The tales of those who knew the road in the West and those who knew it in the East are much alike. It is probable that there was one important distinction—the passenger traffic of the road between the Potomac and Ohio, which gave life on that portion of the road a peculiar flavor, was doubtless not equaled on the western division.

For many years the center of western population was in the Ohio Valley, and good steamers were plying the Ohio when the Cumberland Road was first opened. Indeed the road was originally intended for the accommodation of the lower Ohio Valley.[9] Still, as the century grew old and the interior population became considerable, the Ohio division of the road became a crowded thoroughfare. An old stage-driver in eastern Ohio remembers when business was such that he and his companion Knights of Rein and Whip never went to bed for twenty nights, and more than a hundred teams might have been met in a score of miles.

When the road was built to Wheeling, its greatest mission was accomplished—the portage path across the mountains was completed to a point where river navigation was almost always available. And yet less than half of the road was finished. It now touched the eastern extremity of the great state whose public lands were being sold in order to pay for its building. Westward lay the growing states of Indiana and Illinois, a per cent of the sale of whose land had already been pledged to the road. Then came another moment when the great work paused and the original ambition of its friends was at hazard.

In 1820 Congress appropriated one hundred and forty-one thousand dollars for completing the road from Washington, Pennsylvania to Wheeling. In the same year ten thousand dollars was appropriated for laying out the road between Wheeling, Virginia and a point on the left bank of the Mississippi River, between St. Louis and the mouth of the Illinois River. For four years the fate of the road west of the Ohio hung in the balance, during which time the road was menaced by the specter of unconstitutionality, already mentioned. But on the third day of March, 1825, a bill was passed by Congress appropriating one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for building the road to Zanesville, Ohio, and the extension of the surveys to the permanent seat of government in Missouri, to pass by the seats of government of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.[10] Two years later, one hundred and seventy thousand dollars was appropriated to complete the road to Zanesville, Ohio, and in 1829 an additional appropriation for continuing it westward was made.[11]

It has been noted that the Cumberland Road from Cumberland to Wheeling was built on a general alignment of a former thoroughfare of the red men and the pioneers. So with much of the course west of the Ohio. Between Wheeling and Zanesville the Cumberland Road followed the course of the first road made through Ohio, that celebrated route marked out, by way of Lancaster and Chillicothe, to Kentucky, by Colonel Ebenezer Zane, and which bore the name of Zane’s Trace. This first road built in Ohio was authorized by an act of Congress passed May 17, 1796.[12] This route through Ohio was a well worn road a quarter of a century before the Cumberland Road was extended across the Ohio River.

The act of 1825, authorizing the extension of the great road into the state of Ohio, was greeted with intense enthusiasm by the people of the West. The fear that the road would not be continued beyond the Ohio River was generally entertained, and for good reasons. The debate of constitutionality, which had been going on for several years, increased the fear. And yet it would have been breaking faith with the West by the national Government to have failed to continue the road.

The act appropriated one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for an extension of the road from Wheeling to Zanesville, Ohio, and work was immediately undertaken. The Ohio was by far the greatest body of water which the road crossed, and for many years the passage from Wheeling to the opposite side of the Ohio, Bridgeport, was made by ferry. Later a great bridge, the admiration of the countryside, was erected. The road entered Ohio in Belmont County, and eventually crossed the state in a due line west, not deviating its course even to touch cities of such importance as Newark or Dayton, although, in the case of the former at least, such a course would have been less expensive than the one pursued. Passing due west the road was built through Belmont, Guernsey, Muskingum, Licking, Franklin, Madison, Clark, Montgomery, and Preble Counties, a distance of over three hundred miles. A larger portion of the Cumberland Road which was actually completed lay in Ohio than in all other states through which it passed combined.

The work on the road between Wheeling and Zanesville was begun in 1825-26. Ground was broken with great ceremony opposite the Court House at St. Clairsville, Belmont County, July 4, 1825. An address was made by Mr. William B. Hubbard. The cost of the road in eastern Ohio was much less than the cost in Pennsylvania, averaging only about three thousand four hundred dollars per mile. This included three-inch layers of broken stone, masonry bridges, and culverts. Large appropriations were made for the road in succeeding years and the work went on from Zanesville due west to Columbus. The course of the road between Zanesville and Columbus was perhaps the first instance where the road ignored, entirely, the general alignment of a previous road between the same two points. The old road between Zanesville and Columbus went by way of Newark and Granville, a roundabout course, but probably the most practicable, as anyone may attest who has traveled over the Cumberland Road in the western part of Muskingum County. A long and determined effort was made by citizens of Newark and Granville to have the new road follow the course of the old, but without effect. Ohio had not, like Pennsylvania, demanded that the road should pass through certain towns. The only direction named by law was that the road should go west on the straightest possible line through the capital of each state.

