THE NATIONAL ROAD

America’s first great national project.

Historian Crytzer, author of The Whiskey Rebellion (2023), points out that well before George Washington assumed the presidency, settlers were pouring west across the Appalachians. Trails accommodated individuals but were too primitive to allow freight to return to markets in the East. Washington was obsessed with overcoming this problem, which would also increase the value of his extensive property in those territories. His solution was a canal from the Potomac across mountains to the Ohio River, which never got off the ground. Albert Gallatin (1761-1849) did better. The longest-serving Secretary of the Treasury (1801-1814) and a resident of frontier western Pennsylvania, he persuaded President Jefferson that a good road across the Appalachians was a national priority. Jefferson and his anti-Federalists opposed lavish government spending, so the 1806 Congressional bill reduced the road’s budget to a fraction of Gallatin’s estimate; corners were cut and the National Road lived “in a near-constant state of disrepair.” Construction involved heavy manual labor, clearing trees and brush for a path 66 feet wide, bridging rivers, and laying down a surface of crushed rock. Work began in Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811 and reached Wheeling (in present-day West Virginia) in 1818. Efforts to reach the Mississippi petered out, but the 620 miles across the Appalachians flourished with stage coaches, mail, and heavy wagons carrying settlers traveling west and commerce east. “The National Road was a triumph of interstate collaboration and cooperation…but by 1850 that shine had worn off.” Cheaper and faster, railroads reached Wheeling in 1853. By the following decade, nature had reclaimed the highway, and the author recounts the first of several nostalgic essays written by a journalist who traveled the overgrown, abandoned route. “All around the writer were empty and dilapidated taverns, and long-abandoned stables. ‘The turmoil of traffic, the beat of hoofs, the rumble of wheels…once so familiar would now sound strangely inappropriate,’ he opined.”

A fine reminder that a revolution first united our nation, but roads kept it united.