The Cumberland Road

Historic Highways of America #10

by Archer Butler Hulbert

Excerpt from Chapter 1: When this West was in its teens and began suddenly outstripping itself, to the marvel of the world, one of the momentous factors in its progress was the building of a great national road, from the Potomac River to the Mississippi River, by the United States Government – a highway seven hundred miles in length, at a cost of seven millions of treasure. This ribbon of road, winding its way through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, toward the Mississippi, was one of the most important steps in that movement of national expansion which followed the conquest of the West. It is probably impossible for us to realize fully what it meant to this West when that vanguard of surveyors came down the western slopes of the Alleghenies, hewing a thoroughfare which should, in one generation, bind distant and half-acquainted states together in bonds of common interest, sympathy, and ambition. Until that day, travelers spoke of “going into” and “coming out of” the West as though it were a Mammoth Cave. Such were the herculean difficulties of travel that it was commonly said, despite the dangers of life in the unconquered land, if pioneers could live to get into the West, nothing could, thereafter, daunt them. The growth and prosperity of the West was impossible, until the dawning of such convictions as those which made the Cumberland Road a reality.

207 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1904

About the author

Archer Butler Hulbert, FRGS was an historical geographer, writer, and professor of American history.