Cumberland: Named for Where the Road Began
Near Indianapolis, Indiana
On July seventh, eighteen thirty-one, a settler named Samuel Fullen had his land platted into a village ten miles east of Indianapolis on the National Road. He named it Cumberland, after Cumberland, Maryland, the eastern terminus where the whole road had started. The gesture was deliberate.
This was a town that knew exactly what it was: a waypoint on the great road carrying settlers from the Atlantic coast into the interior of the continent. The National Road in Indiana was still being completed, and travelers moving through stopped here for a meal, a room, and fresh horses. The road was later designated U.
S. Route Forty, then shadowed by Interstate Seventy. Cumberland is now absorbed into the Indianapolis metropolitan area, a suburb of a city that barely existed when Fullen named his village after a town hundreds of miles away.
