America's First Highway

"Does the horse pull the cart or does the horse push the cart?" Holding the reins of his home-built covered wagon, Elam Bender turned to me and smiled as he repeated his question. I stared back, half considering the problem and half engrossed in his coonskin cap. I'd seen coonskin caps before, mind you. I had just never seen one with the coon's head attached.
"Absolutely, without a doubt," I guessed, "the horse is pulling the cart."
Bender turned his gaze back to the road. The 14-year-old horse, Queen, clip-clopped along the highway pavement, the top of her head bobbing in and out of view. Ahead of us was the lead wagon; behind us, some 20 more, a reenactment of the westering caravans that rumbled over this length of the National Road in Maryland during the early 1800s.
The wagon's wheels crept uncomfortably close to the edge of the road. "You're wrong," Bender finally said. "Old Queen up there is pushing against the harness with her shoulders. So as far as the horse is concerned, she's pushing the wagon.”
At the moment, Queen was pushing us up a pretty steep hill near Keysers Ridge. It was already noon, yet the air was still cottony with fog. I watched Bender's hands at the reins, the hands of a retired dairy farmer and retired Mennonite minister, dark lined from decades of farmwork and God's work and everything that overlapped. Now, after 20 years participating in this annual pilgrimage, Bender seemed to know every twist and turn in the road. He pointed out each spot where the National Road's original path veered to the right or left of the modern highway that has replaced it. Queen turned her head longingly toward those byways, particularly when a tractor trailer rudely overtook us with a muffled woomph.
"The trucks get a little scary," observed Bender. "But I guess they're the reason the highway was put here in the first place."
The highway is U.S. Route 40. Since the 1920s that's been the official name the old National Road has borne for most of its … length through Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The National Road was the first federal interstate, constructed in fits and starts … [beginning in] 1811 with the goal of linking the great port of Baltimore with the wide Mississippi near St. Louis. Originally called the Cumberland Road, it's also been known as the Great Western Road, the Old Pike, the National Trail. The road commonly became Main Street as it passed through a town; some romantics got to calling it the Main Street of America.
The route has been repaved and straightened countless times, but motorists still roll over stone bridges built by hand 175 years ago, past centuries-old inns where wagon and stagecoach drivers once shook trail dust from their boots. West from Maryland, original mile markers still count down the distances to Wheeling, Columbus, and towns that no longer exist. And, in many spots, just a few feet beneath U.S. 40's pavement lie layers of rocks, each fragment hand-hewn when the nation was young.
I had set out on the road as the leaves began to turn, in a new rental car. It would have been nice to find an old Studebaker—made by the same company that once built covered wagons—but my sedan would prove to be worthy as I frequently urged it off the pavement to explore overgrown, abandoned stretches of the old road.
The National Road begins in Cumberland, Maryland. The city marks the western end of an old toll road from Baltimore and the end of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which parallels the Potomac River for more than 180 miles from Washington, D.C. Today I-68 swoops down from the hills, skims on pylons over Cumberland's rooftops, and takes off again, like a barnstorming jet. Between descent and ascent, there's barely time to admire Cumberland's turn-of-the-century spires, made more impressive by their location on a hill close to the heart of downtown.
As with so many major human accomplishments, the National Road had its roots in the desire to make money. In 1751 the Ohio Company of Virginia hired a Delaware Indian named Nemacolin to blaze a path to its holdings near what is now Brownsville, Pennsylvania. Two years later, as a Colonial Army major, George Washington rode that same trail to demand that French commanders pull their troops from Pennsylvania—a request that was not only rebuffed but also touched off the French and Indian War. In subsequent years Washington widened the trail when he built, then surrendered, Fort Necessity and helped command a force that improved the route again when he served as an aide-de-camp to British Gen. Edward Braddock during a disastrous campaign against the French.
After the Revolution, Washington worried about the fate of the young country's western territories, which were still wedged between conflicting European powers. He feared the residents might align themselves commercially and politically with "the Spaniards on their right, or Great Britain on their left."
The solution, he declared, was to "open a wide door, and make a smooth way for the produce of that Country to pass to our Markets before the trade may get into another channel." The dream of a national road was born. Congress passed a bill to create the road in 1806, and Thomas Jefferson signed it.
