The National Road—formerly the Cumberland Road and later celebrated as "Main Street of America"—was the United States' first great federally financed highway and a proving ground for national‑scale internal improvements. Originating at the head of navigation on the Potomac River in Cumberland, Maryland, the 4-rod (66 ft; 20 m) wide engineered turnpike was authorized on March 29, 1806, when President Thomas Jefferson signed "An Act to regulate the laying out and making a road from Cumberland … to the State of Ohio". Surveyors ran a 131-mile (211 km) alignment over the Allegheny Mountains to Wheeling, Virginia, on the Ohio River by 1818, building a stone‑surfaced, cambered roadway, masonry bridges, culverts, and cast‑iron mileposts that set standards for antebellum turnpikes. Between 1825 and 1838, Congress approved successive appropriations that pushed the highway westward across Ohio, Indiana, and into Illinois. Construction gangs reached Zanesville in 1833, Columbus in 1834, the eastern outskirts of Indianapolis in 1836, Terre Haute in 1838, and the then‑capital of Vandalia, Illinois—591 mi (951 km) from Cumberland—by 1839, when federal contracts ceased. From 1806 to 1838, Congress appropriated about $6.8 million for surveys, right‑of‑way acquisition, grading, stone surfacing, and masonry—an unprecedented federal outlay for transportation infrastructure. The project triggered widespread debates over the constitutional scope of "internal improvements". The operation and maintenance of completed segments were transferred to the states in stages—Maryland (1833), Pennsylvania (1836), Virginia (now West Virginia) (1838), Ohio (1849), Indiana (1849), and Illinois (1856). Traffic declined with the rise of canals and railroads, but many portions were rebuilt in concrete or brick during the 1910s–1930s and incorporated into U.S. Route 40. In the 20th century, with the advent of the automobile, the National Road was connected with other historic routes to California under the title, National Old Trails Road. Today, much of the alignment is followed by U.S. Route 40 (US 40), with various portions bearing the Alternate U.S. Route 40 (Alt. US 40) designation, or various state-road numbers (such as Maryland Route 144 for several sections between Baltimore and Cumberland). Scholars regard the National Road as a foundational step toward the modern Interstate Highway System. Today, Interstate 70 closely follows the National Road for most of its length. In 1976, the American Society of Civil Engineers designated the National Road as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. In 2002, the entire road, including extensions east to Baltimore and west to St. Louis, was designated the Historic National Road, an All-American Road. The surviving corridor, which includes historic tollhouses, stone‑arch and iron bridges, and intact macadam sections, is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
History
Braddock Road The Braddock Road had been opened by the Ohio Company in 1751 between Fort Cumberland, the limit of navigation on the upper Potomac River, and the French military station at Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio River, (at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers), an important trading and military point where the city of Pittsburgh now stands. It received its name during the colonial-era French and Indian War of 1753–1763 (also known as the Seven Years' War in Europe), when it was constructed by British General Edward Braddock, who was accompanied by Colonel George Washington of the Virginia militia regiment in the ill-fated July 1755 Braddock expedition, an attempt to assault the French-held Fort Duquesne.
Cumberland Road
Construction of the Cumberland Road (which later became part of the longer National Road) was authorized on March 29, 1806, by Congress. The new Cumberland Road would replace the wagon and foot paths of the Braddock Road for travel between the Potomac and Ohio Rivers, following roughly the same alignment until just east of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. From there, where the Braddock Road turned north towards Pittsburgh, the new National Road/Cumberland Road continued west to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), also on the Ohio River. The contract for the construction of the first section was awarded to Henry McKinley on May 8, 1811, and construction began later that year, with the road reaching Wheeling on August 1, 1818. For more than 100 years, a simple granite stone was the only marker of the road's beginning in Cumberland, Maryland. In June 2012, a monument and plaza were built in that town's Riverside Park, next to the historic original starting point. Beyond the National Road's eastern terminus at Cumberland and toward the Atlantic coast, a series of private toll roads and turnpikes were constructed, connecting the National Road (also known as the Old National Pike) with Baltimore, then the third-largest city in the country, and a major maritime port on Chesapeake Bay. Completed in 1824, these feeder routes formed what is referred to as an eastern extension of the federal National Road.
Westward extension
On May 15, 1820, Congress authorized an extension of the road to St. Louis, on the Mississippi River, and on March 3, 1825, across the Mississippi and to Jefferson City, Missouri. Work on the extension between Wheeling and Zanesville, Ohio, used the pre-existing Zane's Trace of Ebenezer Zane, and was completed in 1833 to the new state capital of Columbus, Ohio, and in 1838 to the college town of Springfield, Ohio. In 1849, a bridge was completed to carry the National Road across the Ohio River at Wheeling. The Wheeling Suspension Bridge, designed by Charles Ellet Jr., was at the time the world's longest bridge span at 1,010 feet (310 m) from tower to tower.
Transfer to states
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