters were of a size proportionate

to the rest of the wagon. The first wagons used on the old roads

had narrow rims, but it was not long before the broad rims,

or "broad tread wagons," came into general use by those who

made a business of freighting. The narrow rims were always

used by farmers, who, during the busiest season on the road,

deserted their farms for the high wages temporarily to be made,

and who in consequence were dubbed "sharp shooters" by the

regulars. The width of the broad tread wheels was four inches.

As will be noted, tolls for broad wheels was less than for the

narrow ones which tended to cut the roadbed more deeply. One

ingenious inventor planned to build a wheel with a rim wide

enough to pass the toll gates free. The model was a wagon

which had the rear axle four inches shorter than the front, making

a track eight inches in width. Nine horses were hitched to this

wagon, three abreast. The team caused much comment, but

was not voted practicable.

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The Old National Road.                  465

The loads carried on the mountain ships were very large.

An Ohio man, McBride by name, in the winter of 1848 went

over the mountains with seven horses, taking a load of nine

hogsheads weighing an average of one thousand pounds each.

The following description is from the St. Clairsville (Ohio)

Gazette of 1835:

"It was a familiar saying with Sam Patch that

some things can be done easier than others, and this fact

was forcibly brought to our mind by seeing a six-horse

team pass our office on Wednesday last, laden with

eleven hogsheads of tobacco, destined for Wheeling.

Some speculation having gone forth as to its weight, the

driver was induced to test it on the hayscales in this

place, and it amounted to 13,280 lbs. gross weight-

net weight 10,375. This team    (owned by General C.

Hoover of this county) took the load into Wheeling

with ease, having a hill to ascend from the river to the

level of the town, of eight degrees. The Buckeyes of

Belmont may challenge competition in this line."

Teamsters received good wages, especially when trade was

brisk. From Brownsville to Cumberland they often received

$1.25 a hundred; $2.25 per hundred has been paid for a load

hauled from Wheeling to Cumberland.⁸⁷ The stage drivers

 

87 Before the era of the National Road the price for hauling the

goods emigrants over Braddock's Road was very high. One emigrant

paid $5.33 per hundred for hauling "women and goods" from Alex-

andria, Virginia, to the Monongahela. Six dollars per hundred weight

was charged one emigrant from Hagarstown, Md., to Terre Haute,

Indiana. An elaborate description of the freighters of our 'Middle Age'

is given by Mr. Thomas Wilson of the United States National Museum

in a delightful article entitled "The Arkansas Traveller", Ohio Archaeo-

logical and Historical Society Publications Vol. VIII, pp. 296-300.

Among other things the following is of special interest, written of a road

parallel to the National road in Ohio: "The wagons were immense lum-

bering machines with broad tires three to five inches in width and an inch

in thickness. The boxes or bodies were like unto the latter "Prairie

Schooners;" the keel was not straight as is usual at the present day, but

highly curved, being low in the center or middle of the wagon and high

in the air at the front and back. The body was of framework mortised

together, the slats, both horizontal and perpendicular, conformed in curve

• 61
 

466        Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

received twelve dollars a month with board and lodging. Usually

the stage drivers had one particular route between two towns

about twelve miles apart on which they drove year after year,

and learned as well as trainmen, know their "run" to-day. The

life was hard, but the dash and spirit rendered it as fascinating

as railway life is now.

 

to their respective body-pieces and standards in that they increased and

made the top end of the body to be higher and longer than was the bot-

tom of the foundation. (See cut.) They were provided with bows and

covered with sail-cloth, an efficient protection against rain. The wagon

had what was then called a "patent Lock," now so common as to have

lost the terms "patent" and "lock" both, and become a "brake." The

handle of the brake was managed by the driver from the ground. Occa-

sionally it swung back and forth over the hind wheel and was pulled down

by the weight of the driver and fastened with a chain to a spike or hook;

occasionally it was at the rear of the wagon and was pushed from side to

side and kept in place by a ratchet. The pole of these wagons was known

as "stiff," that it is it was fastened solid into the front hounds and did

not fall to the ground, nor was it supported by the horses' necks. It

was only used to steer and hold back, for which purpose long chains were

fastened to its ends and attached by breast-chains to the hames.

The bodies of these wagons were set on bolsters and, of course,

without springs. This, with their curve, brought them low in the center

and gave the front wheels but little play in turning. The great length

and weight of the wagon, with its six horses, made it a machine as

unwieldy to turn or steer as a steamboat. The six horses were hitched

to the wagon thus: the wheel horses with double and single trees

fastened to the tongue and hounds by means of hammer and hammer-

strap, the former serving as a bolt or pin; the middle leaders were hitched

to double and single trees which hung by the middle hook in the iron

loop at the end of the pole. From the same loop the lead-chain was

hooked which, stretched between the middle leaders, received the hook

of the double trees of the leaders. The drivers used but a single line

fastened to the bridle-rein of the near lead horse. The lefthand side was

the "near" side, the other the "off" side. The middle span of horses

were the "middle leaders," the rear ones the "wheel horses." The near

wheel horse carried the saddle for the driver, on which he could mount

as occasion demanded, but he rarely did. In driving, he walked by the

side of the near wheel horse, carrying in his hand his Loudoun County

black-snake whip, the single line attached to the lead horse being con-

tinually within reach. The rear end of the line was buckled to the hame

of the wheel horse, high up, and was about long enough to clear the

ground as it swung; when it was not in use its slack was hung over the

• 62
 

The Old National Road.                467

 

Far better time was made by these old conveyances than

many realize. Ten miles an hour was an ordinary rate of speed.

A stage driver was dismissed more quickly for making slow time,

than for being guilty of intoxication, though either offense was

considered worthy of dismissal. The way bills handed to the

drivers with the reins often bore the words "Make this time

or we'll find some one who will." Competition in the matter

of speed was as intense as it is now in the days of steam. A

thousand legends of these rivalries still linger in story and tra-

dition.  Defeated competitors were held accountable by their

companies and the loads or condition of their horses were seldom

accepted as excuses. Couplets were often conjured up containing

some brief story of defeat with a cutting sting for the vanquished

driver:

 

"If you take a seat in Stockton's line

You are sure to be passed by Pete Burdine."

or

"Said Billy Willis to Peter Burdine

You had better wait for the oyster line."

 

In September, 1837, Van Buren's presidential message was

carried from Baltimore (Canton Depot) to Philadelphia, a dis-

tance of one hundred and forty miles, in four hours and forty-

three minutes. Seventy miles of the journey was done by rail,

three by boat, and eighty-seven by horse. The seventy-three by

rail and boat occupied one hundred and seventeen minutes and

the eighty-seven by horse occupied the remaining two hundred

and twenty-six minutes, or each mile in about two minutes and

a half. This time was considered remarkable and shows how

little time was lost, even in the relay system. And that message

was not light, as any one may see by perusing its contents.

The news of the death of William the Fourth of England,

which occurred June 20, 1837, was printed in Columbus, Ohio,

 

hame. The line was used to guide the horses, more as a signal than by

actual force. To pull it steadily without jerk means for the lead horse

to come to "haw" (to the left); two or three short jerks meant for him

to go "gee' (to the right). By these signals, with the aid of his voice,

the driver had perfect command of his team."

• 63
 

468        Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

papers July 28. It was not until 1847 that the capital of Ohio was

connected with the world by telegraph wires.

Time tables of passenger coaches were published as railway

time tables are to-day. The following is a National Road time

table printed at Columbus for the winter of 1835-1836:

COACH LINES.

WINTER ARRANGEMENT.

THE OLD STAGE LINES with all their different connections throughout

the state, continue as heretofore.

THE MAIL PILOT LINE, leaves Columbus for Wheeling daily, at 6

A. M., reaching Zanesville at 1 P. M. and Wheeling at 6 A. M. next day,

through in 24 hours, allowing five hours repose at St. Clairsville.

THE GOOD INTENT LINE, leaves Columbus for Wheeling, daily at 1

P. M., through in 20 hours, reaching Wheeling in time to connect with

the stages for Baltimore and Philadelphia.

THE MAIL PILOT LINE, leaves Columbus daily, for Cincinnati at 8

A. M., through in 36 hours, allowing six hours repose at Springfield.

Extras furnished on the above routes at any hour when required.

THE EAGLE LINE, leaves Columbus every other day, for Cleveland,

through in 40 hours, via. Mt. Vernon and Wooster.

THE TELEGRAPH LINE leaves Columbus for Sandusky City, every

other day at 5 A. M., through in two days, allowing rest at Marion, and

connecting there with the line to Detroit, via. Lower Sandusky.

THE PHOENIX LINE, leaves Columbus every other day, for Huron,

via Mt. Vernon and Norwalk, through in 48 hours.

THE DAILY LINE OF MAIL COACHES, leaves Columbus, for Chilli-

cothe at 5 A. M., connecting there with the line to Maysville, Ky., and

Portsmouth.

For seats apply at the General Stage Office, next door to Col.

Noble's National Hotel.

T. C. ACHESON, for the proprietor.

The following advertisement of an opposition line, running

in 1837, is interesting:

OPPOSITION!

DEFIANCE FAST LINE COACHES.

DAILY

FROM WHEELING, VA. to Cincinnati, O. via Zanesville, Columbus,

Springfield and intermediate points.

Through in less time than any other line.

"By opposition the people are well served."

The Defiance Fast Line connects at Wheeling, Va. with Reside &

Co.'s Two Superior daily lines to Baltimore, McNair and Co.'s Mail Coach

• 64
 

The Old National Road.                    469

 

line, via Bedford, Chambersburg and the Columbia and Harrisburg Rail

Roads to Philadelphia, being the only direct line from Wheeling-: also

with the only coach line from Wheeling to Pittsburg, via Washington,

Pa., and with numerous cross lines in Ohio.

The proprietors having been released on the 1st inst. from burthen

of carrying the great mail, (which will retard any line) are now enabled

to run through in a shorter time than any other line on the road. They

will use every exertion to accommodate the traveling public. With stock

infinitely superior to any on the road, they flatter themselves they will

be able to give general satisfaction; and believe the public are aware, from

past experience, that a liberal patronage to the above line will prevent

impositions in high rates of fare by any stage monopoly.

The proprietors of the Defiance Fast Line are making the necessary

arrangements to stock the Sandusky and Cleveland Routes also from

Springfield to Dayton-which will be done during the month of July.

All baggage and parcels only received at the risk of the owners

thereof.

JNO. W. WEAVER & Co.,

GEO. W. MANYPENNY,

JNO. YONTZ,

From  Wheeling to Columbus, Ohio.

JAMES H. BACON,

WILLIAM RIANHARD,

F. M. WRIGHT,

WILLLIAM H. FIFE,

From Columbus to Cincinnati.

 

There was always danger in riding at night, especially over

the mountains, where sometimes a mis-step would cost a life.

The following item    from  a letter to a newspaper in 1837 tells

of such an accident:

"One of the Reliance line of stages, from Frederick to the

West, passed through here on its way to Cumberland. About

ten o'clock the ill-fated coach reached a small spur of the moun-

tain, running to the Potomac, and between this place and Han-

cock, termed Millstone Point, where the driver mistaking the

track reined his horses too near the edge of the precipice, and in

the twinkling of an eye, coach, horses, driver and passengers

were precipitated upward of thirty-five feet onto a bed of rock

below - the coach was dashed to pieces, and two of the horses

killed - literally smashed.

"A respectable elderly lady of the name of Clarke, of Louis-

• 65
 

470       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

ville, Kentucky, and a negro child were crushed to death - and

a man so dreadfully mangled that his life is flickering on his lips

only. His face was beaten to a mummy. The other passengers

and the driver were woefully bruised, but it is supposed they

are out of danger. There were seven in number.

"I cannot gather that any blame was attached to the driver.

It is said that he was perfectly sober; but he and his horses

were new to this road, and the night was foggy and very dark."

