erns, and provided from forest and stream the larger portion of food for the sojourners over the first rough roads. It is said that these objected to the building of the National Road, through fear that more accelerated means of locomotion would eventually cheat them out of the business which then fell to their share. But, like the New England landlord, the western tavernkeeper was a many-sided man. Had the National Road taverns been located always within villages, their proprietors might have become what New England landlords are reputed to have been, town representatives, councilmen, selectmen, tapsters and heads. of the "Train Band"-in fact, next to the town clerk in importance. As it was, the western landlord often filled as important a position on the frontier as his eastern counterpart did in New England. This was due, in part, to the place which the western tavern occupied in society. Taverns were, both in the east and in the west, places of meeting for almost any business. This was particularly true in the west, where the public house was almost the only available place for any gathering whatever between the scattered villages. But while in the east the landlord was most frequently busy with official duties, the western landlord was mostly engaged in collateral professions, which rendered him of no less value to his community. The jovial host at the National Road tavern often worked a large farm, upon which his tavern stood. Some of the more prosperous on the eastern half of the road, owned slaves which carried on the work of the farm and hotel. He sometimes ran a store in connection with his tavern, and almost without exception, officiated at his bar, where he "sold strong waters to relieve the inhabitants." Whiskey, two

drinks for a "fippeny bit," called "fip" for short (value 64 cents) was the principal "strong water" in demand. It was the pure article, neither diluted nor adulterated. In the larger towns of course any beverage of the day was kept at the taverns sherry toddy, mulled wine, madeira and cider.

As has been said, the road bred its own landlords. Youths, whose lives began simultaneously with that of the great road, worked upon its curved bed in their teens, became teamsters and contractors in middle life, and spent the autumn of their lives as landlords of its taverns, purchased with the money earned in working upon it. Several well-known landlords were prominent contractors, many of whom owned their share of the great six and eight-horse teams which hauled freight to the western rivers. The old taverns were the hearts of the National Road, and the tavern life was the best gauge to measure the current of business that ebbed and flowed. As the great road became superceded by the railways, the taverns were the first to succumb to the shock. In a very interesting article, a recent writer on "The Rise of the Tide of Life to New England Hilltops,"95 speaks of the early hill life of New England, and the memorials there left "of the deep and sweeping streams of human history." The author would have found the National Road and its predecessors an interesting western example of the social phenomena with which he dealt. In New England, as in the central west, the first travelled courses were on the summits of the watersheds. These routes of the brute were the first ways of men. The tide of life has ebbed from New England hilltops since the

95 Mr. Edward P. Pressey in New England Magazine, Vol. XXII, No. 6 (August 1900).

beginning. Sufficient is it for the present subject that the National Road was the most important "stream of human history" from Atlantic tide-water to the headwaters of the streams of the Mississippi. Its old taverns are, after the remnants of the historic road-bed and ponderous bridges, the most interesting "shells and fossils" cast up by this stream. This old route, chosen first by the buffalo and followed by red and white men, will ever be the course of travel across the mountains. From this rugged path made by the once famous National Road, the tide of life can not ebb. Here, a thousand years hence, may course a magnificent boulevard, the American Appian way, to the commercial, as well as military, key of the eastern slopes of the Mississippi basin at the junction of the Alleghany and Monongahela rivers. It is important that each fact of history concerning this ancient highway be put on lasting record.

CHAPTER X.

CONCLUSION.

It is impossible to leave the study of the National Road without gathering up into a single chapter a number of threads which have not been woven into the preceding record. And first, the very appearance of the old road as seen by travellers who pass over it to-day. One can not go a single mile over it without becoming deeply impressed with the evidence of the age and the individuality of the old National Road. There is nothing like it in the United States. Leaping the Ohio at Wheeling, the National Road throws itself across Ohio and Indiana, straight as an arrow, like an ancient elevated pathway of the gods, chopping hills in twain at a blow, traversing the lowlands on high grades like a railroad bed, vaulting river and stream on massive bridges of unparalled size. The farther one travels upon it, the more impressed one must become, for there is, in the long grades and stretches and ponderous bridges, that "masterful suggestion of a serious purpose, speeding you along with a strange uplifting of the heart," of which Kenneth Grahame speaks; "and even in its shedding off of bank and hedgerow as it marched straight and full for the open downs, it seems to declare it contempt for adventitious trappings to catch the shallow-pated."96 For long distances, this road "of the sterner sort" will be, so far as its immediate surface is concerned, what the tender mercies of the counties through which it passes will allow, but at certain

96 "The Golden Age," p. 155.