West on the National Road

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West on the National Road
It's only 128 miles from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, West Virginia, but this route along the country's first Interstate traverses a surprising cross-section of American history.

By Bruce Heydt

Only the federal government would give America's first interstate road the designation "U.S. Route 40." In fairness, when the road was begun in 1811 as the first U.S. highway authorized by an act of Congress and built with federal dollars, it bore the more appropriate name of the Cumberland and later the National Road. In 1926, when the government began using numbers to identify its highways, the route received the rather nondescript label it still bears today.

The road, authorized in 1806 during Thomas Jefferson's administration, opened a route through the Allegheny Mountains, a major barrier to the young country's westward expansion. From Cumberland, Maryland, today's Route 40 modestly winds its way through a greatly reworked landscape that was once America's western frontier. Now and then, I caught glimpses of newer divided highways that parallel Route 40 and typically carry a much larger volume of traffic at a brisker speed. In contrast, the National Road rolls westward at a laid-back pace, following the contours of the land rather than slicing through it in an effort to link east and west in the fewest possible miles.

Modern travelers setting out from the nation's heartland may first encounter the road at its original western terminus of Wheeling, West Virginia, or even Vandalia, Illinois, where westward expansion had extended it by 1850. But nineteenth-century travelers usually began their journeys along the National Road from its eastern terminus of Cumberland, the town where I began my own trek.

The result for modern motorists is a sometimes dizzying drive punctuated by ear popping and incessant gear shifting.

To all appearances, Route 40 is your standard highway. But there's more to the route than meets the eye. It is really three roads in one, all built for more or less the same purpose, but each reflecting the needs of its own century. Long before the nineteenth-century federal road carried stagecoaches west through the Allegheny Mountains, George Washington, then an officer in the Virginia militia, built a road following this same general route in order to open the Ohio River Valley to Britain and her North American colonies. And in the twentieth century another Anglo-American alliance of sorts helped bring motor traffic to the road. In 1893 J. Frank Duryea, who introduced the gas-powered motorcar to America, and Scottish engineer John McAdam, who lent his name to his new process of surfacing roadways, set the stage for a new phase in the life of the then-decaying National Road.

For most of its length, the route's present incarnation is, not surprisingly, the most apparent, but even before setting out from Cumberland, I caught a hint of the nineteenth-century carriage road. Cumberland remains very conscious of its history and seems poised to recover some of the glories of its heyday, when it became America's first true gateway to the West. In addition to recognizing the National Road's role in putting the town on the map, Cumberland also looks back to the very rivals that soon made the road obsolete. The town's visitor information center, a quick walk from the original eastern terminus of the National Road, is in a railroad station. It serves the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad, a short excursion line that recaptures the days of steam trains, especially the Cumberland and Pennsylvania Railroad, that by the 1850s offered many travelers a favorable alternative to slow and dirty stage roads.

Cumberland is also home to the Canal Place Preservation & Development Authority. The organization hopes to convert the town's Potomac River waterfront into a heritage area commemorating the region's ties to the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which served Cumberland from 1850 to 1924. Ironically, after helping to put an end to the stagecoach era, rail and canal travel then declined in the early twentieth century, when hard surfaces and motor vehicles enticed travelers back onto the old roadways.

Today, the old National Road begins its journey west in the guise of Cumberland's North Centre Street and continues on through the Narrows, a gap in the mountains to the west of town. In broad terms, the route follows the course of the nearly vanished "Braddock's Road," a military trail George Washington used in 1754. British General Edward Braddock improved it during his disastrous march to Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh) in 1755. Braddock's British redcoats, however, cut a more direct line through the rougher, steeper countryside than a horse-drawn carriage could easily follow, so the line of the new National Road frequently deviated from the historic trail, following the path of least geographic resistance as it wound back and forth in search of gentle grades—not always easy to find in western Maryland. The result for modern motorists is a sometimes dizzying drive punctuated by ear popping and incessant gear shifting.

Just outside of town stands the first of many mileposts that mark the distance to Wheeling, West Virginia—in this case 128 miles. In 1811 this marker probably stood in isolation, or perhaps adjacent to a lone roadside tavern. Today it's in a suburban residential area that typifies the growth the road encouraged and that earned it the nickname "America's Main Street." Now that Route 40 is no longer the primary east-west artery, it has become more literally a Main Street for many communities in western Maryland and southwest Pennsylvania, towns like Frostburg, Grantsville, Farmington, Uniontown, Brownsville, Washington, Claysville and several others.