An act of the legislature of Ohio required that every stage

coach used for the conveyance of passengers in the night should

have two good lamps affixed in the usual manner, and subjected

the owner to a fine of from $10.00 to $30.00 for every forty-

eight hours the coach was not so provided. Drivers of coaches

who should drive in the night when the track could not be

distinctly seen without having the lamps lighted were subject

to a forfeiture of from $5.00 to $10.00 for each offense. The

same act provided that drivers guilty of intoxication, so as to

endanger the safety of passengers, on written notice of a pas-

senger on oath, to the owner or agent, should be forthwith dis-

charged, and subjected the owner continuing to employ that

driver more than three days after such notice to a forfeiture

of $50.00 a day.

Stage proprietors were required to keep a printed copy of

the act posted up in their offices, under a penalty of $5.00.

Another act of the Ohio Legislature subjected drivers who

should leave their horses without being fastened to a fine of

not over $20.00.

As has been intimated, passengers purchased their tickets

of the stage company in whose stage they embarked, and the

tolls were included in the price of the ticket. A paper resembling

a way bill was made out by the agent of the line at the starting

point. This paper was given to the driver and delivered by

him to the landlord at each station upon the arrival of the

coach. This paper contained the names and destinations of the

passengers carried, the sums paid as fare and the time of depar-

ture, and contained blank squares for registering time of arrival

and departure from each station. The fares on the National

• 66
 

The Old National Road.                    471

 

Road varied slightly but remained nearly as follows, when the

great monopolies were in control:

Baltimore to Frederic ................................                                 $2              00

Frederic to Hagarstown ..............................                                2                00

Hagarstown to Cumberland ...........................                             5                00

Cumberland to Uniontown............................ 4 00

Uniontown to Washington ............................                            225

Washington to Wheeling .............................                              2                00

Wheeling to Zanesville  ..............................                               3                00

Zanesville to Columbus ...............................                               200

Columbus to Springfield ..............................                               2                00

Springfield to Cincinnati .............................                               300

Springfield to Indianapolis ............................                             3                00

Intermediate points 5 cents per mile.

 

 

VIII.

 

MAILS AND MAIL COACHES.

The most important official function of the National Road

was to furnish means of transporting the United States mails.

The strongest constitutional argument of its advocates was the

need of facilities for transporting troops and mails. The clause

in the constitution authorizing the establishment of post roads

was interpreted by them to include any measure providing quick

and safe transmission of the mails. As has been seen, it was

finally considered by many to include building and operating rail-

ways with funds appropriated for the National Road.

The great mails of seventy-five years ago were operated

on very much the same principle on which mails are operated

to-day.   The postoffice department at Washington contracted

with the great stage lines for the transmission of the mails by

yearly contracts, a given number of stages with a given number

of horses to be run at given intervals, to stop at certain points,

at a fixed yearly compensation, usually determined by the custom

of advertising for bids and accepting the lowest offered.

When the system of mail coach lines reached its highest

perfection the mails were handled as they are to-day. The great

mails that passed over the National Road were the Great Eastern

and Great Western mails out of Washington and St. Louis. A

thousand lesser mail lines connected with the National Road

• 67
 

(472)

• 68
 

The Old National Road.                     473

 

at every step, principally those from Cincinnati in Ohio, and

from Pittsburg in Pennsylvania. There were through and way

mails, also mails which carried letters only, newspapers going

by separate stage. There was also an "Express Mail" corre-

sponding to the present "fast mail."

It is probably not realized what rapid time was made by

the old-time stage and express mails over the National Road

to the central west.     Even compared with the fast trains of

to-day, the express mails of sixty years ago, when conditions

were favorable, made marvelous time. In 1837 the Post Office

department required, in their contract for carrying the Great

Western Express Mail from Washington over the National Road

to Columbus and St. Louis, that the following time be made:

Wheeling,    Virginia  .............................. 30                hours.

Columbus,  Ohio      .................................                  45½        "

Indianapolis, Indiana ............................ 65½ "

Vandalia,     Illinois  ................................ 851/2          "

St. Louis,    Missouri...............................  94             "

At the same time the ordinary mail coaches, which also

served as passenger coaches, made very much slower time:

Wheeling, Virginia ...................... 2 days 11 hours.

Columbus, Ohio  .......................... 3                           "              16              "

Indianapolis, Indiana ..................... 6                          "     20     "

Vandalia, Illinois ........................ 9                              "              10              "

St. Louis, Missouri  ......................  10                       "              4                "

Cities off the road were reached in the following time from

Washington:

Cincinnati,  Ohio  ...............................  60                  hours.

Frankfort, Kentucky ............................ 72                 "

Louisville,  Kentucky  ............................  78              "

Nashville, Tennessee ............................ 100              "

Huntsville, Alabama ............................ 1151/2            "

The ordinary mail to these points made the following time:

Cincinnati, Ohio ......................... 4 days 18 hours.

Frankfort, Kentucky .................... 6                           "     18     "

Louisville, Kentucky .................... 6                           "     23     "

Nashville, Tennessee .................... 8                           "     16     "

Huntsville, Alabama ..................... 10                        "    21     "

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474       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

The postoffice department had given its mail contracts to

the steamship lines in the east, when possible at from Boston to

Portland and New York to Albany. One mail route to the

southern states, however, passed over the National Road and

down to Cincinnati, where it went on to Louisville and the Mis-

sissippi ports by packet. The following time was made by this

Great Southern Mail from Louisville:

Nashville, Tennessee ........................... 21 hours.

Mobile, Alabama ............................... 80

New Orleans, Louisiana .............. ..... 105  "

The service rendered to the south and southwest by the

National Road, was not rendered to the northwest, as might have

been expected. Chicago and Detroit were difficult to bring into

easy communication with the east. Until the railway was com-

pleted from Albany to Buffalo, the mails went very slowly to

the northwest from New York. The stage line from Buffalo

to Cleveland and on west over the terrible Black Swamp road

to Detroit was one of the worst in the United States. When

lake navigation became closed, communication with northwestern

Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and northern Indiana and Illinois

was almost cut off. Had the stage route followed that of the

buffalo and Indian on the high ground occupied by the Mahoning

Indian trail from Pittsburg to Detroit, a far more excellent

service might have been at the disposal of the postoffice depart-

ment! As it was, stage horses floundered in the Black Swamp

with"mud up to the horses'bridles," where a half dozen mails were

often congested, and "six horses were barely sufficient to draw a

two-wheeled vehicle fifteen miles in three days." In fact the road

was at times impassable: "The road through the Black Swamp

has been much of the season impassable. A couple of horses

were lost in a mud hole last week. The bottom had fallen out

The driver was unaware of the fact. His horses plunged in and

ere they could be extricated were drowned."88

The old time-tables of the National Road made an interest-

 

88Ohio State Journal, February 9, 1838. "The land mail between

this and Detroit crawls with snails pace"-Cleveland Gazette, August

31, 1837.

• 70
 

The Old National Road.                  475

ing study. One of the first of these published after the great

stage lines were in operation over the entire road and the southern

branch to Cincinnati, appeared early in the year 1833. By this

schedule the Great Eastern Mail left Washington daily at 7 P.

M. and Baltimore at 9 P. M. and arrived in Wheeling, on the

Ohio river, in fifty-five hours. Leaving Wheeling at 4.30 A. M.,

it arrived in Columbus at five the morning following, and in

Cincinnati at the same hour the next morning, making forty-

eight hours from one point on the river to the other, much better

time than any packet could make. The Great Western Mail left

Cincinnati daily at 2 P. M. and reached Columbus at 1 P. M.

on the day following. It left Columbus at 1.30 P. M. and reached

Wheeling at 2.30 the day following, thence on to Washington

in fifty-five hours.⁸⁹

At times the mails on the National Road were greatly

delayed, taxing the patience of the public beyond endurance.

The road itself was so well built that rain had little effect upon

it as a rule. In fact, delay of the mails was more often due

to inefficiency of the postoffice department, inefficiency of the

stage line service, or failure of contractors, than poor roads. Until

a bridge was built across the Ohio river at Wheeling, in 1836,

mails often became congested, especially when ice was running out.

There were frequent derangements of cross and way mails which

affected seriously the efficiency of the service. The vast number

of connecting mails on the National Road made regularity in

 

89 The northern and southern Ohio mails connected with the Great

Eastern and Great Western mails at Columbus. They were operated as

follows:

NORTHERN MAIL: Left Sandusky City 4 A. M., reached Delaware

8 P. M. Left Delaware next day 3 A. M., reached Columbus 8 A. M.

Left Columbus 8:30 A. M., reached Chillicothe 4 P. M. Left Chillicothe

next day 4 A. M., reached Portsmouth 3 P. M.

SOUTHERN MAIL: Left Portsmouth 9 A. M., Chillicothe 5 P. M.,

Columbus 1 P. M., day following. Delaware 7 P. M., Sandusky City 7

P. M. day following. A Cleveland mail left Cleveland daily for Columbus

via Wooster and Mt. Vernon at 3 A. M., and reached Columbus on the

day following at 5 P. M., returning the mail left Columbus at 4 A. M.

and reached Cleveland at 5 P. M. on the ensuing day.

• 71
 

476      Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

transmission of cross mails confusing, especially if the through

mails were at all irregular.

To us living in the present age of telegraphic communication

and the ubiquitous daily paper, it may not occur that the mail

stages of the old days were the newsboys of the age, and that

thousands looked to their coming for the first word of news from

distant portions of the land. In times of war or political excite-

ment the express mail stage and its precious load of papers from

Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, was hailed as the latest

editions of our newspapers are to-day. Thus it must have been

that a greater proportion of the population along the Old National

Road awaited with eager interest the coming of the stage in

the old days, than to-day await the arrival of the long mail trains

from the east.

Late in the 30's and in the 40's, when the mail stage system

reached its highest perfection, the mail and passenger service

had been entirely separated, special stages being constructed for

hauling the former. As early as 1837 the postoffice department

decreed that the mails, which heretofore had always been held

as of secondary consideration compared with passengers, should

be carried in specially arranged vehicles, into which the post-

master should put them under lock and key not to be opened

until the next postoffice was reached. These stages were of two

kinds, designed to be operated upon routes where the mails

ordinarily comprised, respectively, a half and nearly a whole load.

In the former, room was left for six passengers, in the latter,

for three. Including newspapers with the regular mail, the

later stages which ran westward over the National Road rarely

carried passengers. Indeed there was little room for the guards

who traveled with the driver to protect the government property.

Many old drivers of the "Boston Night Mail," or the "New York

Night Mail," or "Baltimore Mail," may yet be found along the

old road, who describe the immense loads which they carried

westward behind flying steeds. Such a factor in the mail stage

business did the newspapers become, that many contractors

refused to carry them by express mail, consigning them to the

• 72
 

The Old National Road.                   477

 

ordinary mails, thereby bringing down upon themselves the fre-

quent savage maledictions of a host of local editors.⁹⁰

Newspapers were, nevertheless, carried by express mail

stages as far west as Ohio in 1837, as is proven by a newspaper

account of a robbery committed on the National Road, the

robbers holding up an express-mail stage and finding nothing

in it but newspapers.⁹¹

The mails on the National Road were always in danger of

being assailed by robbers, especially on the mountainous portions

of the road at night. Though by dint of lash and ready revolver,

the doughty drivers usually came off safely with their charge.

 

 

IX.

 

TAVERNS OF THE NATIONAL ROAD.

So distinctive was the character of the National Road that

all which pertained to it was highly characteristic. Next to the

race of men which grew up beside its swinging stretches, noth-

ing had a more distinctive tone than the taverns which offered

cheer and hospitality to its surging population.

