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.

Blending Cultures

It took some years to blend the cultures in the Old Northwest and Ohio Valley region.  The Yankee scorned the Southerner and the Southerner scorned the Yankee.  The New Englanders, usually a people of education (their communities appointed a schoolmaster right away),  were pious, law-abiding and industrious.  This didn't blend well with their easy-going neighbors.  New Englanders were, however, shrewd businessmen who could drive a hard bargain with their backwoods neighbors.  "Yankee tricks" was a common term to refer to the business practices between New Englanders and Southerners, with suspicion always on the New Englanders.

In the first days of the westward migration the Cumberland Gap was the gateway to the West.  Situated at the southeastern corner of Kentucky, it was easy for the Virginians and Carolinians to pass to Cincinnati and Louisville.  A group of Virginians, Carolinians, and Kentuckians, known as the "Long Knives", were short on book learning and not known to be gentlemen.  They sought the Ohio Valley as an escape from the society that held their birth and lack of wealth at a disadvantage.  They were not pious, though religious, their houses were poorer, their villages cruder, their dress rougher.  These people, however, were brave, industrious, hospitable and generous to a fault.  They often clashed with the New Englanders.

Before the Erie Canal opened in 1825, there were just three main routes to the new western territory but they all led to the Ohio River. Some went by way of Lake Erie by boat and then land. Some took the Cumberland Gap and Wilderness Road..  And some took long, arduous journeys by land on the National Road.  They went on foot or by canvas-covered wagons (ancestors of the prairie schooners that would go West in the mid-1800s).  Heavy with possessions, these vehicles were drawn over rough, muddy roads by oxen, mules and maybe horses.  Like their later offspring, they found exposure, illness, Indian attacks and acute loneliness. 

As Morris Birkbeck who was passing on the National Road in 1817 wrote, "Old America seems to be breaking up and moving westward on this grand track toward Ohio." 

Next time...Down the Ohio
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Today in Pioneer History: "On April 1, 1700, English pranksters began popularizing the annual tradition of April Fool's Day by playing practical jokes on each other.  Although the day also called All Fool's Day, has been celebrated for centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery.