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Rh touch with the East, and each contributed to the other's power and both were welded into one nation. The population of the three states west of the Ohio through which the Cumberland Road ran increased from 783,635 to 3,620,314 in the generation the road was in active use. The average increase of percentage of permanent population for the first five decades in these states was over 182 per decade. In the second decade of the century Indiana's population increased over 500 per cent. This has been equaled but three times in all the phenomenal "rushes" of recent years into the western states. In all this making of "the young empire of the West" the Cumberland Road had a preponderating influence.

This "Chain of Federal Union," forged, under God, by the hand of that first American in the hot fires of revolution, strengthened wisely by the same timely hand in those critical afterhours, has thrown its imperial links, one by one, across a continent. Historic Washington's Road, with all the wealth of history and tradition which attaches to it, was the first and most important link.