The origin of taverns in the east and west was very dis-

similar. The first taverns in the west were those which did service

on the old Braddock's Road. Unlike the taverns of New Eng-

land, which were primarily drinking places, sometimes closing

at nine in the evening and not professing, originally, to afford

 

90 "The extreme irregularity which has attended the transmission of

newspapers from one place to another, for several months past has been a

subject of general complaint with the editors of all parties. It was to

have been expected that, after the adjournment of Congress, the evil

would have ceased to exist. Such, however, is not the case. Although

the roads are now pretty good, and the mails arrive in due season, our

eastern exchange papers seem to reach us only by chance. On Tuesday

last, for instance, we received, among others, the following, viz., The

New York Courier and Enquirer of March 1, 5 and 19; the Philadelphia

Times and Saturday Evening Post of March 2; the United States Gazette

of March 6; and the New Jersey Journal of March 5 and 19. The cause

of this irregularity, we have reason to believe, does not originate in this

state." Ohio State Journal, March 30, 1833.

91 Ohio State Journal, August 9, 1837.

• 73
 

478       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

lodging, the tavern in the west arose amid the forest to answer

the needs of travelers. It may be said that every cabin in all

the western wilderness was a tavern, where, if there was a lack

of "bear and cyder" there was an abundance of dried deer meat

and Indian meal and a warm fire-place before which to spread

one's blankets.⁹²

The first cabins on the old route from the Potomac to the

Ohio were at the Wills Creek settlement (Cumberland) and

Gists clearing where Washington stopped on his La Bouef trip

on the buffalo trace not far from the summit of Laurel Hill.

After Braddock's Road was built, and the first roads were opened

between Uniontown and Brownsville, Washington and Wheeling,

during the Revolutionary period, a score of taverns sprang up-

the first of the kind west of the Alleghany mountains.

The oldest tavern on Braddock's Road was Tomlinson's

Tavern near "Little Meadows," eight miles west of the present

village of Frostburg, Maryland.

At this point the lines of Braddock's Road and the National

Road coincide. On land owned by him along the old miliary

road Jesse Tomlinson erected a tavern.   When the National

Road was built, his first tavern was deserted and a new one built

near the old site. Another tavern, erected by one Fenniken,

stood on both the line of the military road and the National

Road, two miles west of Smithfield ("Big Crossings") where

the two courses were identical.

The first taverns erected upon the road which followed the

portage path from Uniontown to Brownsville were Collin's Log

Tavern and Rollin's Tavern, erected in Uniontown in 1781 and

1783, respectively. These taverns offered primitive forms of hos-

pitality to the growing stream of sojourners over the rough moun-

tain path to the Youghiogeny at Brownsville, where boats could

be taken for the growing metropolis of Pittsburg.   Another

tavern in the west was carried on this road ten mile west of

Uniontown. As the old century neared its close a score of

taverns sprang up on the road from Uniontown to Brownsville

92 It will be found upon investigation, that the portions of our country

most noted for hospitality are those where taverns gained the least hold as

a social institution.

• 74
 

The Old National Road.                                            479

 

and on the road opened from   Brownsville to Wheeling.                                At

least three old taverns are remembered at West Brownsville.

Hill's stone tavern was erected at Hillsboro in 1794. "Catfish

Camp," the name of James Wilson's tavern at Washington, the

first tavern in that historic town, was built in 1781 and operated

eleven years for the benefit of the growing tide of pioneers who

chose to embark on the Ohio at Wheeling rather than on the

Monongahela at Brownsville. Other taverns at Washington be-

fore 1800 were McCormack's (1788), Sign of the White Goose

(1791), Buck Tavern (1796, Sign of the Spread Eagle, and

Globe Inn (1797). The Gregg Tavern and the famous old

Workman House at Uniontown were both erected in the last

years of the old century, 1797-1799. Two miles west of Ran-

kintown, Smith's Stone tavern stood on the road to Wheeling

and the Sign of the American Eagle (1796), offered lodging

at West Alexander, several years before the old century closed.

West of the Ohio river, on Zane's rough blazed track through

the scattered Ohio settlements toward Kentucky, travelers found,

as has been elsewhere noted, entertainment at Zane's clearings

at the fords of the Muskingum  and Scioto, and at the little

settlement at Cincinnati. Before the quarter of a century elapsed,

ere the National Road crossed the Ohio river, a number of

taverns were erected on the line of the road which was built

over the course of Zane's trace. On this first wagon road west

of the Ohio river the earliest taverns were at St. Clairsville and

Zanesville. At this latter point the road turned southwest, fol-

lowing Zane's trace to Lancaster, Chillicothe and Maysville,

Kentucky. The first tavern on this road was opened at Zanes-

ville during the last year of the old century, McIntire's Hotel.

In the winter of the same year, 1799, Green's Tavern was built,

in which, it is recorded, the Fourth of July celebration in the

following year was held. Cordery's Tavern followed, and David

Harvey built a tavern in 1800. The first license for a tavern in

St. Clairsville was issued to Jacob Haltz, February 23, 1802.

Two other licenses were issued that year to John Thompson

and Bazil Israel. Barnes' Tavern was opened in 1803. William

Gibson, Michael Groves, Sterling Johnson, Andrew Moore and

Andrew Marshall, kept tavern in the first half decade of this

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480       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

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The Old National Road.              481

century. As elsewhere noted, there was no earlier road between

Zanesville and Columbus which the National Road followed.

West of Zanesville but one tavern was opened in the first decade

of this century. Griffith Foos' tavern at Springfield, which was

doing business in 1801, prospered until 1814. The other taverns

of the west, at Zanesville, Columbus, Springfield, Richmond,

Indiana and Indianapolis, are of another era and will be men-

tioned later.

The first taverns of the west were built mostly of log,

though a few, as noted, were of stone. They were ordinary wil-

derness cabins, rendered professionally hospitable by stress of

circumstance. They were more often of but one or two rooms,

where, before the fireplace, guests were glad to sleep together

upon the puncheon floor. The fare afforded was such as hunters

had-game from the surrounding forest and neighboring streams

and the product of the little clearing, potatoes and the common

cereals.

At the beginning of the new century a large number of sub-

stantial taverns arose beside the first western roads-even before

the National Road was under way. The best known of these

were built at Washington, The Sign of the Cross Keys, (1801);

The McClellan, (1802); National and Walker Houses at Union-

town. At Washington arose The Sign of the Golden Swan,

(1806); Sign of the Green Tree, (1808); Gen. Andrew Jackson,

(1813); and Sign of the Indian Queen, (1815). These were

built in the age of saw-mills and some of them came well down

through the century.

It is remarkable how many buildings are to be seen on the

National Road which tell by their architectural form the story of

their fortunes. Many a tavern, outgrowing the day of small

things, was found to be wholly inadequate to the greater business

of the new era. Additions were made as circumstances de-

manded, and in some cases the result is very interesting.

The Seaton House in Uniontown was built in sections, as was the

old Fulton House, (now Moran House) also of Uniontown. A

fine old stone tavern at Malden, Pennsylvania; was erected in

1822 and an addition made in 1830. A stone slab in the second

section bears the date "1830", also the word "Liberty", and a

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rude drawing of a plow and sheaf of wheat. Though of more

recent date, the well known "Four Mile House" west of Colum-

bus, Ohio, displays, by a series of additions, the record of its

prosperous days, when the neighboring "Camp Chase" held its

population of Confederate prisoners.

Among the more important taverns which became the notable

hostelries of the National Road should be mentioned the Black,

American, Mountain Spring and Pennsylvania houses at Cumber-

land; Plumer tavern and Six Mile House west of Cumberland;

Franklin and Highland Hall houses of Frostburg; Lehman and

Shulty houses at Grantsville; Thistle tavern at the eastern foot of

Negro mountain, and Hablitzell's stone tavern at the Summit;

The Stoddard House on the summit of Keyser's Ridge; the stone

tavern near the summit of Winding Ridge, and the Wable stand

on the western slope; the Wentling and Hunter houses at Peters-

burg; the "Temple of Juno" two miles westward; the Endsley

House and Camel tavern at Smithfield ("Big Crossing") ; a tavern

on Mt. Augusta; the Rush, Inks and John Rush houses, Sampey's

tavern at "Great Meadows"; the Braddock Run House; Downer

tavern; Snyder's tavern at eastern foot of Laurel Hill, and the

Summit House at the top; Shipley and Monroe houses and Nor-

ris tavern east of Uniontown, and Searight's tavern six miles

west; Johnson-Hatfield house; the Brashear, Marshall, Clark and

Monongahela houses at Brownsville; Adam's tavern; Key's and

Greenfield's tavern at Beallsville; "Gall's House"; Hastings and

the Upland House at the foot of Egg Nogg Hill; Ringland's

tavern at Pancake; the Fulton House, Philadelphia and Kentucky

Inn and Travellers Inn at Washington; Rankin and Smith tav-

erns; Caldwell's tavern; Brown's and Watkin's taverns at Clays-

ville; Beck's tavern at West Alexander; the Stone tavern at

Roney's Point and the United States Hotel and Monroe House at

Wheeling.

West of the Ohio was Rhode's and McMahon's taverns at

Bridgeport; Hoover's tavern near St. Clairsville; Chamber-

lain's tavern; Christopher Hoover's tavern, one mile west of

Morristown; Taylor's tavern; Gleave's tavern and Stage office;

Bradshaw's Hotel at Fairview; Drake's tavern at Middleton; Sign

of the Black Bear at Washington; Carran's, McDonald's, Mc-

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The Old National Road.              483

 

Kinney's and Wilson's taverns in Guernsey county and the "Ten

Mile House" at Norwich, ten miles east of Zanesville. In Zanes-

ville, Robert Taylor opened a tavern in 1805, and in 1807 moved

to the present site of the Clarendon Hotel, situated on the National

Road and hung out the Sign of the Orange Tree. Perhaps no

tavern in the land can claim the honor of holding a state legisla-

ture within its doors, except the Sign of the Orange Tree, where,

in 1810-12, when Zanesville was the temporary capital of Ohio,

the legislature made its headquarters.⁹³ The Sign of the Rising

Sun was another Zanesville tavern, opened in 1806, the name being

changed by a later proprietor, without damage to its brilliancy,

perhaps, to the Sign of the Red Lion. The National Hotel was

opened in 1818 and became a famous hostelry. Roger's hotel is

mentioned in many old advertisements for bids for making and

repairing the National Road. In 1811 William Burnham opened

the Sign of the Merino Lamb in a frame building owned by Gen-

eral Isaac Van Home. The Sign of the Green Tree was opened

by John S. Dugan in 1817, this being remembered for entertaining

President Monroe, and General Lewis Cass at a later date.

West of Zanesville, on the new route opened straight westward

to Columbus, the famous monumental pile of stone, the "Five Mile

House" long served its useful purpose beside the road and is one

of the most impressive of its monuments, to-day. Edward Smith

and Usal Headley were early tavern keepers at this point. Henry

Winegamer built a tavern three miles west of the Five Mile

House. Henry Hursey built and opened the first tavern at Gra-

tiot. These public houses west of Zanesville were erected in

the year preceding the opening of the National Road, which was

built through the forest in the year 1831.9⁴ The stages which

were soon running from Zanesville to Columbus, left the uncom-

pleted line of the National Road at Jacksontown and struck

across to Newark and followed the old road thence to Columbus.

The first tavern built in Columbus was opened in 1813, which,

 

93 The Virginian House of Burgesses met in the old Raleigh Tavern

at Williamsburg, in 1773.--Woodrow Wilson's George Washington, p

146.

94 For advertisement of sale of a National Road tavern see Appendix

No. 4, p. 147.

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in 1816, bore the sign "The Lion and the Eagle." After 1817 it

was known as "The Globe." The Columbus Inn and White

Horse Tavern were early Columbus hotels; Pike's tavern was

opened in 1822, and a tavern bearing the sign of the Golden Lamb

was opened in 1825. The Neil House was opened in the 20's, a

transfer of it to new owners appearing in local papers in 1832.

