Greenup: The National Road's Last Stop

Greenup was platted in eighteen thirty-four by William C. Greenup, who worked as a surveyor and supervisor on the National Road in Illinois, the first federally funded highway in American history, running from Cumberland, Maryland to Vandalia, Illinois. Greenup owned the land here and donated lots to get the town started, planting it squarely on the road he helped oversee.

The National Road, now U.S. Route Forty, was the great westward artery of the early republic, and towns like Greenup existed to feed, water, and house the travelers moving along it. When Cumberland County was organized in eighteen forty-three, Greenup became its first county seat, a role it held for twelve years.

Today the town has about fourteen hundred residents. Route Forty still runs through it, now paralleled by Interstate Seventy a mile or two to the north. The two roads tell the same story in different eras: this narrow strip of central Illinois has been a corridor of westward movement for two centuries.