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 CHAPTER VIII

HE narrow swath of a road cut through the darkling Alleghenies by General Braddock has been worth all it cost in time and treasure. Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century it was one of the main thoroughfares into the Ohio valley, and when, at the dawning of the nineteenth, the United States built our first and greatest public highway, the general alignment of Braddock's Road between Cumberland and the last range of the Alleghenies—Laurel Hill—was the course pursued. In certain localities this famed national boulevard, the Cumberland Road, was built upon the very bed of Braddock's road, as Braddock's road had been built partly upon the early Washington's Road which followed the path of Indian, buffalo, and mound-building aborigines. Nowhere in America can the evolution of