There was no easy route across the mountains. The Appalachians form a considerable barrier from Georgia to Maine. But it didn't take long for planners to agree that the best route stretched west of Baltimore, at first roughly following the trail blazed by Nemacolin, aiming for the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia.
West of Cumberland the original road crawled over Haystack Mountain, but I drove the route adopted just a few years later, around the mountain and through a streambed contained on both sides by high cliffs. Legend says an Indian maiden and an English trapper, forbidden to marry by her father, hurled themselves off the cliffs together.
It would have been quite a drop. They call this territory the mountain side of Maryland. Building a road here in the early 19th century wasn't easy. I could picture teams of laborers pushing through the forest: the first group blazing a trail, the next felling trees, another digging the roadbed. Workers—sometimes moonlighting farmers—sat at the roadside, hammers in hand, breaking native rocks to congressionally prescribed specifications.
Up Chestnut Ridge from Great Crossings, Pennsylvania, I found Don and Eunice Shoemaker. They hadn't expected to stay long when they took over as managers of the Summit Inn in 1958. The road practically passed through the parking lot of the sprawling hotel, 2,400 feet up at the western rampart of the Appalachians.
The inn has a glorious history. It is a resort in the grand old tradition, with a sweeping covered veranda and a 30-foot stone fireplace in its cavernous lobby. Built in 1907 as a retreat for the wealthy coal barons of nearby Uniontown, the Summit rode the automobile craze of the early 20th century in a big way. Signing the Summit guest book with a flourish were such visitors as Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone. They and other tycoons tested their newfangled contraptions against the perils of the National Road, which a few yards west of the Summit dropped off the Appalachians at a 9 percent grade.
My feet were propped on the white-painted railing at the Summit porch west end. The rosy sun, low on the horizon, argued for bragging rights with the reds and oranges of early fall. Then the lights of Uniontown, a third of a mile below, flickered on. Eighty years ago glowing coke ovens would have dotted the landscape.
I was sitting atop the last mountain on the National Road. Beyond this point spread the rolling hills and flatlands of America's Midwest. I could imagine those road builders, after two years of battling gravity in the Appalachians, viewing this landscape with a sigh of relief—then bracing for their plunge into that forest.
The AMY C out of Tampa, Florida, was passing beneath my feet, heading south on the Ohio River. The barge was pushing nine huge bins lashed together with cables, six of them filled to their rims with coal. Behind the wheelhouse glass the pilot returned my wave as he disappeared under the 149-year-old Wheeling suspension bridge—once the world's longest—which carries the National Road toward Ohio. Wheeling marked the road's end until July 4, 1825, when construction resumed to the west. Jubilant locals turned out at the St. Clairsville, Ohio, courthouse to listen to speeches and watch the first spade of dirt turned.
As the road rose out of the Ohio River Valley, I could see its stages of history laid out side-by-side-by-side. To the north sits the original roadbed—concrete, brick, or gravel pushed up by grass—overhung by unruly trees. To the south roars I-70, four lanes of interstate highway that, with the pedal to the floor and a wallop of caffeine, will get a motorist to Utah in a couple of days.
In between lies U.S. 40, two lanes of blacktop that ease you between towns, then join the old route as it passes through alternately picturesque and shabby business districts. The most dismal ones pass namelessly. The more vibrant ones all seem to have a personal claim to fame: Cambridge (site of the Hopalong Cassidy Sidewalk), New Concord (childhood home of John Glenn, the astronaut and senator), Zanesville (birthplace of Zane Grey, the Western novelist who glorified the pioneers rolling through his hometown). The original road groans back to life on its own in the less fortunate settlements that have been bypassed by U.S. 40, which veers abruptly around them like a motorist trying to avoid a pothole. Whether the intention was to preserve the towns or simply speed the flow of traffic, the strategy of rerouting U.S. 40 often amounted to a municipal death sentence.
It is past Columbus, they say, that the Midwest truly begins. One thing is for sure: Beyond it the National Road begins to ignore the contours of nature and makes a beeline toward Indianapolis. At this point Congress was getting impatient with the cost of building the road. Surveyors were ordered to plot a route as straight (and cheap) as possible. Their dedication to the task is admirable. If not for a slight pull to the right on the front wheels of my car, I could have pointed straight ahead, closed my eyes, and let the cruise control take me to Indianapolis.
