PREFACE

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HERE has history gone that we cannot read the record in highways she has made? The story of the pyramids is it not suggested in the remnants of those massy causeways built from the quarries to the Nile? Those faint white lines con-. verging on Mecca that wandering, zig-zag trace from Egypt to the Promised Land, how much of history do they suggest!

Roads have been typical of the civilizations which built them. The traveler entering the city of Nazareth traverses a Roman road which has been used since the beginning of the Christian era. Every line is typical of Rome; every great block of stone speaks of Roman power and Roman will. And ancient roads come down from the Roman standard in a descending scale, even as the strength and durability of their civilizations.

And so what stories of their own do the great routes of trade and conquest tell, whether it be the wandering course of Ten Thousand Immortals, a herculean leap over the Alps, a caravan route along the Oxus to India, or a blundering Braddock's road hewn into the Allegheny forests!

Now, these stories are largely stories of needs. And, in a general way, the greater need the better the road. This is illustrated by the very brute creation in our primeval forests. The bear's food, for instance, was all about him in forest and bush. He made no thoroughfares, for he needed none. On the other hand, the moose and buffalo, who required change of climate, new

and

feeding grounds and fresher salt licks, made thoroughfares their trails on the hills, and the chasms torn through the forests by the rivers, would have been all you could see in a bird's eyeview of this land two centuries ago.

From this beginning of road-making in America this law of need has been unconsciously observed. As the science of road building has more and more developed it is found to follow more closely this underlying economic. principle. As primeval conditions have passed away our roads have been coming down from the summits of the water-sheds, where the buffaloes made them and where Indian and pioneer travelled, to the river bottoms where they are most needed today.

The Old National Road, of which this monograph is a study. was built to answer a nation's needs, and its history is of value only as it interprets and throws additional light upon the rise, nature and passing of the need which brought it into existence. Was it not a great thing that the struggling young American Republic made the longest straight road ever built in the world? But the task was no greater than the need. It meant much that this road was built west - but more, that it was straight. It heralded the age of straight roads, an age whose motto was to be "Time is Money," and which made an axiom of the theorem. "A straight line is the shortest distance between two points." The Star of Bethlehem travelled above a highway to the cradle. of the King, as Milton said:

"See how from far upon the eastern road

The startled wizards haste with odours sweet."

Like it, the "Star of Empire" has ever traversed above highways. It has not gone where there were no roads. If it paused a moment on the Atlantic sea-board, it paused to await the opening of the National Road, above whose stately stretches it then passed, beckoning "the wealth and power of the world westward, until today it stands still over the cradle of the young empire of the West." For seven hundred miles this road marks the course of that star.

It was a question whether the expansion of the United States was to conduce to national strength or national weakness. France and Germany and Italy have expanded to the injury of national vitality, England and the United States to its strengthening. The building of the National Road was a means of securing the west to the United States as it was never secured to France or England. The era of canals and the National Road and steam navigation brought the farthest west into living touch with the east, and each contributed to the other's power and both were welded into one nation. This is one of the most critical and important chapters in the history of the expansion of the United States. The population of the three states west of the Ohio through which the National Road ran increased from 783,635 to 3,620,314 in the generation the road was in active. use (before the advent of railways). The average increase of percentage of permanent population for the first five decades in these states was over 182 per decade. In the second decade of the century Indiana's population increased over 500 per cent. This has been equaled but three times in all the phenomenal

"rushes" of recent years into the western states! In all this making of "the young empire of the west" the Old National Road had a preponderating influence. The states north and south of the great highway knew little of this marvelous advance. The percentage of increase of population of Virginia decreased 2 per cent., while Indiana and Illinois increased over 300, Kentucky's per cent. of increase decreasing 45. While Ohio's per cent. of increase of population increased by one, that of Virginia fell off 11 per cent. and Kentucky 8 per cent. This was in the prime of the National Road. These figures must not ⚫ be made to exaggerate, but are pregnant with suggestion. Throughout its generation the course of the National Road was on the general alignment of the expansive movement.

The author is indebted to the librarian of the State Libraries of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois. To Hon. C. B. Galbreath and assistants of the Ohio State Library he is greatly indebted for daily assistance in procuring volumes and manuscripts otherwise difficult to secure. The author is also largely in the debt of the Hon. T. B. Searight's valuable volume of biographical and colloquial skethches, "The Old Pike."

The old National Road was best known in some parts as the "United States" and "Cumberland Road." The former name has been selected as most appropriate for the present monograph as prepared for the Ohio Archæological and Historical Society. ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT.

Rome, Ohio,

January Twenty-sixth, 1901.