It was the headquarters of the Neil, Moore and Company line

of stages, and the best known early tavern in the old coaching

days in Ohio. Many forgotten taverns in Columbus can be found

mentioned in old documents and papers including the famous

American House, Buckeye Hotel, on the present site of the Board

of Trade building, etc. West of Columbus the celebrated "Four

Mile House", which has been referred to previously, was erected

in the latter half of the century. In the days of the great mail

and stage lines "Billy Werden's" tavern in Springfield was the

leading hostelry in western Ohio. At this point the stages run-

ning to Cincinnati, with mail for the Mississippi Valley, left the

National Road. Across the state line, Neal's and Clawson's tav-

erns offered hospitality in the extreme eastern border of Indiana.

At Richmond, Starr Tavern (Tremont Hotel), Nixon's Tavern,

Gilbert's two-story, pebble-coated tavern and Bayle's Sign of

the Green Tree, offered entertainment worthy of the road and its

great business, while Sloan's brick stage house accommodated the

passenger traffic of the stage lines. At Indianapolis, the Palmer

House, built in 1837, and "Washington Hall," welcomed the pub-

lic of the two great political faiths, Democrat and Whig, re-

spectively.

Almost every mile of the road's long length wagon houses

offered hospitality to the hundreds engaged in the great freight

traffic, in which a large room with its fireplace could be found be-

fore which to lay blankets on a winter's night. The most success-

ful wagon houses were situated at the outskirts of the largertowns,

where, at more reasonable prices, and in more congenial sur-

roundings than in a crowded city inn, the rough sturdy men,

upon whom the whole west depended for over a generation for its

merchandize, found hospitable entertainment for themselves and

their rugged horses. These houses were usually unpretentious

frame buildings surrounded by a commodious yard, and gener-

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The Old National Road.               485

 

ous watering troughs and barns. A hundred tired horses have

been heard munching their corn in a single wagon-house yard at

the end of a long day's work.

In both tavern and wagon house the fire place and the bar

were omnipresent, whatever else might be missing. The fire-

places in the first western taverns were notably generous, as the

rigorous winters of the Alleghanies required. Many of these

fire places were seven feet in length and nearly as high, capable

of holding, had it been necessary, a wagon load of wood. With

a great fire place at the end of the room, lighting up its darkest

corners as no candle could, the taverns along the National Road

where the stages stopped for the night, saw merrier scenes than

any of their modern counterparts witness. And over all their

merry gatherings the flames from the great fires threw a soft-

ened light, in which those who remember them best seem to bask

as they tell of them to us. The taverns near some of the larger

villages, Wheeling, Washington or Uniontown, often entertained

for a winter's evening, a sleighing party from town, to whom the

great room and its fireplace was surrendered for the nonce,

where soon lisping footsteps and the soft swirl of old fashioned

skirts told that the dance was on.

Beside the old fire place hung two important articles, the

flip-iron and the poker. The poker used in the old road taverns

was of a size commensurate with the fire place, often being seven

or eight feet long. Each landlord was Keeper-of-the-Poker in

his own tavern, and many were particular that none but them-

selves should touch the great fire, which was one of the main fea-

tures of their hospitality, after the quality of the food and drink.

Eccentric old "Boss" Rush in his famous tavern near Smith-

field (Great Crossings) even kept his poker under lock and key.

The tavern signs so common in New England were known

only in the earlier days of the National Road as many of the

tavern names show. The majority of the great taverns bore

on their signs only the name of their proprietor, the earliest

landlord's name often being used for several generations. The

advancing of the century can be noticed in the origin of such

names as the "National House," the "United States Hotel," the

"American House,"etc. The evolution in nomenclature is, plainly,

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486       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

from the sign or symbol to the landlord's name, then to a fanciful

name. Another sign of later days was the building of verandas.

The oldest taverns now standing are plain ones or the two story

buildings rising abruptly from the pavement and opening directly

upon it. Of this type is the Brownfield House at Uniontown

and numerous half-forgotten houses which were early taverns

in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The kitchen of the old inn was an important feature, espe-

cially as many of the taverns were little more than restaurants

where stage passengers hastily dined. The food provided was

of a plain and nourishing character, including the famous home-

cured hams, which Andrew Jackson preferred, and the buck-

wheat cakes, which Henry Clay highly extolled.    In this

connection it should be said that the women of the old west

were most successful in operating the old time taverns, and

many of the best "stands" were conducted by them. The pro-

vision made in a license to a woman in early New England, that

"she provide a fit man that is godly to manage the business,"

was never suggested in the west, where hundreds of brave

women carried on the business of their husbands after their

decease. And their heroism was appreciated and remembered

by the gallant aristocracy of the road.

The old Revolutionary soldiers who, quite generally, became

the landlords of New England, did not keep tavern in the west.

But one Revolutionary veteran was landlord on the National

Road. The road bred and brought up its own landlords to a large

extent. The early landlords were fit men to rule in the early tav-

erns, and provided from forest and stream the larger portion of

food for the sojourners over the first rough roads. It is said that

these objected to the building of the National Road, through

fear that more accelerated means of locomotion would eventually

cheat them out of the business which then fell to their share.

But, like the New England landlord, the western tavern-

keeper was a many-sided man. Had the National Road taverns

been located always within villages, their proprietors might have

become what New England landlords are reputed to have been,

town representatives, councilmen, selectmen, tapsters and heads

of the"Train Band"-in fact,next to the town clerk in importance.

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The Old National Road.                487

 

As it was, the western landlord often filled as important a posi-

tion on the frontier as his eastern counterpart did in New Eng-

land. This was due, in part, to the place which the western

tavern occupied in society. Taverns were, both in the east and

in the west, places of meeting for almost any business. This was

particularly true in the west, where the public house was almost

the only available place for any gathering whatever between the

scattered villages. But while in the east the landlord was most

frequently busy with official duties, the western landlord was

mostly engaged in collateral professions, which rendered him of

no less value to his community. The jovial host at the National

Road tavern often worked a large farm, upon which his tavern

stood. Some of the more prosperous on the eastern half of the

road, owned slaves which carried on the work of the farm and

hotel. He sometimes ran a store in connection with his tavern,

and almost without exception, officiated at his bar, where he

"sold strong waters to relieve the inhabitants." Whiskey, two

drinks for a "fippeny bit," called "fip" for short (value 61/4 cents)

was the principal "strong water" in demand. It was the pure

article, neither diluted nor adulterated. In the larger towns of

course any beverage of the day was kept at the taverns - sherry

toddy, mulled wine, madeira and cider.

As has been said, the road bred its own landlords. Youths,

whose lives began simultaneously with that of the great road,

worked upon its curved bed in their teens, became teamsters and

contractors in middle life, and spent the autumn of their lives as

landlords of its taverns, purchased with the money earned in

working upon it. Several well-known landlords were prominent

contractors, many of whom owned their share of the great six

and eight-horse teams which hauled freight to the western rivers.

The old taverns were the hearts of the National Road, and

the tavern life was the best gauge to measure the current of

business that ebbed and flowed. As the great road became super-

ceded by the railways, the taverns were the first to succumb

to the shock. In a very interesting article, a recent writer on

"The Rise of the Tide of Life to New England Hilltops,"95

95 Mr. Edward P. Pressey in New England Magazine, Vol. XXII,

No. 6 (August 1900).

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The Old National Road.             489

 

speaks of the early hill life of New England, and the memorials

there left "of the deep and sweeping streams of human history."

The author would have found the National Road and its pre-

decessors an interesting western example of the social phenom-

ena with which he dealt. In New England, as in the central

west, the first travelled courses were on the summits of the water-

sheds. These routes of the brute were the first ways of men.

The tide of life has ebbed from New England hilltops since the.

beginning.  Sufficient is it for the present subject that the

National Road was the most important "stream of human history"

from Atlantic tide-water to the headwaters of the streams of

the Mississippi. Its old taverns are, after the remnants of the

historic road-bed and ponderous bridges, the most interesting

"shells and fossils" cast up by this stream. This old route, chosen

first by the buffalo and followed by red and white men, will ever

be the course of travel across the mountains. From this rugged

path made by the once famous National Road, the tide of life

can not ebb. Here, a thousand years hence, may course a mag-

nificent boulevard, the American Appian way, to the commercial,

as well as military, key of the eastern slopes of the Mississippi

basin at the junction of the Alleghany and Monongahela rivers.

It is important that each fact of history concerning this ancient

highway be put on lasting record.

 

 

x.

 

CONCLUSION.

It is impossible to leave the study of the National Road

without gathering up into a single chapter a number of threads

which have not been woven into the preceding record. And

first, the very appearance of the old road as seen by travellers

who pass over it to-day. One can not go a single mile over it

without becoming deeply impressed with the evidence of the age

and its individuality of the old National Road. There is nothing

nothing like it in the United States. Leaping the Ohio at Wheel-

ing, the National Road throws itself across Ohio and Indiana,

straight as an arrow, like an ancient elevated pathway of the gods,

chopping hills in twain at a blow, traversing the lowlands on

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490       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

high grades like a railroad bed, vaulting river and stream on

massive bridges of unparalled size. The farther one travels upon

it, the more impressed one must become, for there is, in the long

grades stretches and ponderous bridges, that "masterful sug-

gestion of a serious purpose, speeding you along with a strange

uplifting of the heart," of which Kenneth Grahame speaks; "and

even in its shedding off of bank and hedgerow as it marched

straight and full for the open downs, it seems to declare it con-

tempt for adventitious trappings to catch the shallow-pated."⁹⁶

For long distances, this road "of the sterner sort" will be, so far

as its immediate surface is concerned, what the tender mercies

of the counties through which it passes will allow, but at certain

points, the traveler comes out unexpectedly upon the ancient road

bed, for in many places the old macadamized bed is still doing

noble duty.

Nothing is more striking than the ponderous stone bridges

which carry the road bed over the water ways. It is doubtful

if there are on this continent such monumental relics of the

old stone bridge builders' art. Not only such massive bridges

as those at Big Crossings - Smithfield, Pennsylvania - and the

artistic "S" bridge near Claysville, Pennsylvania, will attract the

traveler's attention, but many of the less pretentious bridges over

brooks and rivulets will, upon examination, be found to be pon-

derous pieces of workmanship. A pregnant suggestion of the

change which has come over the land can be read in certain of

these smaller bridges and culverts. When the great road was

built the land was covered with forests and many drains were

necessary. With the passing of the forests many large bridges,

formerly of much importance, are now of a size out of all pro-

portion to the demand for them, and hundreds of little bridges

have fallen into disuse, some of them being quite above the general

level of the surrounding fields. The ponderous bridge at Big

Crossings was finished and dedicated with great eclat July 4,

1818. Near the eastern end of the three fine arches is the fol-

lowing inscription: "Kinkead, Beck & Evans, builders, July 4,

1818."

 

96 "The Golden Age," p. 155.

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The Old National Road.               491

 

The traveler will notice, still, the mile posts which mark

the great road's successive steps. Those on the eastern portion

of the road are of iron and were made at the founderies at Con-

nelsville and Brownsville. Major James Francis had the contract

for making and delivering those between Cumberland and

Brownsville. John Snowdan had the contract for those between

Brownsville and Wheeling. They were hauled in six horse teams

to their sites. Those between Brownsville and Cumberland have

recently been reset and repainted. The mile stones west of the

Ohio river are mostly of sand stone, and are fast disappearing

under the action of the weather. Some are quite illegible. In

central Ohio, through the Darby woods, or "Darby Cuttings," the

mile posts have been greatly mutilated by vandal wood-choppers,

who knocked off large chips with which to sharpen their axes.

