The Wagon Roads of Western Maryland
By John McGrain (05/27/2010)

Last Update: Oct. 12, 2010

Note: The author started to gather this information in 2009. It turns out that a number of persons in Western Maryland were far advanced in exploring the Braddock Road and the National Road. There is probably nothing new to add to their extensive discoveries. However, some other items of interest about other roads are presented here, as well as some speculations about French explorations of the upper Potomac, which are difficult to prove.

William B. Marye in his comments of an old map of 1721 by Philemon Lloyd entitled “Patowmeck Above Ye Inhabitants” noted that the entire Upper Potomac region upstream of Conoy Island was known as “Cohongorooto” (MHM, June 1935, 30:114ff). That was the scarcely visited far west of Maryland that was soon to be settled. Benjamin Winslow’s 1736 map of the same territory is available at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore. Many writers have worked on the story of the roads leading to the west. It seems almost impossible to find anything new other than a few quaint sidelights or bits of local pedantry. This account has ended as a summary of what many other dedicated historians have collected. We have despaired, even in the age of the Internet, of finding anything that has eluded our predecessors.

The Monocacy Road

The first serious study of roads in Maryland was by George Leakin Sioussat in the 1899 report of the Maryland Geological Survey on the history of construction of highways in this state. Sioussat was the source of much later work. The 1958 History of Road Building in Maryland by Charles T. LeViness was much less detailed but it included mentions of two roads that ran out of central Pennsylvania, across Maryland, into the Valley of Virginia. LeViness presented a map of the Monocacy Road of the mid-1700s that seemed to pass SW from Taneytown to the vicinity of Frederick and then cross South Mountain on what seems to be the present Alternate U. S. 40, the oldest of all the westbound routes. LeViness stated that these old routes were “lost roads” of which no trace remained. However, the 150th anniversary book for Carroll County in 1989 presented a map by George J. Horvath, Jr., showing that the present Md. Route 194 going SW from Taneytown was indeed the Monocacy Road. William B. Marye in his study “The Old Indian Road” quoted a number of land survey documents that prove the Monocacy Road, sometimes spelled “Monoksy Road,” transited the first plantations along the present Maryland Route 194. William B. Marye thought the Monocacy Road crossed Pipe Creek “near Union Bridge,” but a study of the topographic maps suggests that it probably crossed at Bruceville and Keymar. Research by John P. Dern and Dr. Grace Tracey, as well as the plats worked out by Dr. Arthur Tracey, have added additional support (Cf. Pioneers of Old Monocacy). Knowledge of these roads has evolved considerably in recent decades even though the experts heartily disagree with each other. In some cases, stretches of the original roads can still be traversed.

The earliest apparent reference to a western road was found in the letter-books of Dr. Charles Carroll, August 12, 1731, wherein Carroll discussed selling some of his land on Conewago and Codorus Creeks “on the Road that leads from Conestoga to pipe Creek,” (Marye, “The Baltimore County Garrison,” Maryland Historical Magazine, September 1921, 16:258).

The road building order issued by the Court of General Quarter Sessions of Pennsylvania in February 1740 was quoted in Daniel Wunderlich Nead’s The Pennsylvania-Germans in Maryland, 1914, p. 47.

The Prince George’s County Court Records of 1743 mentioned the “wagon road near Little Pipe Creek” and also “Little Pipe Creek Wagon Road.” The same road was listed in 1744 and again in 1748, the year that Frederick County was erected from the western territory of Prince George’s.

T. J. C. Williams and Folger McKinsey in History of Frederick County, p. 3, noted that the Maryland General Assembly ordered the building of the Monocacy Road but quoted no law, and the actual legislation has not been found thus far in the Archives of Maryland series. More likely, the orders are filed in the court minutes of Prince George’s County. “In 1726, the court had divided each hundred into two or more overseer precincts, a term not encountered in other county court records. The precincts were described as portions of a hundred, such as upper, lower, or middle. As settlements moved north and west, new ways were devised to designate an overseer area. The minutes of November 1739 list the area from the top of ‘Shannandore’ Mountain to the top of ‘Kitoctin’ Mountain and another from the latter mountain to Monocacy Wagon Road near Thomas Beatty’s” (See, Pat Melville, “Roads in Prince George’s County, 1696-1765,” The Archivists’ Bulldog, May 12, 2003, 17:1). The Beatty family had lived on the road east of the Monocacy and east of present Ceresville. Their mother had purchased 1,000 acres of Dulany’s Lot in 1732, and the family house survives at 9110 Liberty Road, about 0.98 mile east of the Monocacy; it is a very primitive house that was originally in a Dutch style, the Beattys having intermarried with Hudson Valley Dutch settlers. Thus there is an argument for placing the river crossing of 1739 at the Ceresville ford and ferry site. Grace L. Tracey and John P. Dern in their 1987 Pioneers of Old Monocacy, p. 50, state that there was “no one Monocacy Road.” They gave Hughes Ford near the present Frederick airport as the crossing place in 1725.

Edward Bennett Mathews in his “Counties of Maryland,” stated, “As early as 1740 the Monocacy road had become in part a wagon road, a development from an earlier line of pack-horse travel from Hanover westward to the Potomac. This became the line of Settlement during the early stages of development. Important localities also spring up along Little Pipe Creek and its tributaries in the vicinity of Union Bridge” (Maryland Geological Survey, 1906, Volume 6:464. Also available as Archives of Maryland Online, Volume 630:48).

The Monocacy Road from the 1958 anniversary book of the State Roads Commission.

Normand Bruce advertised the Hampton iron furnace 1.5 miles west of Emmitsburg in the Maryland Journal & Public Advertiser, October 3, 1773, giving his home address as the “Great Pipe Creek bridge, on the main road leading from Pennsylvania to Virginia.” Bruce lived on the present Md. Route 194, the Monocacy Road, and his text proves there was a bridge, at least by 1773. The crossing would have been Bruceville, a name still found on current maps. Another bridge was needed in 1784 when the justices levied funds to span Big Pipe Creek at “Col. Bruce’s Mill.” [See, Pat Melville, “Roads in Frederick County, 1765-1794,” The Archivist’s Bulldog, 18 (July 15, 2004)]. Thus, it is possible to drive over the Carroll County part of the Monocacy Road in 2010.

McGinnis Mill fronted on the Monocacy Road.

William B. Marye in his 1920 paper “The Old Indian Road” stated that the Monocacy Road crossed the Monocacy at Poe’s Ford, but he lacked a document to show where the ford had been. Later researchers found the location of Poe’s Ford. Calvin Edward Schildknecht in Monocacy and Catoctin, (page 253), placed that ford above the mouth of Hunting Creek on the road from Woodsboro to Creagerstown (Md. Route 550) and added that the Monocacy Road did not cross there, which is logical because the Woodsborough Road leads from NW to SE. In Place Names of Frederick County, Maryland, Louis O’Donoghue stated that the Poe crossing was upstream of Hunting Creek and below the bridge on Md. Route 550, possibly within grid 14-D-5 in the modern ADC Street Atlas. The Poe family of that neighborhood were Germans originally named Pfau (“peacock” in German); they were not related to the Irish Poe family that produced the famous Baltimore poet and critic. The 1965 topographic map suggests that Myers Ford is distinct from the Poe Ford; that map shows Myers Ford below the mouth of Hunting Creek. The present Shyrock Road possibly led to the Myers Ford and is located at grid 14-D-7 in the ADC Street Atlas.

