The National Road

The lack of easy and cheap transportation was a huge obstacle to western development.  The settlers found if difficult to reach their new homes.  Once there, supplies of salt, iron, hardware, fabrics, and food stuffs could be obtained only at great expense from the East.

The farmers produced maize, wheat, meats, and livestock, but these left little profit margin after the cost of getting the product to market.  It required a month to carry goods from central Ohio to Baltimore.  By 1820 three thousand wagons passed back and forth carrying western merchandise valued at 18 million dollars.

Internal improvements had to be made.  Indian trails became rough pioneer roadways, then developed into turnpikes.  Long before the War of 1812, Jefferson and other statesmen conceived of a great highway connecting the seaboard with the interior.When Ohio became a state in 1802, five percent of the sale of public lands were designated for building roads extending eastward.  In 1811, the greatest undertaking of its kind in the history of America began with 10 million dollars.

The Cumberland Road, known to settlers as the National Road, started at Cumberland, Maryland and pushed through the Alleghenies to Wheeling, West Virginia.  John McAdam of England developed the method of construction - laying crushed limestone over a prepared road bed in three layers, each layer packed down by traffic before the next was laid.  Curved to provide drainage in areas where spring rains were known to cause flooding, it worked well.

When it was proposed to extend further west to Indiana and Illinois by means of tolls, opinions raged.  Upkeep would be paid by the tolls, even extending roads to the north and south eventually.  While legal and constitutional battles went on, so did construction.  Columbus, Ohio in 1833,  Indianapolis in 1840, finally to Vandalia, Illinois.  Plans to take it to Jefferson City, Missouri were never completed. 

Cost was originally $10,000 a mile but became $13,000 a mile from West Virginia onward.  Until 1860 the National Road was a busy thoroughfare.  Lined with hospitable farmhouses and fast-growing towns, hardly a day passed without several covered wagons going by.  Citizens gathered to hear the travelers stories, news from the big Eastern cities like New York and Washington, even gossip from the next county.   The taverns and road houses offered a respite from travel and provided food and lodging.    Once the railroads and steamboats came, travel was easier and these small towns  faded from history, but in some parts of the rural Midwest you can still travel on what once was the iconic National Road that was so much a part of American history.

Next time...The Steamboat
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On May 27, 1831, Jedediah Smith, one of the nation's most important trapper-explorers is killed by Comanche Indians on the Santa Fe Trail.  Smith's role in opening the Far West was not fully appreciated until his far-ranging journeys were documented.  He "filled in the blanks" on many of the early explorers maps and gave a picture of the America West before it was settled.