The bed of the National Road was originally eighty feet in

width. In Ohio, at least, property owners have encroached upon

the road, until in some places, ten feet of ground has been in-

cluded within the fences. This matter has been brought into

notice where franchises for electric railway lines have been

granted. In Franklin county, west of Columbus, Ohio, there is

hardly room for a standard gauge track outside the road-bed,

where once the road occupied forty feet each side of its axis.

When the property owners were addressed with respect to the

removal of their fences, they demanded to be shown quit claim

deeds for the land, which, it is necessary to say, were not forth-

coming from the state. Hundreds of contracts, calling for a

width of eighty feet, can be given as evidence of the original width

of the road.⁹⁷ In days when it was considered the most extrav-

agant good fortune to have the National Road pass through one's

farm, it was not considered necessary to obtain quit claim deeds of

the land!

It is difficult to sufficiently emphasize the aristocracy which

existed among the old "pike boys," as those most intimately con-

nected with the road were called. This was particularly true of

 

97 "The proper limits of the road are hereby defined to be a space

of eighty feet in width - forty feet on each side of the center of the graded

road-bed." - Law passed April 18, 1870, Laws of Ohio, Vol. LVIII,

p. 140.

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492       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

the drivers of the mail and passenger stages, men who were as

often noted for their quick wit and large acquaintance with men,

as for their dextrous handling of two hands full of reins. Their

social and business position was the envy of the youth of a nation,

whose ambition to emulate them was begotten of the best sort

of hero worship. Stage drivers' foibles were their pet themes,

such as the use of peculiar kinds of whips and various modes of

driving. Of the latter there were three styles common to the

National Road. (1) The flat rein (English style), (2) Top and

bottom (Pennsylvania adaptation), (3) Side rein (Eastern style).

The last mode was in commonest use. Of drivers there were,

of course, all kinds, slovenly, cruel, careful. Of the best class,

John Bunting, Jim Reynolds and Billy Armor were best known,

after "Red" Bunting, in the east, and David Gordon and James

Burr, on the western division. No one was more proud of the

fine horses which did the work of the great road than the better

class of drivers. As Thackeray said was true in England, the

passing of the era of good roads and the mail stage has sounded

the knell of the rugged race of horses which once did service in the

central west.

As one scans the old files of newspapers, or reads old time

letters and memoirs of the age of the National Road, he is im-

pressed with the interest taken in the coming and going of the

more renowned guests of the old road. The passage of a Presi-

dent-elect over the National Road was a triumphant procession.

The stage companies made special stages, or selected the best of

their stock, in which to bear him. The best horses were fed and

groomed for the proud task. The most noted drivers were ap-

pointed to the honorable station as Charioteer-to-the-President.

The thousands of homes along his route were decked in his honor,

and welcoming heralds rode out from the larger towns to escort

their noted guests to celebrations for which preparations had been

making for days in advance. The slow moving presidential page-

ant through Ohio and Pennsylvania was an educational and pa-

triotic ceremony, of not infrequent occurrence in the old coach-

ing days-a worthy exhibition which hardly has its counterpart

in these days of steam. Jackson, Van Buren, Monroe, Harrison,

Polk and Tyler passed in triumph over portions of the great road.

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The Old National Road.               493

 

The taverns at which they were feted are remembered by the fact.

Drivers who were chosen for the task of driving their coach were

ever after noted men. But there were other guests than presi-

dents-elect, though none received with more acclaim. Henry

Clay, the champion of the road, was a great favorite throughout

its towns and hamlets, one of which, Claysville, proudly per-

petuates his name. Benton and Cass, Gen. Lafayette, Gen. Santa

Anna, Black Hawk, Jenny Lind, P. T. Barnum and J. Q. Adams,

are all mentioned in the records of the stirring days of the old

road. As has been suggested elsewhere, politics entered largely

into the consideration of the building and maintenance of the road.

Enemies of internal improvement were not forgotten as they

passed along the great road which they voted to neglect, as even

Martin Van Buren once realized when the axle of his coach was

sawed in two, breaking down where the mud was deepest!

Many episodes are remembered, indicating that all the political

prejudice and rancor known elsewhere was especially in evidence

on this highway, which owed its existence and future to the

machinations of politicians.

But the greatest blessing of the National Road was the splen-

did era of national growth which it did its share toward hastening.

Its best friends could see in its decline and decay only evidences

of unhappiest fortune, while in reality the great road had done its

noble work and was to be superseded by better things which owed

to it their coming. Historic roads there had been, before the

great highway of America was built, but none in all the past had

been the means of supplanting themselves by greater and more

efficient means of communication. The far-famed Appian Way

witnessed many triumphal processions of consuls and pro-consuls,

but it never was the means of bringing into existence something

to take its place in a new and more progressive era. It helped

to create no free empire at its extremity, and they who tra-

versed it in so much pride and power would find it to-day nothing

but a ponderous memorial of their vanity. The National Road

was built by the people and for the people, and served well its

high purpose. It became a highway for the products of the fac-

tories, the fisheries and the commerce of the eastern states. It

made possible that interchange of the courtesies of social life

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The Old National Road.              495

 

necessary in a republic of united states. It was one of the great

strands which bound the nation together in early days when there

was much to excite animosity and provoke disunion. It became

the pride of New England as well as of the west which it more

immediately benefited; "The state of which I am a citizen," said

Edward Everett of Lexington, Kentucky, in 1829, "has already

paid between one and two thousand dollars toward the construc-

tion and repair of that road; and I doubt not she is prepared

to contribute her proportion toward its extension to the place

of its destination."⁹8

Hundreds of ancient but unpretentious monuments of the old

National Road-the hoary mile stones which line it-stand to

perpetuate its name in future days. But were they all gathered

together-from Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Virginia

and Maryland-and cemented into a monstrous pyramid, the pile

would not be appropriate to preserve the name and fame of a high-

way which "carried thousands of population and millions of

wealth into the West, and, more than any other material structure

in the land, served to harmonize and strengthen, if not save, the

Union !"

What of the future? The dawning of the era of country

living is in sight. It is being hastened by the revolution in

methods of locomotion. The bicycle and automobile presage

an era of good roads, and of an unparalleled countryward move-

ment of society. With this era is coming the revival of inn and

tavern life, the rejuvenation of a thousand ancient highways and

all the happy life that was ever known along their dusty coils and

stretches. By its position with reference to the national capital,

and the military and commercial key of the central west, Pitts-

burg, and both of the great cities of Ohio, the old National Road

will become, perhaps, the foremost of the great roadways of

America. The bed is capable of being made substantial at a com-

paratively small cost, as the grading is quiet perfect. Its course

measures the shortest possible route practicable for a roadway

from tide water to the Mississippi river. As a trunk line its

location cannot be surpassed. Its historic associations will render

 

98Everett's Speeches and Orations, Vol. 1, p. 202.

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496       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

the route of increasing interest to the thousands who, in other

days, will travel, in the genuine sense of the word, over those

portions of its length which long ago became hallowed ground.

The "Shades of Death" will again be filled with the echoing horn

which heralded the arrival of the old time coaches, and Winding

Ridge again be crowded with the traffic of a nation. A hundred

National Road taverns will be opened, and bustling landlords wel-

come, as of yore, the travel-stained visitor. Merry parties will

again fill those tavern halls, now long silent, with their laughter.

And all this will but mark a new and better era than its pre-

decessor, an era of outdoor living, which must come, and come

quickly, if as a nation we are to retain our present hold on the

world's great affairs.

 

APPENDIX No. 1.

 

THE FIRST REFORT OF THE NATIONAL ROAD COMMISSIONERS-1806.

"The commissioners, acting by appointment under the law of

Congress, entitled, 'An act to regulate the laying out and mak-

ing a road from Cumberland, in the State of Maryland, to the

State of Ohio, beg leave to report to the President of the United

States, and to premise that the duties imposed by the law became

a work of greater magnitude, and a task much more arduous, than

was conceived before entering upon it; from which circumstance

the commissioners did not allow themselves sufficient time for the

performance of it before the severity of the weather obliged them

to retire from it, which was the case in the first week of the pre-

sent month (December). That, not having fully accomplished

their work, they are unable fully to report a discharge of all the

duties enjoined by the law; but as the most material and principal

part has been performed, and as a communication of the progress

already made may be useful and proper, during the present ses-

sion of Congress, and of the Legislatures of those States through

which the route passes, the commissioners respectfully state that

at a very early period it was conceived that the maps of the country

were not sufficiently accurate to afford a minute knowledge of the

true courses between the extreme points on the rivers, by which

the researches of the commissioners were to be governed; a survey

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The Old National Road.              497

 

for that purpose became indispensable, and considerations of pub-

lic economy suggested the propriety of making this survey

precede the personal attendance of the commissioners.

Josias Thompson, a surveyor of professional merit, was taken

into service and authorized to employ two chain carriers and a

marker, as well as one vaneman, and a packhorse man and horse,

on public account; the latter being indispensable and really benefi-

cial in accelerating the work. The surveyor's instructions are con-

tained in document No. 1, accompanying this report.

Calculating on a reasonable time for the performance of the

instructions to the surveyor, the commissioners, by correspond-

ence, fixed on the first day of September last, for their meet-

ing at Cumberland to proceed in the work; neither of them,

however, reached that place until the third of that month, on

which day they all met.

The surveyor having, under his instructions, laid down a plat

of his work, showing the meanders of the Potomac and Ohio riv-

ers, within the limits prescribed for the commissioners, as also

the road between those rivers, which is commonly traveled from

Cumberland to Charleston, in part called Braddock's road; and

the same being produced to the commissioners, whereby straight

lines and their true courses were shown between the extreme

points on each river, and the boundaries which limit the powers

of the commissioners being thereby ascertained, serving as a basis

whereon to proceed in the examination of the grounds and face of

the country; the commissioners thus prepared commenced the

business of exploring; and in this it was considered that a faith-

ful discharge of the discretionary powers vested by the law made

it necessary to view the whole to be able to judge of a preference

due to any part of the grounds, which imposed a task of examin-

ing a space comprehending upwards of two thousand square

miles; a task rendered still more incumbent by the solicitude and

importunities of the inhabitants of every part of the district, who

severally conceived their grounds entitled to a preference. It

becoming necessary, in the interim, to run various lines of ex-

periment for ascertaining the geographical position of several

points entitled to attention, and the service suffering great delay

for want of another surveyor, it was thought consistent with the

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498       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

public interest to employ, in that capacity, Arthur Rider, the

vaneman, who had been chosen with qualification to meet such an

emergency; and whose services as vaneman could then be dis-

pensed with. He commenced, as surveyor, on the 22nd day of

September, and continued so at field work until the first day of

December, when he was retained as a necessary assistant to the

principal surveyor, in copying field notes and hastening the

draught of the work to be reported.

The proceedings of the commissioners are especially detailed

in their general journal, compiled from the daily journal of each

commissioner, to which they beg leave to refer, under mark No. 2.

After a careful and critical examination of all the grounds

within the limits prescribed, as well as the grounds and ways out

from the Ohio westwardly, at several points, and examining the

shoal parts of the Ohio river as detailed in the table of soundings,

stated in their journal, and after gaining all the information, geo-

graphical, general and special, possible and necessary, toward a

judicial discharge of the duties assigned them, the commissioners

repaired to Cumberland to examine and compare their notes and

journals, and determine upon the direction and location of their

route.

In this consultation the governing objects were:

1. Shortness of distance between navigable points on the

eastern and western waters.

2. A point on the Monongahela best calculated to equalize

the advantages of this portage in the country within reach of it.

3. A point on the Ohio river most capable of combining

certainty of navigation with road accommodation; embracing,

in this estimate, remote points westwardly, as well as present and

probable population on the north and south.

4. Best mode of diffusing benefits with least distance of road.

In contemplating these objects, due attention was paid as

well to the comparative merits of towns, establishments and

settlements already made, as to the capacity of the country with

the present and probable population.