The course between Zanesville and Columbus was located by the United States commissioner, Jonathan Knight, Esq., who, accompanied by his associates (one of whom was the youthful Joseph E. Johnson), arrived in Columbus, October 5, 1825. Bids for contracts for building the road from Zanesville to Columbus were advertised to be received at the superintendent’s office at Zanesville, from the twenty-third to the thirtieth of June, 1829. The road was fully completed by 1833. The road entered Columbus on Friend (now Main) Street. There was great rivalry between the North End and South End over the road’s entrance into the city. The matter was compromised by having it enter on Friend Street and take its exit on West Broad, traversing High to make the connection.

Concerning the route out of Columbus, the Ohio State Journal said:

“The adopted route leaves Columbus at Broad Street, crosses the Scioto River at the end of that street and on the new wooden bridge erected in 1826 by an individual having a charter from the state. The bridge is not so permanent nor so spacious as could be desired, yet it may answer the intended purposes for several years to come. Thence the location passes through the village of Franklinton, and across the low grounds to the bluff which is surrounded at a depression formed by a ravine, and at a point nearly in the prolongation in the direction of Broad Street; thence by a small angle, a straight line to the bluffs of Darby Creek; to pass the creek and its bluffs some angles were necessary; thence nearly a straight line through Deer Creek Barrens, and across that stream to the dividing grounds, between the Scioto and the Miami waters; thence nearly down to the valley of Beaver Creek.”

The preliminary survey westward was completed in 1826 and extended to Indianapolis, Indiana. Bids were advertised for the contract west of Columbus in July 1830. During the next seven years the work was pushed on through Madison, Clark, Montgomery, and Preble Counties and across the Indiana line. Proposals for bids for building the road west of Springfield, Ohio, were advertised for, during August 1837; a condition being that the first eight miles be finished by January 1838. These proposals are interesting today. The following is a typical advertisement:

“National Road in Ohio.—Notice to contractors.—Proposals will be received by the undersigned, until the 19th of August inst., for clearing and grubbing eight miles of the line of National Road west of this place, from the 55th to the 62nd mile inclusive west of Columbus—the work to be completed on or before the 1st day of January, 1838.

“The trees and growth to be entirely cleared away to the distance of 40 feet on each side of the central axis of the road, and all trees impending over that space to be cut down; all stumps and roots to be carefully grubbed out to the distance of 20 feet on each side of the axis, and where occasional high embankments, or spacious side drains may be required, the grubbing is to extend to the distance of 30 feet on each side of the same axis. All the timber, brush, stumps and roots to be entirely removed from the above space of 80 feet in width and the earth excavated in grubbing, to be thrown back into the hollows formed by removing the stumps and roots.

“The proposals will state the price per linear rod or mile, and the offers of competent, or responsible individuals only will be accepted.

“Notice is hereby given to the proprietors of the land, on that part of the line of the National Road lying between Springfield and the Miami river, to remove all fences and other barriers now across the line a reasonable time being allowed them to secure that portion of their present crops which may lie upon the location of the road.

G. Dutton,
Lieutenant U. S. Engineers Supt.

National Road Office, Springfield, Ohio.
August 2nd 1837.”[13]

Indianapolis was the center of Cumberland Road operations in Indiana, and from that city the road was built both eastward and westward. The road entered Indiana through Wayne County but was not completed until taken under a charter from the state by the Wayne County Turnpike Company, and finished in 1850. When Indiana and Illinois received the road from the national Government it was not completed, though graded and bridged as far west as Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois.