In The Martzes of Maryland (p. 46) Ralph F. Martz wrote that his ancestors left “Wright’s Ferry on the Susquehanna and traveled via Codorus Creek, then along Conewago Creek, crossed Big Pipe Creek and crossed the Monocacy River at Poe’s Ford and traveled up the Fishing Creek Gap. They crossed the Middletown Valley near Jerusalem, They followed South Mountain back to Crampton’s Gap.” Boston March, a member of the Martz family, acquired the Noltens Farm in Little Antietam Valley “just off the Conestoga-Opequon Road” in 1769 (p. 110).

Calvin Edward Schildknecht and Thomas John Chew Williams in Monoacy and Catoctin, Volume 3, insisted that a ford just south of Creagerstown on the Frank Stevens farm was not the Poe Ford on the Monocacy Road. Following Edward T. Schultz’s First Settlement of Germans in Maryland, Mr. Marye in 1920 reported that traces of the old ford road near Creagerstown had survived into the early 20th century.

Schildknecht and Williams added to the confusion by stating that the Monocacy Road stayed on the east side of the river “until reaching Hughes Ford east of Frederick (p. 252).” No vestigial roads leading to Hughes Ford can be found on the 1965 topographic map; however crossings are shown on the 1858 map by Bond and by the 1873 Titus atlas. Hughes Ford is marked on the 1965 topographic map east of the Frederick City airport; in the present day ADC Street Atlas, it is not marked but would fall within grid 30-C-7. A fragment of Hughes Ford Road survives today as an extension of Monroe Street in Frederick City, grids 29-J & K-6 in the ADC Street Atlas. It was probably truncated by building the airport.

Oddly enough, the end-papers map drawn by J. E. Hershey and published in Volume I of Schildknecht’s Monocacy and Catoctin showed the Monocacy Road crossing not at Hughes Ford but at an unnamed ferry at what seems to be Ceresville although that mill and estate were not shown with an owner’s name.

A study of the roads leading out of Carroll County suggests that a road headed for the Monocacy River probably took a path to Woodsboro and to Walkersville. An advertisement in the Maryland Journal of Baltimore, February 20, 1792, shows that G. H. Williams was trying to sell the family farm on Monocacy called Ceresville along with a mill of three run of stones, a sawmill, a good farm house, and a “license to keep the ferry.” The location of Ceresville is well known, and in 2010 the second, much improved Ceresville Mill of 1812 still stands on present Md. 26, the road from Libertytown to Frederick City. Laws of Maryland, 1790, Chapter 32, mentioned a road from Randallstown, through the Barrens of Baltimore County towards Liberty-Town and on to Frederick “crossing the Monocacy at the Ferry next above the mouth of Israel’s Creek,” a location that also works out to Md. Route 26 and Ceresville.

William B. Marye in 1920 noted in his summary that a ford on the Monocacy was near Albine’s plantation, although he could not pinpoint the location (MHM, 15:385). Tracey and Dern in Pioneers of Old Monocacy state that the Albin plantation and the Thomas Beatty property were in the vicinity of Hughes Ford. In an 1727 act of assembly for rounding up slaves who had joined the Shewan [sic] Indians in the backwoods, the territory where the legislators declared open season was “to the northwestward of Monocacy River, from the mouth there of up the said river, to the fording place where the Conestogo-Path crosses the same, near one Albine’s Plantation, and then to the northwestward of the said Conestogo-Path until it meets with Susquehanah-River” (Laws of Md., Acts of 1727, Chapter 12). Calvin Edward Schildknecht in Monocacy and Catoctin (p. 1:61) stated that the tract called Albin’s Choice was near the present airport and near Hughes Ford; on page 1:137 he stated that Monocacy Ford was indeed Hughes Ford, thus agreeing with Tracey and Dern.

Marye also quoted an item from the history of Lancaster County wherein the Pennsylvania part of the route was mentioned at a meeting between Governor Gordon and an Indian tribe in 1728; the Native Americans said they looked forward to seeing the Governor coming down “the Conestoga Road” at their meeting the following year (MHM 15:395). Marye found an even earlier mention of the Conestoga Path in 1725, hardly four years after the first mention of the river itself in public records (MHM 15:367). Governor Calvert of Maryland in October 1725 invited the “Shuano” Indians to a meeting “at Monokosey” to settle on a treaty about run-away slaves (Arch. Md., 35:200).

Another Marye citation pegged the name “Monocacy Road” at least to 1732, where it was described as traveling across Little Pipe Creek; that instance was in the patent of a tract called “Strawberry Plains” dated June 16, 1732. The survey began on the Monocacy Road itself at a stream draining to Little Pipe Creek (MHM 15:350). The “path” was spoken of as a “wagon road” by at least April 1734 when the verbal description of a land grant called “The Forest” mentioned “the wagon road from Conestoga to Opekin where it crosses Ketanktin Creek which falls into the Potomac River about six miles above Monocacy” (Marye, 1920, Maryland Historical Magazine, 15:382). A patent of “Providence” in Lord Baltimore’s reserve issued in 1735 also mentioned the “Wagon Road leading from Susquehannah towards Potomac” (MHM, 15:381-382).

The River in Records and on Maps

Augustine Herrman’s 1670-1673 map of the Chesapeake showed a stylized squiggle spelled “Monanloch” well upstream of the Great Falls of the Potomac. The 1685 map by John Thornton et al. showed a nameless north-south stream that has to be the present Monocacy. This same North East Branch [of the Potomac] also appeared on Henry Popple’s 1733 “Map of the British Empire in America.” Popple was possibly the first cartographer to show the Shenandore River (Peabody Library of Johns Hopkins University). Fry and Jefferson’s 1751 map showed the Shenandore River as well as the “Monoccasy” River. The 1775 Lewis Evans map in the Johns Hopkins Library showed the Monocacy and Shenandore Rivers, plus the Baltimore Town founded in 1729, which most other maps missed, including Fry and Jefferson’s.

Possibly the earliest public recorded to name the river was found in 1721/1722 testimony cited by William B. Marye (MHM, 30:118). Thomas Jefferson in his 1787 map spelled the name the way it is now used and showed the river more accurately than did his predecessors.

T. J. Scharf noted in his History of Western Maryland (1882, p. 568) that “Monocacy” translated to mean “Right Ear.” Oddly enough, the side stream of the Monocacy called Linganore Creek was supposedly spelled “Lenchen Ohr” and was said to mean “Left Ear,” the name of an Indian Chief according to Scharf’s history (p. 605). Lenchen Ohr comes from German rather than from an Indian language. Linganore appears at least as early as 1724. Scharf added to the confusion by saying that the streams were the left and right ears of the Potomac. However, Dr. Hamill Kenny in his Maryland place name books of 1961 and 1984 dismissed both ears as mere folklore, stating that both stream named were derived from the Delaware language, Monocacy meaning “fenced” or “fortified” and Linganore meaning, “It melts in spring.”