In the course of arrangement, and in its order, the first

point located for the route was determined and fixed at Cumber-

land, a decision founded on propriety, and in some measure on

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The Old National Road.              499

 

-necessity, from the circumstance of a high and difficult mountain,

called Nobley, laying and confining the east margin of the Poto-

mac, so as to render it impossible of access on that side without

immense expense, at any point between Cumberland and where

the road from Winchester to Gwynn's crosses, and even there

the Nobley mountain is crossed with much difficulty and hazard.

And this upper point was taxed with another formidable objec-

tion; it was found that a high range of mountains, called Dan's,

stretching across from Gwynn's to the Potomac, above this point,

precluded the opportunity of extending a route from this point

in a proper direction, and left no alternative but passing by

Gwynn's; the distance from  Cumberland to Gwynn's being

upward of a mile less than from the upper point, which lies ten

miles by water above Cumberland, the commissioners were not

permitted to hesitate in preferring a point which shortens the

portage, as well as the Potomac navigation.

The point of the Potomac being viewed as a great repository

of produce, which a good road will bring from the west of Laurel

Hill, and the advantages which Cumberland, as a town, has in

that respect over an unimproved place, are additional considera-

tions operating forcibly in favor of the place preferred.

In extending the route from Cumberland, a triple range of

mountains, stretching across from Jening's run in measure with

Gwynn's, left only the alternative of laying the road up Will's

creek for three miles, nearly at right angles with the true course,

and then by way of Jening's run, or extending it over a break

in the smallest mountain, on a better course by Gwynn's, to

the top of Savage mountain; the latter was adopted, being the

shortest, and will be less expensive in hill-side digging over a

sloped route than the former, requiring one bridge over Will's

creek and several over Jening's run, both very wide and consid-

erable streams in high water; and a more weighty reason for

preferring the route by Gwynn's is the great accommodation

it will afford travelers from Winchester by the upper point;

who could not reach the route by Jening's run short of the top

of Savage, which would withhold from them the benefit of an

easy way up the mountain.

It is, however, supposed that those who travel from Win-

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500       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

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The Old National Road.               501

chester by way of the upper point to Gwynn's, are in that respect

more the dupes of common prejudice than judges of their own

ease, as it is believed the way will be as short, and on much

better ground, to cross the Potomac below the confluence of the

north and south branches (thereby crossing these two, as well

as Patterson's creek, in one stream, equally fordable in the same

season), than to pass through Cumberland to Gwynn's. Of

these grounds, however, the commissioners do not speak from

actual view, but consider it a subject well worthy of future

investigation. Having gained the top of Alleghany mountain,

or rather the top of that part called Savage, by way of Gwynn's,

the general route, as it respects the most important points, was

determined as follows, viz:

From a stone at the corner of lot No. 1, in Cumberland,

near the confluence of Will's creek and the north branch of the

Potomac river; thence extending along the street westwardly,

to cross the hill lying between Cumberland and Gwynn's, at the

gap where Braddock's road passes it; thence near Gwynn's and

Jesse Tomlinson's, to cross the big Youghiogheny near the mouth

of Roger's run, between the crossing of Braddock's road and the

confluence of the streams which form the Turkey foot; thence

to cross Laurel Hill near the forks of Dunbar's run, to the west

foot of that hill, at a point near where Braddock's old road

reached it, near Gist's old place, now Colonel Isaac Meason's,

thence through Brownsville and Bridgeport, to cross the Monon-

gahela river below Josias Crawford's ferry; and thence on as

straight a course as the country will admit to the Ohio, at a

point between the mouth of Wheeling creek and the lower point

of Wheeling island.

In this direction of the route it will lay about twenty-four

and a half miles in Maryland, seventy-five miles and a half in

Pennsylvania, and twelve miles in Virginia; distances which will

be in a small degree increased by meanders, which the bed of

the road must necessarily make between the points mentioned in

the location; and this route, it is believed, comprehends more

important advantages than could be afforded in any other, inas-

much as it has a capacity at least equal to any other in extending

advantages of a highway; and at the same time establishes the

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502       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

shortest portage between the points already navigated, and on

the way accommodates other and nearer points to which navi-

gation may be extended, and still shorten the portage.

It intersects Big Youghiogheny at the nearest point from

Cumberland, then lies nearly parallel with that river from the

distance of twenty miles, and at the west foot of Laurel Hill

lies within five miles of Connellsville, from which the Yough-

iogheny is navigated; and in the same direction the route inter-

sects at Brownsville, the nearest point on the Monongahela river

within the district.

The improvement of the Youghiogheny navigation, is a

subject of too much importance to remain long neglected; and

the capacity of that river, as high up as the falls (twelve miles

above Connellsville), is said to be equal, at a small expense,

with the parts already navigated below. The obstructions at

the falls, and a rocky rapid near Turkey Foot, constitute the

principal impediments in that river to the intersection of the

route, and as much higher as the stream has a capacity for navi-

gation; and these difficulties will doubtles be removed when the

intercourse shall warrant the measure.

Under these circumstances the portage may be thus stated:

From Cumberland to Monongahela, sixty-six and one-half

miles. From Cumberland to a point in measure with Connels-

ville ,on the Youghiogeny river, fifty-one and one-half miles.

From Cumberland to a point in measure with the lower end of

the falls of Youghiogeny, which will lie two miles north of the

public road, forty-three miles. From Cumberland to the inter-

section of the route with the Youghiogheny river, thirty-four

miles.

Nothing is here said of the Little Youghiogheny, which lies

nearer Cumberland; the stream being unusually crooked, its

navigation can only become the work of a redundant population.

The point which this route locates, at the west foot of

Laurel Hill, having cleared the whole of the Alleghany moun-

tain, is so situated as to extend the advantages of an easy way

through the great barrier, with more equal justice to the best

parts of the country between Laurel Hill and the Ohio. Lines

from this point to Pittsburg and Morgantown, diverging nearly

• 98
 

The Old National Road.              503

 

at the same angle, open upon equal terms to all parts of the

western country that can make use of this portage; and which

may include the settlements from Pittsburg, up Big Beaver to

the Connecticut reserve, on Lake Erie, as well as those on the

southern borders of the Ohio and all the intermediate country.

Brownsville is nearly equi-distant from Big Beaver and

Fishing creek, and equally convenient to all the crossing places

on the Ohio, between these extremes. As a port, it is at least

equal to any on the Monongahela within the limits, and holds

superior advantages in furnishing supplies to emigrants, traders,

and other travelers by land or water.

Not unmindful of the claims of towns and their capacity of

reciprocating advantages on public roads, the commissioners were

not insensible of the disadvantage which Uniontown must feel

from the want of that accommodation which a more southwardly

direction of the route would have afforded; but as that could

not take place without a relinquishment of the shortest passage,

considerations of public benefit could not yield to feelings of

minor import. Uniontown being the seat of justice for Fayette

county, Pennsylvania, is not without a share of public benefits,

and may partake of the advantages of this portage upon equal

terms with Connellsville, a growing town, with the advantage

of respectable water-works adjoining, in the manufactury of flour

and iron.

After reaching the nearest navigation on the western waters,

at a point best calculated to diffuse the benefits of a great high-

way, in the greatest possible latitude east of the Ohio, it was

considered that, to fulfill the objects of the law, it remained

for the commissioners to give such a direction to the road as

would best secure a certainty of navigation on the Ohio at all

seasons, combining, as far as possible, the inland accommodation

of remote points westwardly. It was found that the obstruc-

tions in the Ohio, within the limits between Steubenville and

Grave creek, lay principally above the town and mouth of Wheel-

ing; a circumstance ascertained by the commissioners in their

examination of the channel, as well as by common usage, which

has long given a decided preference to Wheeling as a place of

embarcation and port of departure in dry seasons. It was also

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504       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

seen that Wheeling lay in a line from Brownsville to the centre

of the state of Ohio and Post Vincennes. These circumstances

favoring and corresponding with the chief objects in view in

this last direction of the route, and the ground from Wheeling

westwardly being known of equal fitness with any other way

out from the river, it was thought most proper, under these

several considerations, to locate the point mentioned below the

mouth of Wheeling. In taking this point in preference to one

higher up and in the town of Wheeling, the public benefit and

convenience were consulted, inasmuch as the present crossing

place over the Ohio from the town is so contrived and confined

as to subject passengers to extraordinary ferriage and delay,

by entering and clearing a ferry-boat on each side of Wheeling

island, which lies before the town and precludes the opportunity

of fording when the river is crossed in that way, above and below

the island. From the point located, a safe crossing is afforded

at the lower point of the island by a ferry in high, and a good

ford at low water.

The face of the country within the limits prescribed is gen-

erally very uneven, and in many places broken by a succession

of high mountains and deep hollows, too formidable to be reduced

within five degrees of the horizon, but by crossing them obliquely,

a mode which, although it imposes a heavy task of hill-side dig-

ging, obviates generally the necessity of reducing hills and filling

hollows, which, on these grounds, would be an attempt truly

Quixotic. This inequality of the surface is not confined to the

Alleghany mountain; the country between the Monongahela

and Ohio rivers, although less elevated, is not better adapted

for the bed of a road, being filled with impediments of hills and

hollows, which present considerable difficulties, and wants that

super-abundance and convenience of stone which is found in

the mountain.

The indirect course of the road now traveled, and the fre-

quent elevations and depressions which occur, that exceed the

limits of the law, preclude the possibility of occupying it in any

extent without great sacrifice of distance, and forbid the use of

it, in any one part for more than half a mile, or more than two

or three miles in the whole.

• 100
 

The Old National Road.              505

The expense of rendering the road now in contemplation

passable, may, therefore, amount to a larger sum than may have

been supposed necessary, under an idea of embracing in it a

considerable part of the old road; but it is believed that the

contrary will be found most correct, and that a sum sufficient

to open the new could not be expended on the same distance of

the old road with equal benefit.

The sum required for the road in contemplation will depend

on the style and manner of making it; as a common road cannot

remove the difficulties which always exist on deep grounds, and

particularly in wet seasons, and as nothing short of a firm, sub-

stantial, well-formed, stone-capped road can remove the causes

which led to the measure of improvement, or render the insti-

tution as commodious as a great and growing intercourse appears

to require, the expense of such a road next becomes the subject

of inquiry.

In this inquiry the commissioners can only form an estimate

by recurring to the experience of Pennsylvania and Maryland

in the business of artificial roads. Upon this data, and a com-

parison of the grounds and proximity of the materials for cov-

ering, there are reasons for belief that, on the route reported, a

complete road may be made at an expense not exceeding six

thousand dollars per mile, exclusive of bridges over the principal

streams on the way. The average expense of the Lancaster, as

well as Baltimore and Frederick turnpike, is considerably higher;

but it is believed that the convenient supply of stone which the

mountain affords will, on those grounds, reduce the expense to

the rate here stated.

As to the policy of incurring this expense, it is not the

province of the commissioners to declare; but they cannot, how-

ever, withhold assurances of a firm belief that the purse of the

nation cannot be more seasonably opened, or more happily applied,

than in promoting the speedy and effectual establishment of a

great and easy road on the way contemplated.

In the discharge of all these duties, the commissioners have

been actuated by an ardent desire to render the institution as

useful and commodious as possible; and, impressed with a strong

sense of the necessity which urges the speedy establishment of

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506       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

the road, they have to regret the circumstances which delay the

completion of the part assigned them. They, however, in some

measure, content themselves with the reflection that it will not

retard the progress of the work, as the opening of the road

cannot commence before spring, and may then begin with making

the way.

The extra expense incident to the service from the necessity

(and propriety, as it relates to public economy,) of employing

men not provided for by law will, it is hoped, be recognized

and provision made for the payment of that and similar expenses,

when in future it may be indispensably incurred.