Of course, that would have meant missing West Jefferson, Ohio, home to the Western Hemisphere's one and only Krazy Glue distribution center, and South Vienna, where the corn ears painted in the middle of the road commemorate the annual Corn Festival.
I stopped in Phoneton, founded in 1893 by AT&T at the junction of three major phone and telegraph lines, to find a telephone. Naturally, there was no public phone in Phoneton. But there were ostriches. Two of them behind a fence, staring at me bug-eyed just as I was accelerating to head out of town.
"They're named John and Martha," said Jim Callahan, "and they'll kick the tar out of you."
Callahan and his wife, Letha, have been raising ostriches—and their flightless cousins, emu and rhea—practically on the shoulder of the National Road since 1982. "They're sold for meat and leather for boots and jackets," Callahan said, pouring some pellets for John and Martha's dinner. His dog, Holly, followed close behind, seemingly intent on keeping Callahan between herself and the birds. "A few years ago, I could get $10,000 for a year-old pair. Now it's more like $400."
Blithely unaware of the whims of market demands, Martha was this month laying an egg every two days. In a shed, Callahan showed me an incubator with four eggs in various stages of gestation. "Letha's scared to death of ostriches. They've got these big claws on 'em. But let me show you what she does with the eggs...."
He led me into their modest house, through the screen porch to the living room. I stood in a folk Fabergé museum. Everywhere were ostrich eggs. Carved ostrich eggs. Decorated ostrich eggs. Hollowed out ostrich eggs with dioramas lovingly placed inside them. On one shelf an ostrich egg figurine held an ostrich egg parasol and wore an ostrich egg hooped skirt all decorated with pink beads.
I just knew that a mile away from here at the Wal-Mart along I-70 these things would fetch a pretty penny. But Letha wouldn't dream of it. "If I sold them, it would be labor," she said, straightening the parasol shell. "So I'm not interested in that."
Western Ohio rolled past under my wheels. This is farm country. The land is sealike in its lightly swelling flatness, the sky arching over wide horizons. Barns rose darkly, like islands, skirted by bright gabled farmhouses. Fence posts and mile markers whizzed by. I was surprised to see tobacco barns, with their telltale slatted sides, among the scatterings of farm buildings. Then I remembered that the term "stogie" comes from the National Road's Conestoga wagon drivers, who enjoyed cigars rolled from Ohio tobacco.
Richmond, Indiana, puts a temporary stop to the farm idyll. This is a town that has something to prove. You sense it from the tourist flyers at the brand-new Wayne County visitors bureau, just across the state line. The town has several historic districts reflecting its history as a trading outpost, railroad depot, and manufacturing center. One of the Midwest's best preserved Victorian neighborhoods draws nationwide admirers who stroll along Richmond's sidewalks, peering past the wrought-iron fences at imposing homes with gingerbread trim.
But a few blocks away stands a monument to Richmond's darkest day. A brick wall bears the words: "In Memory of the Forty-one Persons Who Lost Their Lives in the Tragic Downtown Explosion April 6, 1968."
I walked over to the Romanesque Wayne County Courthouse into the office of the county clerk, JoEllen Trimble. She knew all about the explosion. Her husband was one of the 41.
"Jim was an attorney," said Trimble, a woman with sparkling eyes that outshone her violet jogging suit. "It was Saturday, the week before Easter. A gas main ruptured, and there was a huge explosion. And then there was another explosion—it touched off a supply of gunpowder in the basement of a sporting-goods store."
Two city blocks of Richmond vanished.
"I'd been out of town that day, and when I first heard about it, I wasn't worried about Jim," she said. We had left the courthouse and were walking past the blast site. It is occupied now by a department store. "It was a Saturday, and Jim didn't usually work on Saturdays. But that Saturday.…"
A wind blew up. Trimble pulled her jacket collar close around her neck. It occurred to me that for 29 years she'd been walking past this spot. So had scores of others who lost husbands, wives, and children on that day.
You might not remember the Richmond explosion of April 6, 1968. I had not, even though it should count as one of the great American tragedies of the 1960s. Two days before, in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Riots broke out in a hundred cities across the nation, leaving more than three dozen people dead. That dark weekend Richmond was just another American city in flames.
