The National Road and the Gateway at Cumberland

Cumberland sits at the western end of Maryland, where the Potomac River cuts through the last ridge of the Allegheny Mountains before the land opens into the broad Ohio River watershed. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, that geographic fact made Cumberland the most important inland town in the young United States.

The National Road, formally authorized by Congress in eighteen oh-six as the first federally funded interstate highway in American history, began at Cumberland. Or more precisely, it began at the point where the older colonial road from the East Coast ended, which was Cumberland. The road's builders picked up from there and pushed west through the mountains into Pennsylvania, then Ohio, then Indiana and Illinois. By the time it was substantially complete in the late eighteen thirties, the National Road ran nearly six hundred miles from Cumberland to Vandalia, Illinois, and it was carrying the weight of the young nation's westward movement.

What passed through Cumberland was extraordinary. Covered wagons loaded with farm families heading to Ohio and Indiana. Drovers moving cattle and hogs east to the coastal markets. Stagecoaches running scheduled passenger service between Baltimore and Wheeling. Mail. Military supply. The commerce of a country that had just doubled its territory with the Louisiana Purchase and was trying to figure out how to govern the land it now held.

The road was built by contract labor, including many Irish immigrants. Sections of the original macadam surface, broken stone packed in layers and a technology imported from Scotland, are still visible in western Maryland where later road crews left them undisturbed.

The National Road lost its primacy when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad arrived in Cumberland in eighteen forty-two. The railroad was faster, cheaper, and more reliable than any wagon road. Within a decade the great flow of westward migration had shifted from the road to the rails. Cumberland became a railroad city instead of a road city. The highway that built the country ran through it and moved on.