The Cumberland Road was not to Indiana and Illinois what it was to Ohio, for somewhat similar reasons that it was less to Ohio than to Pennsylvania, for the further west it was built the older the century grew, and the newer the means of transportation which were coming rapidly to the front. This was true, even, from the very beginning. The road was hardly a decade old in Pennsylvania, when two canals and a railroad over the portage, offered a rival means of transportation across the state from Harrisburg to Pittsburg.[14] When the road reached Wheeling, Ohio River travel was very much improved, and a large proportion of traffic went down the river by packet. When the road entered Indiana, new plans for internal improvements were under way beside which a turnpike was almost a relic. In 1835-36, Indiana passed an internal improvement bill, authorizing three great canals and a railway.[15] The proposed railway, from the village of Madison on the Ohio River northward to Indianapolis, is a pregnant suggestion of the amount of traffic to Indiana from the east which passed down the Ohio from Wheeling, instead of going overland through Ohio.[16] This was, undoubtedly, mostly passenger traffic, which was very heavy at this time.[17]

But the dawning of a new era in transportation had already been heralded in the national hall of legislation. In 1832 the House Committee on Roads and Canals had discussed in their report the question of the relative cost of various means of intercommunication, including railways. Each report of the committee for the next five years mentioned the same subject, until, in 1836, the matter of substituting a railway for the Cumberland Road between Columbus and the Mississippi was very seriously considered.

In that year a House Bill (No. 64) came back from the Senate amended in two particulars, one authorizing that the appropriations made for Illinois should be confined to grading and bridging only, and should not be construed as implying that Congress had pledged itself to macadamize the road.

The House Committee struck out these amendments and substituted a more sweeping one than any yet suggested in the history of the road. This amendment provided that a railroad be constructed west of Columbus with the money appropriated for a highway. The committee reported, that, after long study of the question, many reasons appeared why the change should be made. It was stated to the committee by respectable authority, that much of the stone for the masonry and covering for the road east of Columbus had to be transported for considerable distances over bad roads across the adjacent country at very great expense, and that, in its continuance westward through Ohio, this source of expense would be greatly augmented. Nevertheless the compact at the time of the admission of the western states supposed the western termination of the road should be the Mississippi. The estimated expense of the road’s extension to Vandalia, Illinois, sixty-five miles east of the Mississippi, amounted to $4,732,622.83, making the total expense of the entire road amount to about ten millions. The committee said it would have been unfaithful to the trust reposed in it, if it had not bestowed much attention upon this matter, and it did not hesitate to ground on a recent report of the Secretary of War, this very important change of the plan of the road. This report of the War Department showed that the distance between Columbus and Vandalia was three hundred and thirty-four miles and the estimated cost of completing the road that far would be $4,732,622.83, of which $1,120,320.01 had been expended and $3,547,894.83 remained to be expended in order to finish the road to that extent according to plans then in operation; that after its completion it would require an annual expenditure on the three hundred and thirty-four miles of $392,809.71 to keep it in repair, the engineers computing the annual cost of repairs of the portion of the road between Wheeling and Columbus (one hundred and twenty-seven miles) at $99,430.30.

On the other hand the estimated cost of a railway from Columbus to Vandalia on the route of the Cumberland Road was $4,280,540.37, and the cost of preservation and repair of such a road, $173,718.25. Thus the computed cost of the railway exceeded that of the turnpike but about twenty per cent, while the annual expense of repairing the former would fall short more than fifty-six per cent. In addition to the advantage of reduced cost was that of less time consumed in transportation; for, assuming as the committee did a rate of speed of fifteen miles per hour (which was five miles per hour less than the then customary speed of railway traveling in England on the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad, and about the ordinary rate of speed of the American locomotives), it would require only twenty-three hours for news from Baltimore to reach Columbus, forty-two hours to Indianapolis, fifty-four to Vandalia, and fifty-eight to St. Louis.

One interesting argument for the substitution of the railway for the Cumberland Road was given as follows:

“When the relation of the general Government to the states which it unites is justly regarded; when it is considered it is especially charged with the common defense; that for the attainment of this end the militia must be combined in time of war with the regular army and the state with the United States troops; that mutual prompt and vigorous concert should mark the efforts of both for the accomplishment of a common end and the safety of all; it seems needless to dwell upon the importance of transmitting intelligence between the state and federal government with the least possible delay and concentrating in a period of common danger their joint efforts with the greatest possible dispatch. It is alike needless to detail the comparative advantages of a railroad and an ordinary turnpike under such circumstances. A few weeks, nay, a very few days, or hours, may determine the issue of a campaign, though happily for the United States their distance from a powerful enemy may limit the contingency of war to destruction short of that by which the events of an hour had involved ruin of an empire.”

Despite the weight of argument presented by the House Committee their amendment was in turn stricken out, and the bill of 1836 appropriated six hundred thousand dollars for the Cumberland Road, both of the Senate amendments which the House Committee had stricken out being incorporated in the bill.

The last appropriation for the Cumberland Road was dated May 25, 1838; it granted one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the road in both Ohio and Indiana, and nine thousand dollars for the road in Illinois.