Historic Highways of America Volume III Part 7

All that was needed to turn the whole current toward the Ohio was a good thoroughfare.

The thousands 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 c.u.mberland Road.

In an act pa.s.sed by Congress April 30, 1802, to enable the people of Ohio to form a state government and for admission into the Union, section 7 contained this provision:

"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 leading 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 pa.s.s."[21]

Another law, pa.s.sed March 3rd of the following year, appropriated 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.[22]

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.

3. Was.h.i.+ngton--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: Boone's Road and Braddock'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 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 expedient to recommend the laying out and making a road from c.u.mberland, 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 accommodate roads from Baltimore and the District of Columbia; it will cross the Monongahela at or near Brownsville, sometimes called Redstone, where the advantages of boating 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 princ.i.p.al population of the state of Ohio."[23]

Immediately the following act of Congress was pa.s.sed:

_To Regulate the Laying out and Making a Road from c.u.mberland in the State of Maryland, to the State of Ohio._

In the execution of this act President Jefferson appointed Thomas Moore of Maryland, Joseph Kerr of Ohio, and Eli Williams of Maryland commissioners to lay out the c.u.mberland Road. Their first report was presented December 30, 1806. It is a doc.u.ment of great importance, throwing, as it does, many interesting side lights on the great task which confronted the builders of our first national highway.

Permission to build the road was gained of each of the states through which it pa.s.sed, Pennsylvania making the condition that the route of the road should pa.s.s through the towns of Was.h.i.+ngton and Uniontown. On the fifteenth of January, 1808, the commissioners rendered a second report in which it appears that timber and brush had already been cleared from the proposed route and that contracts were already let for the first ten miles west of c.u.mberland. This indicates that the c.u.mberland Road was not built on the bed of the old military routes. Though the two crossed each other frequently, the commissioners reported that the two roadbeds were not identical in the aggregate for more than one mile in the entire distance.

Braddock's Road and the c.u.mberland Road were originally one as they left c.u.mberland. The course met again at Little Meadows near Tomlinson'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 Allegheny, and the c.u.mberland Road continued westward along the course of the old portage path toward Wheeling on the Ohio.

Contracts for the first ten miles west of c.u.mberland 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 Was.h.i.+ngton to the Virginia line. In the following year United States mail coaches were running from Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 c.u.mberland 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 this greater proportional expense.

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 freightage of goods the sum of $90,000.

The subsequent history of this highway and all the vicissitudes through which it has pa.s.sed, has, in a measure, perhaps, dimmed the l.u.s.ter of its early pride. The subject of transportation has undergone such marvelous changes in these eighty years since the c.u.mberland 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 the heroic and persistent efforts of George Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 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. 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 t.i.tle 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 today suggest the best there is in our American state. Without exaggeration, the building of the binding highway, which, through so many years, Was.h.i.+ngton championed, was the crowning act of all that had gone before. It embodied the prime idea in the Ordinance of 1787, and proved, finally, that a republic of loyal people could scorn the old European theory that mountains are imperative boundaries of empire.

It was a question whether the expansion of the United States was to conduce to national strength or national weakness. France and Germany and Italy have expanded to the injury of national vitality, England and the United States to its strengthening. The building of the c.u.mberland Road was a means of securing the West to the United States as it was never secured to France or England. The era of ca.n.a.ls and national roads and steam navigation brought the farthest West into living touch with the East, and each contributed to the other's power and both were welded into one nation. The population of the three states west of the Ohio through which the c.u.mberland Road ran increased from 783,635 to 3,620,314 in the generation the road was in active use. The average increase of percentage of permanent population for the first five decades in these states was over 182 per decade. In the second decade of the century Indiana's population increased over 500 per cent. This has been equaled but three times in all the phenomenal "rushes" of recent years into the western states. In all this making of "the young empire of the West" the c.u.mberland Road had a preponderating influence.

This "Chain of Federal Union," forged, under G.o.d, by the hand of that first American in the hot fires of revolution, strengthened wisely by the same timely hand in those critical afterhours, has thrown its imperial links, one by one, across a continent. Historic Was.h.i.+ngton's Road, with all the wealth of history and tradition which attaches to it, was the first and most important link.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Darlington's _Christopher Gist's Journals_, p. 67.

[2] A very curious, and possibly the only, view of these buildings in existence will be found in an old "Map of Fort c.u.mberland," _Historic Highways of America_, vol. iv.

[3] Toner's _Journal of Colonel George Was.h.i.+ngton, 1754_, p. 16.

[4] Toner's _Journal of Colonel George Was.h.i.+ngton, 1754_, p. 13.

[5] The private _Journal_ kept by Was.h.i.+ngton on the expedition of the Virginia Regiment in 1754 was composed of rough notes only. It was lost with other papers at the battle of Fort Necessity and was captured by the French and sent to Paris. Two years later it was published by the French government, after being thoroughly "edited" by a French censor.

It was t.i.tled "MEMOIRE _contenant le Precis des Faits, avec leurs Pieces Justificatives, pour servir de Reponse aux_ OBSERVATIONS _envoyees, par les Ministres d'Angleterre, dans les Cours de l'Europe. A Paris; de l'Imprimerie Royale, 1756._"

In this MEMOIRE, together with portions of Was.h.i.+ngton's _Journal_ appear papers, instructions, etc., captured at Braddock's defeat in 1755. Of the portion of Was.h.i.+ngton's _Journal_ published, Was.h.i.+ngton himself said: "I kept no regular one (Journal) during the Expedition; rough notes of occurrences I certainly took, and find them as certainly and strangely metamorphised, some parts left out which I remember were entered, and many things added that never were thought of, the names of men and things egregiously miscalled, and the whole of what I saw Englished is very incorrect and nonsensical." The last entry on the _Journal_ is on June 27th, six days previous to the battle of Fort Necessity.

[6] Toner's _Journal of Colonel George Was.h.i.+ngton, 1754,_ pp. 43, 44.

[7] Toner's _Journal of Colonel George Was.h.i.+ngton, 1754,_ p. 65.

[8] Toner's _Journal of Colonel George Was.h.i.+ngton, 1754_, p. 63.

[9] Toner's _Journal of Colonel George Was.h.i.+ngton, 1754_, pp. 90-97.

[10] Toner's _Journal of Colonel George Was.h.i.+ngton, 1754_, p. 127.

[11] Toner's _Journal of Colonel George Was.h.i.+ngton, 1754_, p. 101.

[12] Toner's _Journal of Colonel George Was.h.i.+ngton, 1754_, pp. 157-158.

[13] _History of c.u.mberland_, p. 76.

[14] _The Monongahela of Old_, p. 53.

[15] _Frontier Forts of Pennsylvania_, vol. ii., p. 32.

[16] _Writings of Was.h.i.+ngton_ (1837), vol. i., p. 54.

[17] _Monongahela of Old_, pp. 52-53.

[18] _Frontier Forts of Pennsylvania_, vol. ii., p. 31.

[19] Craig's _History of Pittsburg_, p. 104.

[20] Craig's _History of Pittsburgh_, p. 226. It is interesting to note that Pittsburg was on the direct mail route to Kentucky--Boone's old route through c.u.mberland Gap not being a mail route.

[21] _United States Statutes at Large_, vol. ii., p. 173.