The commissioners having engaged in a service in which

their zeal did not permit them to calculate the difference between

their pay and the expense to which the service subjected them,

cannot suppose it the wish or intention of the government to

accept of their services for a mere indemnification of their expense

of subsistence, which will be very much the case under the

present allowance; they, therefore, allow themselves to hope and

expect that measures will be taken to provide such further com-

pensation as may, under all circumstances, be thought neither

profuse nor parsimonious.

The painful anxiety manifested by the inhabitants of the

district explored, and their general desire to know the route

determined on, suggested the measure of promulgation, which,

after some deliberation, was agreed on by way of circular letter,

which has been forwarded to those persons to whom precaution

was useful, and afterward sent to one of the presses in that

quarter for publication, in the form of the document No. 3,

which accompanies this report.

All which is, with due deference, submitted.

ELI WILLIAMS,

THOMAS MOORE,

JOSEPH KERR.

December 30, 1806.

• 102
 

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APPENDIX No. 2.

 

SECOND REPORT OF THE NATIONAL ROAD COMMISSIONERS - 1808.

"The undersigned, commissioners appointed under the law

of the United States, entitled 'An act to regulate the laying out

and making a road from Cumberland, in the State of Maryland,

to the State of Ohio,' in addition to the communications hereto-

fore made, beg leave further to report to the President of the

United States, that, by the delay of the answer of the Legislature

of Pennsylvania to the application for permission to pass the road

through that state, the commissioners could not proceed to the bus-

iness of the road in the spring before vegetation had so far ad-

vanced as to render the work of exploring and surveying difficult

and tedious, from which circumstance it was postponed till the

last autumn, when the business was again resumed. That, in

obedience to the special instructions given them, the route hereto-

fore reported has been so changed as to pass through Uniontown,

and that they have completed the location, gradation and marking

of the route from Cumberland to Brownsville, Bridgeport, and the

Monongahela river, agreeably to a plat of the courses, distances

and grades in which is described the marks and monuments by

which the route is designated, and which is herewith exhibited;

that by this plat and measurement it will appear (when compared

with the road now traveled) there is a saving of four miles of dis-

tance between Cumberland and Brownsville on the new route.

In the gradation of the surface of the route (which became

necessary) is ascertained the comparative elevation and depres-

sion of different points on the route, and taking a point ten feet

above the surface of low water in the Potomac river at Cumber-

land, as the horizon, the most prominent points are found to be

elevated as follows, viz.:

FEET

Summit of Wills mountain .................................. .                                                                                    581.3

Western foot of same ........................................                                                                                 304.4

Summit of Savage mountain ..................................                                                                                    2,022.24

Savage river  ................................................                                                              1,741.6

Summit Little Savage mountain  ...............................                                                                              1,900.4

Branch Pine Run, first Western water ........................                                             1,699.9

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The Old National Road.                    509

 

 

FEET

Summit of Red Hill (afterwards called shades of death).......                                                             1,914.3

Summit Little Meadow mountain .............................                                                                             2,026.16,

Little Youghiogheny river ..................................                                                                                    1,322.6

East Fork of Shade run .....................................                                                                                         1,558.92

Summit of Negro mountain, highest point⁹⁹ .................... 2,328.12

Middle branch of White's creek, at the west foot of Negro

mountain        ...............................................                                                                                       1,360.5

White's creek          ..............................................                                                                                        1,195.5

Big Youghiogheny river ......................................                                                                                    645.5

Summit of a ridge between Youghiogheny river and Beaver

waters             ..................................................                                                                                    1,514.5

Beaver Run              ................................................                                                                                      1,123.8

Summit of Laurel Hill .......................................                                                                                         1,550.16

Court House in Uniontown ...................................                                                                                 274.65

A point ten feet above the surface of low water in the Monon-

gahela river, at the mouth of Dunlap's creek ..............  119.26

The law requiring the commissioners to report those parts

of the route as are laid on the old road, as well as those on new

grounds, and to state those parts which require the most imme-

diate attention and amelioration, the probable expense of making

the same passable in the most difficult parts, and through the whole

distance, they have to state that, from the crooked and hilly course

of the road now traveled, the new route could not be made to

occupy any part of it (except an intersection on Wills mountain,

another at Jesse Tomlinson's, and a third near Big Youghiogheny,

embracing not a mile of distance in the whole) without unneces-

sary sacrifices of distances and expense.

That, therefore, an estimate must be made on the route as

passing wholly through new grounds. In doing this the com-

missioners feel great difficulty, as they cannot, with any degree

of precision, estimate the expense of making it merely passable;

nor can they allow themselves to suppose that a less breadth than

that mentioned in the law was to be taken into the calculation.

The rugged deformity of the grounds rendered it impossible to

lay a route within the grade limited by law otherwise than by

ascending and descending the hills obliquely, by which circum-

stance a great proportion of the route occupies the sides of the

hills, which cannot be safely passed on a road of common breadth,

 

99 Keyser's Ridge.

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510       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

and where it will, in the opinion of the commissioners, be neces-

sary, by digging, to give the proper form of thirty feet, at least in

the breadth of the road, to afford suitable security in passing on

a way to be frequently crowded with wagons moving in opposite

directions, with transports of emigrant families, and droves of

cattle, hogs, etc., on the way to market. Considering, therefore,

that a road on those grounds must have sufficient breadth to

afford ways and water courses, and satisfied that nothing short

of well constructed and completely finished conduits can insure

it against injuries, which must otherwise render it impassable at

every change of the seasons, by heavy falls of rain or melting of

the beds of snow, with which the country is frequently covered;

the commissioners beg leave to say, that, in a former report, they

estimated the expense of a road on these grounds, when properly

shaped, made and finished in the style of a stone-covered turn-

pike, at $6,000 per mile, exclusive of bridges over the principal

streams on the way; and that with all the information they have

since been able to collect, they have no reason to make any

alteration in that estimate.

The contracts authorized by, and which have been taken

under the superintendence of the commissioner, Thomas Moore

(duplicates of which accompany this report), will show what has

been undertaken relative to clearing the timber and brush from

part of the breadth of the road. The performance of these con-

tracts was in such forwardness on the 1st instant as leaves no

doubt of their being completely fulfilled by the first of March.

The commissioners further state, that, to aid them in the

extension of their route, they ran and marked a straight line from

the crossing place on the Monongahela, to Wheeling, and had

progressed twenty miles, with their usual and necessary lines of

experiment, in ascertaining the shortest and best connection of

practical grounds, when the approach of winter and the short-

ness of the days afforded no expectation that they could com-

plete the location without a needless expense in the most inclement

season of the year. And, presuming that the postponement of the

remaining part till the ensuing spring would produce no delay

in the business of making the road, they were induced to retire

from it for the present.

• 106
 

The Old National Road.                  511

 

The great length of time already employed in this business

makes it proper for the commissioners to observe that, in order

to connect the best grounds with that circumspection which the

importance of the duties confided to them demanded, it became

indispensably necessary to run lines of experiment and reference

in various directions, which exceed an average of four times the

distance located for the route, and that, through a country so

irregularly broken, and crowded with very thick underwood in

many places, the work has been found so incalculably tedious

that, without an adequate idea of the difficulty, it is not easy to

reconcile the delay.

It is proper to mention that an imperious call from the private

concerns of Commissioner Joseph Kerr, compelled him to re-

turn home on the 29th of November, which will account for the

want of his signature to this report.

All of which is, with due reference, submitted, this 15th day

of January, 1808.

ELI WILLIAMS,

THOMAS MOORE.

 

 

APPENDIX No. 3.

APPROPRIATIONS BY CONGRESS AT VARIOUS TIMES FOR MAKING, REPAIRING,

AND CONTINUING THE ROAD -AGGREGATE OF APPROPRIATIONS, $6,824,-

919.33.100

1. Act of March 29, 1806, authorizes the President to

appoint a commission of three citizens to lay out a

road four rods in width "from Cumberland or a point

on the northern bank of the river Potomac in the

State of Maryland, between Cumberland and the

place where the main road leading from Gwynn's to

Winchester, in Virginia, crosses the river, * * *

to strike the river Ohio at the most convenient place

between a point on its eastern bank, opposite the

northern boundary of Steubenville and the mouth of

Grave creek, which empties into the said river a little

below Wheeling, in Virginia." Provides for obtain-

ing the consent of the States through which the road

passes, and appropriates for the expense, to be paid

lOOThe Old Pike, pp. 100-106.

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512         Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

from the reserve fund under the act of April 30,

1802  ..............................................  $30,000  00

2. Act of February 14, 1810, appropriates to be expended

under the direction of the President in making the

road between Cumberland and Brownsville, to be

paid from fund act of April 30, 1802 ................  60,000 00

3. Act of March 3, 1811, appropriates to be expended

under the direction of the President, in making the

road between Cumberland and Brownsville, and au-

thorizes the President to permit deviation from a

line established by the Commissioners under the orig-

inal act as may be expedient; Provided, that no devi-

ation shall be made from the principal points estab-

lished on said road between Cumberland and

Brownsville, to be paid from fund act of April 30,

1802  ..............................................  50,000  00

4. Act of February 26, 1812, appropriates balance of a

former appropriation not used, but carried to surplus

fund  ..............................................   3,786  60

5. Act of May 6, 1812, appropriates to be expended under

direction of the President, for making the road

from Cumberland to Brownsville, to be paid from

fund  act  of  April 30,  1802 .........................  30,000  00

6. Act of March 3, 1813 (General Appropriation Bill),

appropriates for making the road from Cumberland

to the State of Ohio, to be paid from fund act of

April  30,  1802 .....................................  140,000  00

7. Act of February 14, 1815, appropriates to be expended

under the direction of the President, for making the

road between Cumberland and Brownsville, to be

paid from fund act of April 30, 1802 ...............  100,000 00

8. Act of April 16, 1816 (General Appropriation Bill),

appropriates for making the road from Cumberland

to the State of Ohio, to be paid from the fund act

April  30, 1802 .....................................  300,000  00

9. Act of April 14, 1818, appropriates to meet claims due

and unpaid .......................................                                                                                      52,984 60

Demands under existing contracts ...................                                                                    260,000 00

from money in the treasury not otherwise appropriated.

10. Act of March 3, 1819, appropriates for existing claims

and contracts .....................................                                                                                    250,000 00

Completing road ....................................                                                                                   285,000 00

To be paid from reserved funds, acts admitting Ohio,

Indiana and Illinois.

11. Act of May 15, 1820, appropriates for laying out the

road between Wheeling, Va., and a point on the left

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The Old National Road.                   513

bank of the Mississippi river, between St. Louis and

the mouth of the Illinois river, road to be eighty feet

wide and on a straight line, and authorizes the Presi-

dent to appoint Commmissioners. To be paid out

of any money in the treasury not otherwise appro-

priated ...........................................  10,000 00

12. Act of April 11, 1820, appropriates for completing

contract for road from Washington, Pa., to Wheel-

ing, out of any money in the treasury not otherwise

appropriated ......................................  141,000 00

13. Act of February 28, 1823, appropriates for repairs be-

tween Cumberland and Wheeling, and authorizes the

President to appoint a superintendent at a compensa-

tion of $3.00 per day. To be paid out of any money

not otherwise  appropriated .........................  25,000  00

14. Act of March 3, 1825, appropriates for opening and

making a road from the town of Canton, in the State

of Ohio, opposite Wheeling, to Zanesville, and for

the completion of the surveys of the road, directed

to be made by the act of May 15, 1820, and orders its

extension to the permanent seat of government of

Missouri, and to pass by the seats of government of

Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, said road to commence

at Zanesville, Ohio; also authorizes the appointment

of a superintendent by the President, at a salary of

$1,500 per annum, who shall make all contracts, re-

ceive and disburse all moneys, &c.; also authorizes

the appointment of one commissioner, who shall have

power according to provisions of the act of May 15,

1820; $10,000 of the money appropriated by this act

is to be expended in completing the survey mentioned.

