Braddock's Road

The road you are driving right now follows a path that General Edward Braddock hacked through these mountains in seventeen fifty-five. It was one of the most ambitious military engineering projects in colonial America, and it ended in one of the worst defeats in British military history.

Braddock arrived from England with two regiments of professional soldiers, tasked with capturing French-held Fort Duquesne, which sat at what is now Pittsburgh. His army, more than two thousand men including a young Virginia colonel named George Washington, set out from Fort Cumberland in Maryland and began cutting a road westward through five mountain ranges. What British planners thought was a seventy-mile march turned out to be one hundred twenty.

On July ninth, seventeen fifty-five, just a few miles short of their objective, the column was ambushed on the banks of the Monongahela River. French forces and their Native American allies, using the forest for cover, shredded the tightly packed British formations. In three hours, nearly nine hundred men were killed or wounded. Braddock himself was shot from his horse and died four days later. Washington, though two horses were shot out from under him and four bullets passed through his coat, survived unharmed.

Braddock was buried in the middle of his own road, and his soldiers marched over the grave to hide it from the enemy.

But the road itself lived on. The twelve-foot-wide path through the wilderness became the template for the National Road, the first highway built with federal funds, authorized by Congress in eighteen oh six. Wagon trains, stagecoaches, and eventually automobiles followed Braddock's route west. The highway you are on descends directly from that colonial military road through these Pennsylvania hills.