At first, Monocacy seems to have been used as the name of a Shawnee Indian village, then it was attached to a river and river valley, and finally it was the name of a settlement by the first wave of Swiss and Germans coming down from Pennsylvania. Edward T. Schultz in 1896 published the findings of the Rev. George A. Whitmore of Thurmont, pastor of a Reformed church. Mr. Whitmore had interviewed persons in their 90s who came of families that settled south of Creagerstown. A Mr. W. L. Grimes, Sr., told the pastor that he had helped tear down the first log church of Monocacy village, which stood in present Creagerstown, where a brick church replaced the log edifice in 1834. Mr. Whitmore also picked up the story that Poes Ford had not been used for a century, not since 1796 or so. He also heard claims that the Monocacy Road had crossed at Poes Ford, which most other sources do not support. Shultz also used the term “Virginia Road.” Schultz made a map based on those findings and showed various graves as well as a suspicious route of the inter-provincial road (Schultz, First Settlements of Germans in Maryland, pp. 21, 22.) The most likely route of the Monocacy Road was 3.5 miles SE of Creagerstown. The newer church at Creagerstown is located on the south side of Black’s Mill Road west of Md. Route 550, at grid 14-B-3 in the ADC Atlas of Frederick County. Monocacy village was essentially the south edge of Creagerstown. The historic church, said to have been the first in the county, was shown neither on Bond’s 1858 map nor in the 1873 Titus atlas. The congregation supposedly dates from 1732, and the first log church dated from about 1747 and was visited by the German missionaries Michael Schlatter and Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg in that year. Muhlenberg specifically mentioned holding a communion service at the log church in 1747. It was a Union church, a building used by both Reformed and Lutheran bodies at different hours. After the Reformed congregation disbanded in 1939, it became St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Tracey and Dern in Pioneers of Old Monocacy deny the antiquity of St. John’s Lutheran Church and state there was no settlers’ village of Monocacy, the German newcomers merely living on separate farms (p. 47). They flatly reject the researches of the Rev. Mr. Whitmore and Edward T. Schultz, saying Monocacy was “an area.”

Charlotte Heatherly, a talented senior at Catoctin High School, Thurmont, was interviewed in the Baltimore Sun, May 20, 1969, about her research in original county deeds for the village of Monocacy. Tracing titles and looking up original patent documents to find mentions of old buildings, Ms. Heatherly conjectured that the former school house of the lost village was the storage shed on her family’s property on Stevens Road, east of Hunting Creek and south of Creagerstown—indeed the Titus Atlas of 1873 showed a schoolhouse. The family’s home site included various foundations of unknown purpose. An accompanying photograph showed the student on the banks of the Monocacy at a place where her calculations placed the fording place of the Monocacy Road. The road went westward through a gap at Mountaindale and on the Crampton’s Gap per her research. Although later writers have dismissed the reality of a Monocacy village, Janet Davis, county historic preservation planner, noted in 2010 that archaeology has yet to be conducted that would settle the matter.

Charlotte Heathery nominated this spot in 1969 as the Monocacy Ford near Creagerstown.

Official State road histories report that by 1739, the Monocacy Road crossed on a ferry; however, the Prince George’s County Court Records of November 1735 listed James Freeland and John Wilcoxon as the appointed overseers of a road from “Seneca Creek to Monocacy Ferry.” Possibly that was not the ferry for the Monocacy Road from Pennsylvania, because in 1740 the same court appointed Abraham Miller as overseer of a route from “Kittoctin Mountains by Monocacy Wagon road near Thomas Beatty’s.” The same crossing was mentioned again in 1742 and 1743, still near Thomas Beatty’s plantation, e. g., “the Monocacy Wagon Road near Thomas Beatty’s.” In 1755, during the French and Indian War, a letter from Colonel Thomas Dunbar to Governor Horatio Sharpe stated, that “within a few miles of Minocacy across the Minocacy is a float.” In other words, there was a ferry that was useful in the westbound movement of General Braddock’s assault on the French. In the Archives of Maryland, on March 26, 1756, Daniel Kennedy of Frederick County submitted his bill “for transporting General Braddock’s soldiers and wagons, etc. over Monocacy Ferry (Arch. Md., 52:670). Leaving Frederick on April 30, 1755, the first stretch of road was good enough for the British General to travel west in a “chair,” which was a type of open carriage. Much later in the century, the Journal of the State Council contained a petition from Robert Hammitt of Frederick County stating that he had rented at a very high rate a ferry on Monocacy river and had proceeded to keep the same without procuring a license. Hammitt noted that he was barely able to support his family (Archives of Md., 71:218).

Numerous Monocacy Fords can be found by quizzing the on-line Archives of Maryland. Many of the fords are probably the same place under different names as ownership shifted.

General Braddock's Road

Once Gen. Braddock got over Catoctin and South Mountains, there was no straight road to Fort Cumberland and he had to cross the Potomac at the present Williamsport, go to Winchester, Va., and travel to the mouth of Cacapon at a place later called Ferry Fields. There he re-crossed into Maryland, followed the river to Old Town, and thence to Fort Cumberland (Scharf, History of Western Maryland, 1:83). General William P. Craighill gave a lecture to the Maryland Historical Society on April 9, 1894, describing Braddock’s detour south of the Potomac to Leesburg and Winchester. Craighill noted that there was still a Braddock’s Road in the Leesburg area and also in Jefferson County, West Virginia, a route cut new by Braddock near Dry Mill, Clark’s Gap, and between Hillsboro and Harpers Ferry (Craighill, Braddock’s Road, MHS Library, VF, s. v., “Roads, Historic"). A long stretch of Braddock Road can be found today, starting in Fairfax County, crossing into Loudoun County, running south of U. S. 50 and SW of Dulles Airport, designated Route 620; going west, it becomes Route 705, crosses U. S. 15, and soon terminates at grid ADC, Loudoun County, Virginia, 35-H-4. The Craighill lecture was published in West Virginia Historical Magazine Quarterly, July 1902, 2:16, General Craighill also mentioned that Braddock Road near Leesburg and Colross also bore the name “Old Mush Pot Road” and was used by General McDowell’s army during the Civil War.

Various mentions of a ford across the Potomac at the mouth of Conocheague Creek refer to the place where the town of Williamsport grew up. The route from Frederick City probably involved transiting South Mountain at Turners Gap. That road is still traversable as Alternate Route 40. It was cleared in 1754 by George Washington in preparation for General Edward Braddock’s campaign against the French and Indians the following year. Frequently improved, the road became the Bank Road of the early 19th century and led westbound settlers to the federally financed National Road that began at Cumberland and continued to the Ohio River. The first 35 miles were completed by 1815 (Maryland Historical Magazine, Spring 1977, 72:100). Alternate U. S. 40 certainly survives in the present as the scenic way west. Until the mid-20th century, road officials constantly improved existing roads because it was easier than finding new routes; the old roads were very likely the best path in hilly country, often improved from the narrow roads made by the Indians.

Christopher Gist [Jr.] was one of the first Marylanders to reach the Ohio River. He had inherited the Milford Mill in Baltimore County but sold it and became an agent of the British based Ohio Company which sought trade with the Indians. On October 31, 1750, Gist left Colonel Cresap’s house in Old Town and followed an old Indian road for the first eleven miles and found his way over the mountains, stopping at various Indian towns. By November 19, per his journal, he was at the Ohio, having spent two days immobilized by snow and two by illness. This was a horse expedition.