The whole sum appropriated to be advanced from

moneys not otherwise appropriated, and replaced

from reserve fund, acts admitting Ohio, Indiana,

Illinois and Missouri .............................  150,000 00

15. Act of March 14, 1826 (General Appropriation Bill),

appropriates for balance due superintendent, $3,000;

assistant superintendent, $158.90; contractor, $252.13.  3,411 03

16. Act of March 25, 1826 (Military Service), appropri-

ates for continuation of the Cumberland road during

the  year  1825 ......................................  110,749  00

17. Act of March 2, 1827 (Military Service), appropri-

ates for construction of road from Canton to Zanes-

ville, and continuing and completing the survey from

Zanesville to the seat of government of Missouri, to

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514        Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

be paid from reserve fund, acts admitting Ohio, In-

diana, Illinois and  Missouri .........................  170,000  00

For balance due superintendent, from moneys not oth-

erwise  appropriated  ...............................  510  00

18. Act of March 2, 1827, appropriates for repairs between

Cumberland and Wheeling, and authorizes the ap-

pointment of a superintendent of repairs, at a com-

pensation to be fixed by the President. To be paid

from moneys not otherwise appropriated. The lan-

guage of this act is, "For repairing the public road

from  Cumberland to Wheeling" ..................    30,000 00

19. Act of May 19, 1828, appropriates for the completion

of the road to Zanesville, Ohio, to be paid from

fund, acts admitting Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and

Missouri ........................................  175,000 00

20. Act of March 2, 1829, appropriates for opening road

westwardly, from Zanesville, Ohio, to be paid from

fund, acts admitting Ohio, Illinois Indiana, and

Missouri ..........................................  100,000 00

21. Act of March 2, 1829, appropriates for opening road

eighty feet wide in Indiana, east and west from In-

dianapolis, and to appoint two superintendents, at

$800 each per annum, to be paid from funds, acts ad-

mitting Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri......   51,600 00

22. Act of March 3, 1829, appropriates for repairing

bridges &c., on road east of Wheeling ...........  100,000 00

23. Act of May 31, 1830 (Internal Improvements), appro-

priates for opening and grading road west of Zanes-

ville, Ohio, $100,000; for opening and grading road

in Indiana, $60,000; commencing at Indianapolis,

and progressing with the work to the eastern and

western boundaries of said State; for opening, grad-

ing, &c., in Illinois, $40,000, to be paid from reserve

fund, acts admitting Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and

Missouri; for claims due and remaining unpaid on

account of road east of Wheeling, $15,000; to be

paid from moneys in the treasury not otherwise ap-

propriated  ........................................  215,000  00

24. Act of March 2, 1831, appropriates $100,000 for open-

ing, grading, &c., west of Zanesville, Ohio; $950 for

repairs during the year 1830; $2,700 for work here-

tofore done east of Zanesville; $265.85 for arrear-

ages for the survey from Zanesville to the capital of

Missouri; and $75,000 for opening, grading, &c.,

in the State of Indiana, including bridge over White

river, near Indianapolis, and progressing to eastern

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The Old National Road.                   515

 

and western boundaries; $66,000 for opening, grad-

ing and bridging in Illinois; to be paid from the

fund, acts admitting Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and

Missouri ..........................................  244,915 85

25. Act of July 3, 1832, appropriates $150,000 for repairs

east of the Ohio river; $100,000 for continuing the

road west of Zanesville; $100,000 for continuing the

road in Indiana, including bridge over east and

west branch of White river; $70,000 for continuing

road in Illinois; to be paid from the fund, acts ad-

mitting Ohio, Indiana and Illinois .................  420,000 00

26. Act of March 2, 1833, appropriates to carry on certain

improvements east of the Ohio river, $125,000; in

Ohio, west of Zanesville, $130,000; in Indiana,

$100,000; in Illinois, $70,000; in Virginia, $34,440.  459,440 00

27. Act of June 24, 1834, appropriates $200,000 for con-

tinuing the road in Ohio; $150,000 for continuing

the road in Indiana; $100,000 for continuing the road

in Illinois, and $300,000 for the entire completion of

repairs east of Ohio, to meet provisions of the acts

of Pennsylvania (April 4, 1831), Maryland (Jan.

23, 1832) and Virginia (Feb. 7, 1832), accepting the

road surrendered to the States, the United States not

thereafter to be subject for any expense for repairs.

Places engineer officer of army in control of road

through Indiana and Illinois, and in charge of all

appropriations. $300,000 to be paid out of any money

in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, balance

from acts admitting Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.....  750,000 00

28. Act of June 27, 1837 (General Appropriation), for

arrearages due contractors ..........................  1,609  36

29. Act of March 3, 1835, appropriates $200,000 for con-

tinuing the road in the State of Ohio; $100,000 for

continuing road in the State of Indiana; to be out

of fund acts admitting Ohio, Indiana and Illinois,

and $346,186.58 for the entire completion of repairs

in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia; but be-

fore any part of this sum can be expended east of

of the Ohio river, the road shall be surrendered to

and accepted by the States through which it passes,

and the United States shall not thereafter be subject

to any expense in relation to said road. Out of any

money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated..  646,186 58

30. Act of March 3, 1835 (Repair of Roads), appropri-

ates to pay for work heretofore done by Isaiah Frost

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The Old National Road.                    517

 

on the Cumberland Road, $320; to pay late Super-

intendent of road a salary, $862.87 ................  1,182 87

31. Act of July 2, 1836, appropriates for continuing the

road in Ohio, $200,000; for continuing road in In-

diana, $250,000, including materials for a bridge

over the Wabash river; $150,000 for continuing the

road in Illinois, provided that the appropriation for

Illinois shall be limited to grading and bridging, and

shall not be construed as pledging Congress to future

appropriations for the purpose of macadamizing the

road, and the moneys herein appropriated for said

road in Ohio and Indiana must be expended in com-

pleting the greatest possible continuous portion of said

road in said States so that said finished part thereof

may be surrendered to the States respectively; to be

paid from acts admitting Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and

Missouri ..........................................  600,000 00

32. Act of March 3, 1837, appropriates $190,000 for con-

tinuing the road in Ohio;, $100,000 for continuing

the road in Indiana; $100,000 for continuing road in

Illinois, provided the road in Illinois shall not be

stoned or graveled, unless it can be done at a cost

not greater than the average cost of stoning and

graveling the road in Ohio and Indiana, and provided

that in all cases where it can be done the work to be

laid off in sections and let to the lowest substantial

bidder. Sec. 2 of the act provides that Sec. 2 of act

of July 2, 1836, shall not be applicable to expendi-

tures hereafter made on the road, and $7,183.63 is

appropriated by this act for repairs east of the Ohio

river; to be paid from the acts admitting Ohio, In-

diana  and  Illinois .................................  397,183  63

33. Act of May 25, 1838, appropriates for continuing the

road in Ohio, $150,000; for continuing it in Indiana,

including bridges, $150,000; for continuing it in Illi-

nois, $9,000; for the completion of a bridge over

Dunlap's creek at Brownsville; to be paid from

moneys in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated

and subject to provisions and conditions of act of

March 3, 1837 .....................................  459,000  00

34. Act of June 17, 1844 (Civil and Diplomatic), appro-

priates for arrearages on account of survey to Jeffer-

son, Mo    ..........................................   1,359                                         81

 

Total  ..........................................  $6,824,919                                 33

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518         Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.

 

 

APPENDIX No. 4.

SPECIMEN ADVERTISEMENT FOR BIDS FOR REPAIRING NATIONAL ROAD IN

OHIO -1838.

Sealed proposals will be received at Toll-gate No. 4, until the 6th

day of March next, for repairing that part of the road lying between the

beginning of the 23rd and end of the 42nd mile, and if suitable bids are

obtained, and not otherwise, contracts will be made at Bradshaw's hotel

in Fairview, on the 8th. Those who desire contracts are expected to

attend in person, in order to sign their bonds.

On this part of the Road three hundred rods or upwards (82½ cubic

feet each) will be required on each mile, of the best quality of lime-

stone, broken evenly into blocks not exceeding four ounces in weight,

each; and specimens of the material proposed, must be furnished, in

quantity not less than six cubic inches, broken and neatly put up in a

box, and accompanying each bid; which will be returned and taken as

the standard, both as it regards the quality of the material and the

preparation of it at the time of measurement and inspection.

The following conditions will be mutually understood as entering

into, and forming a part of the contract, namely: The 23, 24 and 25

miles to be ready for measurement and inspection on the 25th of July;

the 26, 27 and 28 miles on the 1st of August; the 29, 30 and 31 miles

on the 15th of August; the 32, 33 and 34 miles on the 1st of September;

the 35, 36, 37 miles on the 15th of September; the 38, 39 and 40 miles

on the 1st of October; and the 41 and 42 miles, if let, will be examined

at the same time.

Any failure to be ready for inspection at the time above specified,

will incur a penalty of five per cent. for every two days' delay, until the

whole penalty shall amount to 25 per cent. on the contract paid. All the

piles must be neatly put up for measurement and no pile will be measured

on this part of the work containing less than five rods. Whenever a pile

is placed upon deceptive ground, whether discovered at the time of

measurement or afterward, half its contents shall in every case be for-

feited for the use of the road.

Proposals will also be received at the American Hotel in Columbus,

on the 15th of March for hauling broken materials from the penitentiary

east of Columbus. Bids are solicited on the 1, 2 and 3 miles counting

from a point near the Toll-gate towards the city. Bids will also be

received at the same time and place, for collecting and breaking all the

old stone that lies along the roadside, between Columbus and Kirkersville,

neatly put in piles of not less than two rods, and placed on the outside

of the ditches.

• 114
 

The Old National Road.                   519

 

 

 

 

APPENDIX No. 5.

 

ADVERTISEMENT FOR PROPOSALS FOR BUILDING A NATIONAL ROAD BRIDGE

AND FOR TOLL HOUSES IN OHIO - 1837.

 

Proposals will also be received in Zanesville on Monday the 1st day

of May next, at Roger's Tavern, for rebuilding the Bridge over Salt

Creek, nine miles east of Zanesville. The structure will be of wood,

except some stone work to repair the abutments. A plan of the Bridge,

together with a bill for the timber, &c., can be seen at the place of letting

after the 24th inst. Conditions with regard to proposals the same as

above.

At the same time and place, proposals will likewise be received, for

building three or four Toll gates and Gate Houses between Hebron, east

of Columbus, and Jefferson, west of it. The house of frame with stone

foundations, and about 13 by 24 feet, one story high, and completely

finished. Bills of timber, stone, &c., will be furnished, and particulars

made known, by calling on the undersigned, at Rodger's Tavern, in

Zanesville after the 24th inst. In making bids conditions the same as above.

All letters must be post-paid, or no attention shall be given to them.

THOMAS M. DRAKE, Superintendent.

P. S.- Proposals will also be received at Columbus, on Monday, the

17th of April, for repairing the National Road between Kirkersville and

Columbus--by William B. Vanhook, Superintendent.

April 12.

WILLIAM WALL, A. C. B. P. W.

 

 

APPENDIX No. 6.

ADVERTISEMENT OF NATIONAL ROAD TAVERN IN OHIO -1837.

Tavern Stand for Sale or Rent. - A valuable Tavern Stand Sign

of the Harp, consisting of 25½ acres of choice land partly improved, and

a dwelling house, together with three front lots. This eligible and healthy

situation lies 8 miles east of Columbus City, the capital of Ohio, on the

National Road leading to Zanesville, at Big Walnut Bridge. The stand

is well supplied with several elegant springs.

It is unnecessary to comment on the numerous advantages of this

interesting site. The thoroughfare is great, and the growing prospects

beyond calculation. For particulars inquire of

Dec. 4-14.                         T. ARMSTRONG, Hibernia.

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