Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 10).djvu/74

74 was appropriated to complete the road to Zanesville, Ohio, and in 1829 an additional appropriation for continuing it westward was made.

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. 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