The French claimed to own the Ohio Valley and had a few scattered towns in present Illinois and Indiana. Charles E. Kemper of Staunton, Virginia, wrote that the Samuel Champlain map made in 1632 showed Virginia and the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers based on information he received from Jesuit missionaries who left the Iroquois country in present New York State and reached the future site of Harper’s Ferry and descended the Potomac to Jamestown. Their route was the “Indian Road” down the Shenandoah Valley. See, “Some Valley Notes,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 29 (October 1921): 43-417. Kemper also credited unnamed Maryland explorers of 1717 with visiting the northern end of the Valley of Virginia. See, William & Mary Quarterly, 9 (July 1929): 231. Kemper cited various deeds around Staunton that mentioned land along the Indian Road. Kemper cited the Champlain map published at Albany in 1850 in Volume 3 of Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan’s Documentary History of the State of New York, facing the title page. Unfortunately, that map does not show any watercourse resembling the Shenandoah; it does seem to show the Potomac passing the Maryland counties downriver from the present Washington, D. C. Champlain had various index numbers, which O’Callaghan tabulated on p. 3:21. Number 62 was the Chesapeacq Bay; 58 was “several Virginia Rivers”; 61 was Jamestown, spelled “Immestan”; and 60 was Point Comfort.

In 1749, the French had posted lead signs at various places in present West Virginia declaring King Louis XV as owner. One of these signs put up by Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Blainville is in the Virginia Historical Society at Richmond, listed as having been found at the Kanawha River in 1846 (listed in their collection as “Lead Boundary stones, Kanawaha River, etc.”). Another such plaque survives at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. The next year, 1751, Colonel Thomas Gist and his Indian guide Nemacolin marked a trail with axe notches to the Monongahela River; that route later proved useful to the Ohio Company and to the Braddock expedition. Cumberland began as a store house of the Ohio Company in 1750, and Lowdermilk in his History of Cumberland stated (p. 18) that it was at the confluence of the Cohongaronta River [Potomac] and Caiuctucuc Creek [Will’s Creek].

The year before the Braddock expedition, on June 3, 1754, George Washington and the Virginia militia had a skirmish with the French at Great Meadows, in Pennsylvania, providing the pretext for the French and Indian War. They left Fort Cumberland and probably followed Nemacolin’s Path to the Pittsburgh area. A manuscript map showing the “route of a common traveler” was stored in the British Museum for more than a century. The map showed all of Western Pennsylvania and Fort Cumberland plus a nameless road, no doubt the Nemacolin path. The map was presumably sent to London by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia in 1754. It was published in the 1926 Pageant of America, The Winning of Freedom, p. 72. The hand made chart is now filed as an anonymous map in the British Library, listed as MS. 15,563a, dated in the 1750s.

Braddock’s Road saw more military activity in the summer of 1794 when President Washington called out the militias of four states to quash the Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania. The President reviewed the troops at Fort Cumberland during that campaign and advanced along the old route to Brownsville, Pa. Young private Meriwether Lewis was along with the Virginia militia on that effort to make Federal law stick locally. Then in July 1803, Lewis set out for the exploration of the Louisiana Purchase territory via Harpers Ferry, Brucetown, Forks of Cacapon, Fort Cumberland, Grantsville, Uniontown, and Pittsburgh as reported in recent on line postings by David T. Gilbert of the National Park Service.

Lowdermilk’s History of Cumberland contains a drawing of Fort Cumberland and a wooden bridge over Will’s Creek as of 1755. Unfortunately, this is an imaginative re-creation of 1878, based on the engineer’s map of the fortifications filed in the British Museum.

In 1847, some eight years short of General Braddock’s centennial, T.C. Atkinson of Cumberland thought it was time to record the exact route of the campaign. He noted that it was hard to divine why Braddock did not order a road through the Narrows but proceeded along Braddock’s Run toward the present Frostburg. The routes he could identify included that “From the Western foot, the route continues up Braddock’s Run to the forks of the stream, where Clary’s Tavern now stands, 9 miles from Cumberland, where it turned left, in order to reach a point on the ridge favorable to an easy descent into the valley of George’s Creek.” The road stated Atkinson passed a mile south of Frostburg and “it got north of the National Road” near the Shades of Death” (quoted in Will H. Lowdermilk, History of Cumberland, 1878, pp. 143-144).

Lowdermilk and Cumberland engineer T. Leiper Patterson, walked over several miles of the road “starting at Cumberland, in the summer of 1877, and closely traced it as far as the Six Mile House, on the National Road. The route pursued on leaving Will’s Creek was along the valley in which Green Street extended now lies, the same being the exact course of the old National Pike” (History of Cumberland, p. 51).

Continuing with Lowdermilk’s trip:

About a hundred yards East of Mr. Steele’s house, and just where the Cresaptown Road now leads off southward, the road which Washington followed bore slightly to the North, and ran in almost a perfectly straight line to nearly the top of Will’s Mountain, involving a very heavy grade, and from there descended to the level of the Old Pike at Sandy Gap. The ascent of the mountain is steep enough to explain the slow progress with heavily laden teams and artillery, yet in many respects the road was admirably chosen; it avoided the ravines so as to obviate the necessity of bridges or culverts, until the valley beyond was reached, and much of the distance on the higher part of the mountain was smooth and comparatively clear of rocks. At Sandy Gap it crossed to the valley in which the present National Road lies, and by an easy descent led to the base of the hills. Near the Five Mile House the old road can be traced, where it crosses from the left to the right side of the National Road, and runs along within a few yards of it, a little higher up, on the hill side, until within two hundred yards of the Six Mile House. The road is as plain today as it was a hundred years ago, notwithstanding trees of more than a foot in diameter are growing thickly in its bed. Having been used for sixty-five years, as the only road to the west, until 1818, when the National Pike was built, it became well worn. The banks of the road and the evidences of its having been much used are surprisingly plain. The descent from the highest point on the mountain is easy enough for safety, and from the point of passage through Sandy Gap was quite gentle. This was the first road built across the mountains, must ever possess a peculiar historic interest (pp. 52-53).

Lowdermilk provided a map on which he had shown the Braddock Road as a dotted line parallel to the National Road of his time, usually parallel, almost nowhere identical. Robert L. Bantz, Sr., in 2009, noted that the Braddock Road that one can drive on SW of Cumberland is not the actual trace, which can be found on higher ground along Haystack Mountain. Scharf quoted the ranking Colonial officer about the nuisance of building the road:

Truly did Washington say that “instead of pushing on with vigor, without regarding a little rough road, they were halting to level every mole-hill an erect bridges over every brook.” (History of Western Maryland, 1:85).

The old road was also featured in an article by William H. Rideing in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, November 1879.