At the library I flipped through news photographs of Richmond residents, both black and white, running into collapsing buildings to save each other's loved ones. A multiracial group of volunteers, their determination showing, held a fire hose. In one account Lucy Robinson, a black mother of eight who was out of town that day, tried to call Richmond and, when she couldn't get through, was told by a telephone operator that there was probably a riot going on there.
"You may know telephone work," Robinson told the operator, "but you don't know Richmond, Indiana."
It seems fitting that just a mile or two north of the National Road lies the most famous automobile racetrack in the world. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was built right about the time that the pike, long left obsolete by railroads, awakened to a motor-age renaissance.
Beyond Indianapolis I thought I was driving past corn farms gone bust. The fields were sloppy landscapes of broken stalks surrounded by dead weeds. It took a patient fellow at a gas station near Brazil (birthplace of Jimmy Hoffa) to set me straight.
"We call that no-till farming," he said, talking slowly in the apparent hope that I might comprehend. "Don't have to plow after the harvest. Just plant the seeds underneath the stalks, and spray for weeds during the growing season." I asked if all that spraying causes any problems, like chemical runoff contaminating streams. "Nooooo," he said, speaking ever slower. "We're real careful."
Teutopolis, Illinois, introduces itself with an exclamation mark: The spire of St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church occupies a portion of the sky usually reserved for grain elevators. A quick look around confirms that St. Francis is not merely the most impressive church in town, it is the only church in town.
"This is the only church T-Town needs," I was informed by a woman hurrying out the church doors.
Indeed, Teutopolis—named for its heritage as a German Catholic settlement dating back to the 1830s—thrives as an island community of 1,400 that has stubbornly melded its historic, ethnic, religious, and political identities. Its streets are a neat grid of meticulously kept homes. Front-yard Virgin Mary statues outnumber the birdbaths. A ball field on the grounds of a former Franciscan seminary is still flanked by the school's large devotional statues. A home run could imperil a Blessed Virgin just beyond the right field scoreboard.
Now it was late fall, and the basketball season was about to begin. Teutopolis High School is fiercely proud of both its boys and girls teams. I expected to find the players hard at work in the high school gymnasium, but no one was shooting hoops.
I stopped in at the school's main office. "I'm sorry, the principal's not here today," a secretary told me. I waited for her to direct me to someone in charge. Finally she declared, "It's the first day of hunting season!"
It occurred to me that since arriving, I had not seen many males. There were women everywhere, but most of the guys, it turned out, were off stalking deer. I suspect that gender roles here haven't changed much since the days the road first came through, although the antler size of those deer, not the venison, may inspire more excitement today.
Past a succession of cornfields and oil wells, the old roadway dies in Vandalia, at the Kaskaskia River, where a covered bridge used to stand. Here, nearly 600 miles from Cumberland, a sheetmetal highway sign planted in the middle of the pavement declares, "ROAD ENDS."
Across the river I wandered through the halls of Illinois's old state capitol building. Abraham Lincoln served in the legislature and gave his first published speech here, opposing an investigation of the state bank. Out front is an 18-foot-high Madonna of the Trail monument, one of 12 erected nationwide in the 1920s by the Daughters of the American Revolution to honor pioneer women.
By the time the road reached Vandalia in 1838, the town was breathing its last as the state capital. Springfield would inherit the title the following year. The road was out of breath too, proceeding more from momentum than necessity. There were plans to continue it on to the Mississippi, but roads already went there from Vandalia—and besides, the railroads had all but obviated the road builders' aim to join East to West. So the old road ended ingloriously on this riverbank. I drove on to St. Louis along U.S. 40. The original route of this highway from Vandalia ends in East St. Louis, near a Mississippi riverboat casino. Nearby, barges are loaded with corn for shipment downriver. Highway bridges leap toward the Gateway Arch, symbol of America's expansion to a West far beyond George Washington's wildest dream. I thought of Elam Bender's riddle. Did the road pull the nation west, or did the nation push the road west? A bit of both, I figured.
It was past sundown. For tens of thousands who had traveled this far in their wagons, there would be no more roads. The great trails of the West had no inns spaced along their lengths, no reassuring mile markers.
Many of the early travelers never got this far. They dropped out, settled down, started new communities here and there along the Old Pike. Nothing wrong with that. The most rewarding dreams aren't always realized at the end of a road.