Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 10).djvu/76

76 road was built through Belmont, Guernsey, Muskingum, Licking, Franklin, Madison, Clark, Montgomery, and Preble Counties, a distance of over three hundred miles. A larger portion of the Cumberland Road which was actually completed lay in Ohio than in all other states through which it passed combined.

The work on the road between Wheeling and Zanesville was begun in 1825–26. Ground was broken with great ceremony opposite the Court House at St. Clairsville, Belmont County, July 4, 1825. An address was made by Mr. William B. Hubbard. The cost of the road in eastern Ohio was much less than the cost in Pennsylvania, averaging only about three thousand four hundred dollars per mile. This included three-inch layers of broken stone, masonry bridges, and culverts. Large appropriations were made for the road in succeeding years and the work went on from Zanesville due west to Columbus. The course of the road between Zanesville and Columbus was perhaps the first instance where the road ignored, entirely, the general alignment of a previous road between the same two