In his History of Western Maryland, p. 1331, J. Thomas Scharf reported in 1882 that “a full grown cherry tree” was flourishing in the bed of the Braddock Road “on the farm of Mr. Geo. F. Gephart. It was entirely abandoned over sixty years ago, and every tavern and building that once lined it has entirely disappeared. The Tomlinson Hotel, the most noted of all, built over a hundred years ago, was torn down about fifteen years ago [i. e., 1867]. Its site is now a truck patch.” Tomlinson’s had been shown on the Dennis Griffith map of 1794-1795. Scharf also reported on pages 1527-1528 that Jesse Tomlinson, a young man from Will’s Creek vicinity, had first built the Red House tavern on the Braddock Road prior to 1782; it was there, when he was a single man, that a “genteel family” put up for the night on their way to Kentucky. The young daughter of that family was rapidly wooed by the inn keeper and persuaded to give up on migrating any farther; they married, lived happily, and had five sons. Tomlinson built his next inn on the National Road, at Braddock’s fourth camp, possibly in 1816, calling it the Stone House. Both Tomlinsons died in 1840 and were buried under a family shaft in full view of the second inn.

The inn survives about 3 miles east of Grantsville on the north side of U. S. 40 just east of U. S. 219 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. It has lost its wide front porch where the inn keeper would usually take the con to watch for approaching stage coaches. The kitchen staff would have a signal to start bringing out food and the bartender to set up the jugs of whiskey once the bouncing vehicle was sighted in the distance.

The Tomlinson Inn circa 1908 (Lacock)

The Tomlinson Inn today

John Kennedy Lacock published an article in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 38 (1914, No. 1), p. 1, where he reported his trips of August 1908 and July 1909 to find traces of Braddock’s Road west of Cumberland. Lacock was accompanied by college students, many of whom dropped out of the strenuous, month-long trip to Fort Duquesne. Braddock’s new road followed the Ohio Company’s old path laid out by the Indian Nemacolin (p. 6).

They found that no trace of road from old Fort Cumberland to the foot of Wills Mountain survived although Green Street in Cumberland was probably the paved over original route (p. 6). They found some of Braddock’s Road near “the old Steel House,” a structure that had once served as Mt. Nebo School for Young Ladies (p. 8). The “old Cumberland Road” was the original path and so was “the Midlothian Road” for 400 feet (p. 15). The Baltimore Sun, under a date line of September 23, 1908, reported on the first expedition and noted that in Pennsylvania they had found graves of Braddock’s fallen soldiers. The party had also gone astray in places and were put on the right route by S P. McIntyre of Jackson, PA. Those who survived to the end were H. W. Temple of Washington and Jefferson College, J. L. Kalf of Michigan, and John K. Lacock of Harvard.

Even in 2010, a long stretch of Braddock's Road survives west of Cumberland for 3.5 miles, paralleling the National Freeway on the way to Eckhart Mines and Frostburg. In Maryland, the Braddock Road, widened to 12 feet from George Washington’s 6-foot road was here and there reused for the National Road and then further improved as U. S. 40. There are so few places to put roads in the west end that one could be tempted by maps to believe Braddock’s route through Allegany and Garrett Counties was entirely adapted to the National project that began in 1811. Merritt Ierley in Traveling the National Road (1990) quoted chief engineer Elie Williams, who was obliged to survey new approaches in the mountains to meet Federal specifications to avoid grades greater than 5 percent (pp. 38-44). Billy Joe Peyton in the chapter of The National Road, 1996, p. 1:123, stated:

As for utilizing the existing Braddock’s Road, its indirect course and frequent elevations and depressions exceeded the limits of the law and “forbid the use of any of it in any one part for more than half a mile, or more than two or three miles in the whole. Thus, the commissioners recommended an entirely new road, which cost more than one incorporating parts of the old route.

Braddock’s Road was not only named for the General who ordered it but it served as his burial place. Washington brought the body back to Fort Necessity and read the burial service over the General when he was laid to rest in the center of the road to keep the Indians from finding and defiling his corpse. The site was 1.5 miles west of Great Meadows in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. Only in 1804 did road workers discover the remains and move them to a modest plot that was depicted in Scharf’s History of Western Maryland, 1882, p. 1473.

Griffith’s map of 1794-1795 showed the Braddock Road much as it looked on the John K. Lacock reconstructed map made in 1914. The last part of Braddock’s Road before it crossed into Pennsylvania, the National Road passed out of Maryland at the village of Strawn, west of Keyser’s Ridge. Using the Lacock reports, maps, and photographs issued as postcards, Robert Bantz, Sr., a retired engineer, in 1999 identified several stretches of Braddock’s Road that had been bypassed; he first found the ruts near the Green Lantern Inn on U. S. 40, and traced it from there to Camp No. 4 in Little Meadows. The road had survived timbering and strip mining operations. Bantz found an historic spring on the Laber farm near the Route 40 toll house and also Sir John’s Rock. The road also traced through a golf course and the Layman’s Orchard, the second encampment of the expedition. Around the Shades of Death, Bantz found an alternative road worn by wagoners who found the original route impassable (Glades Star, March 2000 9:186-195). Later research in the 21st century led Bantz to report that 98 percent of the Braddock Road is untraveled and on private property.

In 1913, the members of Britain’s Coldstream Guards erected a substantial monument over the grave. The first published map to show the road by name was Mason and Dixon’s 1768 boundary survey. The WPA’s Federal Writers Project Guide to the Keystone State, 1940, p. 597, only claimed that the excavated body was a “skeleton in military trappings.” That book listed the grave as 19.4 miles outside of Maryland on U. S. 40, about two miles east of Fort Necessity.

The Mason and Dixon Line

Mason and Dixon’s vista cut through the trees for surveying purposes provided another road or path west. In 2009, Dr. Feather Ann Davis cited that West Virginia tradition from her Morris ancestors, and William Ecenbarger in his 2000 book Walkin’ the Line, A Journey from Past to Present along the Mason-Dixon, p. 218, mentioned the “visto” [as Mason and Dixon spelled it] as a convenient path of settlement as well as cleared space for a settler’s first crop.

Mason and Dixon also showed on their map the “War Path” near the point where they stopped surveying on October 9, 1767. They were threatened by Indian leaders not to go past that trail, also called the Catawba War Path. They were at that point two or more miles west of the Monongahela River and just east of Dunkard Creek; they never resumed the work.

Notes On the National Road

President-Elect Andrew Jackson’s route to his inaugural, set for March 4, 1829, involved a steamboat trip from Nashville to Pittsburgh and the rest of the way by carriage, some of it on the National Road. He probably joined the road at Brownsville, PA. The historian Thomas B. Searight recalled shaking Jackson’s hand at an inn yard in Unionville, PA. The seventh president is recorded to have stayed at Ben Bean’s tavern in Hancock, MD. Howard Pyle’s imaginative drawing of the old General’s reception in the mountains appeared in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, November 1879.

As the railroad crept towards the Ohio River, the road was a useful link between that river and the nearest depot. After serving his two terms, President Andrew Jackson, in March 1837, took the train to Ellicott City and traversed the roads to Wheeling in a coach (Maryland Historical Magazine, 80:170). In early 1845, President-Elect Polk traveled from Nashville to Wheeling by steamboat and took the National Road to meet the B. & O. at Cumberland (Baltimore Republican & Argus, February 14, 1845). In the winter of 1847 [more likely 1849], President Taylor’s party left their river steamboat and traveled by coach to Cumberland to entrain on the B. & O. It was quite an adventure on the highway, and the best coachman of the line was assigned to the journey. Scharf in History of Western Maryland, p. 1336, noted, “The road was a perfect glare of ice, and everything above ground literally plated with sheeted frost. The scenery was beautiful.” The ex-General apparently thrived on the danger and at one point stopped to enjoy the mountain view.

