Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 5).djvu/199

Rh Philadelphia and Lancaster, became the first macadamized road in the United States and demands particular attention in another volume of this series.

Nothing could have been more surprising to the writer than to find how remarkably this road held its own in competition with the Braddock or the Cumberland Road south of it. Explain it as you will, nine-tenths of the published accounts left by travelers of the old journey from Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington into the Ohio Valley describe this Pennsylvania route. The Cumberland Road was built from Cumberland, Maryland to Wheeling, West Virginia, on the Ohio (1806–1818) at a cost of nearly two million dollars, yet during the entire first half of that century you will find that almost every important writer who passed over the mountains went over the Pennsylvania Road. It is exceedingly difficult to find a graphic picture of a journey over Braddock's Road before 1800; contemporaneous descriptions of a journey over the Cumberland or National Road are not numerous. On the other hand a vol-