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210 Immediately the following act of Congress was passed:

In the execution of this act President Jefferson appointed Thomas Moore of Maryland, Joseph Kerr of Ohio, and Eli Williams of Maryland commissioners to lay out the Cumberland Road. Their first report was presented December 30, 1806. It is a document of great importance, throwing, as it does, many interesting side lights on the great task which confronted the builders of our first national highway.

Permission to build the road was gained of each of the states through which it passed, Pennsylvania making the condition that the route of the road should pass through the towns of Washington and Uniontown. On the fifteenth of January, 1808, the commissioners rendered a second report in which it appears that timber and brush had already been cleared from the proposed route and that contracts were already let for the first ten miles west of