Two presidents died in office in mid-century; both were from the West. The remains of William Henry Harrison were sent home, not by the National Road but by the Northern Central Railroad from Washington, to Baltimore, then to York, PA, and thence via the Pennsylvania Main Line mixture of rail lines and canals to the river at Pittsburgh. Mr. Harrison was buried at North Bend, Hamilton County, Ohio. President Zachary Taylor died in office in 1850, and his body was also sent by the Northern Central from Bolton depot and presumably by some of the rail and canal links, including an inclined plane over the mountains, because the Philadelphia to Pittsburg all-rail route was not completed until December 1852. Mr. Taylor was buried at Louisville, Kentucky.

Both the Pennsylvania Railroad and the B. & O. were completed to navigable rivers by the end of 1852, the Pennsylvania ran its first across the State train on November 29, the B. & O. on December 31. That access to the Ohio River rendered the National Road more or less obsolete as an inter-state system.

The National Road used to go over the Castleman River on an elegant stone bridge, but in 1933 the bridge was bypassed. The bridge had replaced a ford called The Little Crossings. The bridge survives today in a 4-acre State park at the edge of Grantsville, Md., on a loop north of present U. S. 40.

Castleman River Bridge on National Road photographed by Leo Beachy

Tomlinson’s or Stanton’s Mill dates from 1795-1797 and seems to be aligned with the road; it certainly predated the National Road, yet it was not exactly aligned with Braddock’s Road, but about 400 feet north of it. Robert L. Bantz, Jr., wrote in 2009 that the original Nemacolin trail and Braddock’s Road passed within a stone’s throw of the mill site, and given the width of Braddock’s road, probably passed over the site selected to build the mill. The Nemacolin Trail probably passed through the present mill structure. Mr. Bantz further noted that the later Jennings Railway destroyed the nearby vestiges of the trail and Braddock’s Road. The mill was certainly close to the General’s fourth camp. Present day address of the mill is 84 Castleman Road, a bypassed segment of U. S. 40, which also leads to the preserved stone arch bridge. As reconstructed by Robert L. Bantz, Sr., the actual Braddock Road lies between U. S. 40 and the modern freeway. Thus, the mill was not exactly aligned with either of those major roads.

Tomlinson’s or Stanton’s Mill, Grantsville

J. Thomas Scharf in his History of Western Maryland, p. 1532 and 1539, distinguished between the original Old Grantsville on Braddock’s Road and the present one. Scharf relates that stonemason Henry Fuller came to the Little Meadows area in 1837 and built the Slicer House, the first hotel in New Grantsville. Fuller ran his hotel for a few years before going back to the mason’s trade.

The Guide to the National Road, 1996, 2:79, reported that I-68, the National Freeway runs over Braddock’s Road going toward Meadow Mountain east of Stanton’s Mill.

In Garrett County where the trees were the thickest, bandits hid out awaiting travelers at “the Shades of Death.” George Washington in his diary recorded on September 11, 1784, enduring hard riding over the Shades of Death and meeting pack horses loaded with ginseng and other farm products. That gloomy location, per Merritt Ierley, was east of Grantsville where a stage had been robbed in 1834 (p. 141), near Smith’s Ordinary. A Guide to the National Road, Karl Raitz, ed., 1996, 2:79, places the Shades just west of Mt. Zion Church, which measures out to 3.5 miles east of Grantsville. The Shades were within a much larger pine forest that stretched from Little Savage Mountain on the east to the top of Meadow Mountain on the west. Samuel Ninny, an African American wagon driver interviewed in 1879 for Harper’s Monthly, stated that not a ray of sun reached the road in that copse. Stephen Schlossnagle et al. in Garrett County, 1978, wrote that the trees were 108 to 180 feet tall and had no branches until they reached 100 feet above the earth. The Shades were in their opinion near Smith’s Ordinary according to an account of 1804 by Gerald T. Hopkins. Other accounts, probably less likely, placed the grove of white pines 0.5 mile east of Grantsville. The great trees are gone, thanks to such works as the 19th century Shade Run Mills sawmill; the area is grazing land in the 21st century.

Writing in the Maryland Historical Magazine, Spring 1971, Harold Kanarek, reported the services to the National Road provided by West Point engineers as well as practical or self-educated supervisors. The road was no sooner completed in various places when it started to deteriorate and need expensive repairs. The engineers reported woeful ruin setting in. Some moronic settlers had been dragging logs along the compacted macadamized surfaces. In many cases, the contractors used the wrong size of crushed stones. However, Uria Brown from Baltimore traveled to Uniontown, Pa., in June 1816, and wrote about the “superb bridge” on the Great Western Turnpike Road and spoke of the “masterly workmanship of the bridges and culverts” and he especially praised the “bridge over the Little Crossings of Little Youghegany River” (MHM, 10 September 1915: 279.)

At Will’s Creek, under Laws of Maryland, Acts of 1804, Chapter 83, Allegany County built a chain suspension bridge using funds from a lottery. Further levies on the citizens were authorized by Acts of 1807, Chapter 58, passed January 1808 to finish “the bridge now building.” Contractor was John Templeman who used a patented design of Judge James Finley. The bridge washed out in a flood during the great rains of November 7, 1810. The Gettysburg Centinel, November 21, 1810, reported on the floods and noted, “at Ft. Cumberland, Md., the elegant bridge over Will’s Creek has been entirely swept away and a new brick mill.” The mill was probably one of the Beall Mills, no doubt J. Beall’s, the one shown as a mill lot in the 1806 map of Cumberland at the SE corner of Bridge and Mechanic Streets. Mechanic Street was laid out to parallel Will’s Creek. The citizens petitioned the Maryland General Assembly in December that year to rebuild the Will’s Creek bridge (Maryland Herald & Hagerstown Weekly Advertiser, January 2, 1811).

Another work on the Finley plan was washed out in the same November flood, the Chain Bridge at Little Falls in the District of Columbia (“High Waters,” Maryland Herald and Hagers-Town Weekly Advertiser, November 21, 1810). The name of Chain Bridge is still attached to that road today where it crosses into Virginia. The bridge was a twin of the one spanning Will’s Creek.

The lost Cumberland bridge been 130 feet in span per recent research by Don Sayenga and Emory Kemp. Lowdermilk’s book lacked the date of the devastating flood, but he stated that the bridge was replaced by a flat boat moored to two walnut trees and hauled by a rope or cable at Baltimore Street; later a wooden bridge was built (History of Cumberland, p. 285). Finally, years later, sometime prior to 1816, Valentine Shockley built a second chain bridge of 150-foot span, again to a Finley design. Lowdermilk’s history (p. 305) quoted the specifications from J. C. Trautwine’s Civil Engineer’s Pocket Book (1871). Lowdermilk and Trautwine claimed it was built in 1820, but Uria Brown, a surveyor, described a chain bridge in his diary entry for June 19, 1816 (MHM, 10:75ff, 1915). An engraving of the bridge was published in Alard Welby’s book Visit to North America, p. 151. Welby had been in Cumberland in 1819; his illustration clearly shows a suspension bridge and a large mill that was probably Beall’s rebuilt. The exact date of construction has yet to be discovered in the early Cumberland or Maryland newspapers.

Specifications in Trautwine’s book were:

The double links of 1-3/8 inch sq. iron, were 10 feet long. The center link was horizontal and at the level of the floor; and at its ends were stirruped the central transverse girders. From the ends of the central link, the chains were carried in straight lines to the tops of the single posts, 25 ft high, which served as piers or towers. The back stays were carried away straight, at the same angle as the cables; and each end was confined to four burled stones of about ½ a cub yard each. The floor was only wide enough for a single line of vehicles. All the transverse girders were 10 ft apart; and supported longitudinal joists, to which the floor was spiked. There were no restrictions as to travel . . . .

The second bridge collapsed on April 25, 1838 (Baltimore Sun, May 1, 1838). Two other frequently published engravings also depict the bridge. Lowdermilk noted (p. 306) that “droves of cattle in full run” went over the bridge, and “six-horse wagons were frequently driven across in a trot.” All the links were forged in Valentine Shockley’s shop per that city history. Both chain bridges handled the National Road traffic headed for Haystack Mountain, Eckhart Mines, and Frostburg.

The National Road was not rerouted through the Narrows of Will’s Creek until 1834. The work was authorized under Laws of Maryland, Acts of 1832, Chapter 55, which “mentioned building the National Road up Mechanic Street, Cumberland, and crossing Wills Creek, and requiring that “A substantial stone bridge shall be built over the mill race in the town of Cumberland.” The millrace was at one of several Beall’s Mills that have stood on Mechanic Street. The project was reported as the work of the engineers Lts. Rickell and H. M. Pettit in the Cumberland Phoenix Civilian, November 18, 1834. Lowdermilk gave the opening date as November 11 that year (p. 33-36). The famous stone arch bridge for the rerouted artery had been open since June 24, 1834, and survived until demolished in flood control work in 1950.

Narrows Bridge of 1834 from a ca. 1900 glass negative, photographer unknown.

Bayly Ellen Marks in 1976 prepared the “Landmarks of the Revolutionary Era in Maryland”, a series of State Highways tour brochures, and noted that one length of Braddock’s Road was designated Allegany County Route 49, and at its crossing with U. S. 220 in urban Cumberland, there was a historical roadside marker for the famous military road that tackled Haystack Mountain and ascended the pass called Sandy Gap. An article in the Garrett Journal, December 17, 1908, reported work on State roads, including the National Pike. The Glades Star noted in 1994, “The National Pike was relocated in several different sections to provide a better grade and a whole new road was established between Keyser’s Ridge and Accident.”

The much quoted article entitled “The Old National Pike” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, November 1879, described in great detail a carriage trip from Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland, none of which was the actual National Road paid for by the Federal government. William H. Rideing, the author collected memories of the inns and their elegant cuisine, venison, steaks, chicken, and trout, as well as creamy corn pancakes, the true “johnnycakes.” Old residents and ex-teamsters remembered the coaches as posh vehicles and recalled the occasional passage of President Jackson and Senator Clay on their way to or from the Ohio River steamboats at Wheeling. The stage lines competed for speed and there were occasional wrecks. A driver had “a prolific vocabulary of invective” according to Rideing, backed up by knives and pistols. Names of the stage lines included June Bug, Good Intent, and The Landlord’s. All along the road, the inns were falling into ruin and the party had many a mile to go to find dinner, that at a private home. One Marylander threatened to shoot the travelers. Traffic was so light that in the summer of 1879, copperheads, black snakes, and rattlers were sunning themselves on the road surface. By that time, the Federal government had deeded the road to the States, and in Maryland, ownership had passed to Allegany and Garrett Counties, and tolls had been removed. Rideing was slightly suspicious of the reports of the wonderful food of the past -- in Baltimore County, Dr, Isaac N. Dickson wrote in his memoirs that that Forney’s Inn on the Reisterstown Road in Reisterstown itself provided the last decent fare to be had between there and Saint Louis. The obsolete “Old Forney Hotel” was demolished to provide building sites; the whole pantheon of American history: Clay, Webster, and Calhoun had been guests (supposedly); it was “the oldest building of its kind” in Reisterstown (Sun, February 12, 1897).

Clark S. Hobbs wrote an “I Remember” column in the Sun Magazine, February 8, 1959, and recalled “When Roads Were Obstacle Courses.” Hobbs essayed the ascent of Negro Mountain in 1908, the very year the State Roads Commission was established and had yet to make any improvements. The author got a “throbbing posterior” running his Ford “Lizzie” over the old pike.

Mountain Passes and Ferries

Edward T. Schultz in his 1896 book First Settlement of Germans in Maryland seemed to be one of the writers who thought the Monocacy road continued over the mountains through Crampton’s Gap rather than Turner’s Gap.

Charles Varlé’s 1808 map showed three nameless ferries on the Monocacy; neither did he name the fords. The names of fords and ferries we have gathered in a brief search included:

Stoners Ford
Hughes Ford
Mumma Ford
Poes Ford
Biggs Ford
Furnace Ford
Middle Ford [same as Furnace Ford]
Rices Ford
Reichs Ford
Myers Ford
Devilbiss Ford
Rues Ford
Millers Ford
Lillys Ford
Davis Ford
Campbells Ford
McCoys Ford
Kinsells Ford
Stulls Ford
Ogles Ford [1761]
Crums Ford [1580 map by Bond, same as Reichs]
Wilsons Ford [1858 map by Bond]
Packhorse Ford
Hardinges Ford
Ogles Ford (same as Stulls Ford)
Hussey’s Ford (below Biggs Ford)
Ogles Wagon Road Ford (same as Mummas Ford)
Williams Ferry [Monocacy]
Gombers Ferry (east end of Patrick Street, 1791)
Swearingen’s Ferry [Potomac River, 1755, 1791]
Watkins Ferry [Potomac, 1744]
Harpers Ferry [Potomac]
Williams Ferry [Potomac, 1736]
Williams Ferry [at Williamsport, 1745, 1775, 1780]
Opequon Creek Ferry [over Potomac, Fielding Lucas map. 1822]
Nolands Ferry [at Johnson’s Furnace [ ? ]
Nolands Ferry [over Potomac]
Spinks Ferry [Potomac]
Kennedy’s Ferry
Packhorse Ford
Botelers Ford
Wagon Road Ford
Whites Ford [Potomac]
Whites Ferry [Potomac]
Rousers Ford (below Dam No. 3 on C&O)

The gaps in South Mountain include:

Nicholsons Gap (Western Maryland Railroad’s crossing)
Charlton Gap (Maryland Route 77 past Camp David)
Turners Gap (Alternate U. S. 40)
Harmans Gap (Possibly the same as Charltons)
Crampton Gap
Fox’s Gap
Braddocks Gap
Smiths Gap
Warners Gap

One of the roads mentioned in Laws of Maryland, Acts of 1790, Chapter 32, was a route from Elizabeth-Town (the old name of Hagerstown) “through Charlton’s Gap in the South Mountain, to Liberty-Town, nearly intersecting the road from Baltimore.” This path was very obviously the present black top, scenic road east from Hagerstown, now designated Maryland Route 77, which climbs the mountain and passes through the Catoctin National Park and goes near the Blue Blazes Still, through the Camp David area, emerging at Thurmont. From Thurmont, Maryland Route 550 leads almost straight SE to Libertytown on Maryland Route 26, the Liberty Road.

Reich’s Ford and Rice’s Fords could easily be the same thing. One of the 1799 road improvements authorized by the General Assembly was a road “over Rices’s Ford on Monocacy by Hobbs . . . to Baltimore County.” Reichs Ford Road appears on current topographic maps in Frederick County Election District No. 9 and is the first road south of Md. 144 (the old Baltimore and Frederick Turnpike); Hobbs Mill was on the Old Annapolis Road. The various maps show no mill at the Reich’s Ford crossing as was often the case. For example, Getzendanner Mill was near Devilbiss Ford and the later bridge (Daily News, Frederick, June 1, 1889), and Biggs Mill was at Biggs Ford.

Laws of Maryland, Acts of 1799, Chapter 126, provided for establishing a bridge across the Monocacy. William E. Williams, keeper of the ferry, was willing to pay for a private toll bridge. The preamble of the act is interesting because it refers to interstate travel. “Whereas it has been represented to this house, by the petitions of a number of inhabitants of the county of Frederick, that the erecting a good and substantial bridge across Monocacy River, on the great road leading from the cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore, and through the populous counties of York and Lancaster in the state of Pennsylvania, to the town of Frederick, in Frederick county, and to the western states, would greatly benefit the trade and general interest of the community, which are at present considerably impeded by ice in the winter season and the frequent rise of the waters in said water.” William E. Williams was willing to build the bridge at his own expense at Williams’ Ferry. The location would have been at Ceresville.

Apparently Williams never built a bridge because the Session Laws of 1828-1829 contain an act to allow the Levy Court of Frederick County to raise a sum to build a bridge on the same Philadelphia and Baltimore Road at Williams Ferry (Archives of Md., 540:426-427; Laws of Md., Acts of 1828, Chapter 96). This bridge was completed, because the General Assembly on March 4, 1834, voted to authorize the Levy Court to pay Richard English for aiding in the construction and for furnishing provisions and materials (Laws of Md., Acts of 1833, Chapter 139). This was apparently the second bridge providing access to Frederick Town. We know that the Baltimore and Frederick Turnpike Company as far back as 1808 had built a span, the famous “Jug Bridge” on a different road (the Baltimore and Frederick Turnpike Road) downstream. The original Jug Bridge was designed by Leonard Harbaugh and served until 1942 when it collapsed and had to be replaced quickly to keep war materials moving. John U. Markell wrote an “I Remember” article in the Sun Magazine, April 22, 1962, recalling how he blew up the remnants of the old Jug Bridge. The jug in question was an enormous urn of fieldstone that supposedly contained a demijohn of mountain dew. The urn was preserved in a park area until 1985 when it was moved out of the way of Interstate 70 (Cinthia Hackett Green, Frederick News, October 8, 1985).

A survey of the Potomac dated 1736 by Benjamin Winslow and William Mayo showed the intricate loops of the river with more accuracy than Varlé’s map of 1808, and inside the present Washington County, it showed “Wagon Road to Philadelphia.” That map belongs to the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and was published as a fold-out in James W. Foster’s article in the William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, Second Series, Volume 18, April 1938, before p. 149. The Winslow map called the western country Conongrooto. The crossing was a little upstream of Antietam Creek. The present Miller Sawmill Road is possibly a surviving vestige of that old route. Thomas H. Hahn in his Towpath Guide to the C & O Canal, p. 122, listed the Packhorse Ford and noted that this was also known Blackford Ford, Boteler Ford, and Shepherdstown Ford. Hahn quoted a 1742 deed from Isaac Garrison to Moses Teague in which it was called “Wagon Road Foard.” This point was located at 72.39 miles on the canal built in the 19th century. Hahn stated that the Packhorse Ford was the only good crossing for several miles in both directions. Its location was grid 33-H-4 in the modern ADC atlas. Hahn reported that Thomas Van Swearingen started a ferry there in 1765 at a point that cannot be located exactly, per some sources. However, Bayly Ellen Marks in her 1976 series of tour leaflets, “Landmarks of the Revolutionary Era in Maryland,” wrote that the ferry site was immediately under the Rumsey Bridge on Maryland Route 34, while the packhorse ford was about 0.5 mile downstream of the modern bridge. The ferry business passed to Benoni Van Swearingen, then to his son-in-law John Blackford. Location of this ferry was 72.77 on the C. & O. Canal. The 1736 map also showed Williams Ferry near Opechon Run (ADC Atlas, 29-C-2). Hahn wrote that Williams later moved his first ferry to Watkins Ferry where Williamsport later developed. Watkins Ferry had been authorized by the Province of Virginia in 1744 (Towpath Guide, p. 125).

Nolands Ferry over the Potomac was the crossing of one version of the Warriors Path, Indian Path, or Monocacy Trail. By a treaty signed with the Five Nations in 1744, the Indians were allowed to travel the backwoods from the Susquehanna to the Carolinas. In Virginia the trail was called the Carolina Road, a ten-foot wide route used by traders as well as Indians. The crossing was 4 miles east of Point of Rocks. The road was roughly the ancestor of U. S. 15. One surviving link is Noland Ferry Road in Frederick County. Location was at grid 29-E-12 in the Frederick County ADC Atlas. The river is now blocked by a sand bar called Nolands Island. The ferry dated to about 1758. After development of the C. & O. Canal, the location was designated Mile 44.58 (Thomas F. Hahn, Towpath Guide, p. 80). In Virginia, some 55 out of 65 miles of the original Carolina Road can be driven upon following the James Monroe and James Madison Highway. Early travelers called part of the route “Rogues Road” because bandits stalked the stretches south of the Potomac. A Fauquier County deed made in 1747 used the term Rogues Road” and travelers in Loudoun County complained that half-naked savages served dinner at the inn south of the Ferry. Nolands Ferry still appeared on the 1858 Bond map and in the 1873 Titus atlas of Frederick County in Buckeystown Election District; Nolands Island appeared on the 1858 map and on the 1873 atlas plate but did not yet block the crossing. Travelers headed for Nolands Ferry had to cross the Monocacy at Furnace Ford only 2.1 miles to the east.

Upstream on the Potomac in Washington County, the original Williams Ferry was at the mouth of Opequon Creek, according to Dan Guzy, who supplied a map from 1735 by William Mayo and Benjamin Wilson based on their survey notes of 1735. Williams later moved his ferry to the vicinity of Williamsport and took over the Watkins Ferry started in 1744 under a license from the Province of Virginia. The first Williams Ferry was later called Foremans Ferry (Mike High, C & O Canal Companion, p. 190). After building the canal, the location was designated Mile 90.8. Location in present terms is grid 29-C-2 in the ADC Atlas of Washington County. The opposite shore is now Berkeley County, West Virginia.

Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson’s maps of 1751 and 1775 showed “Williams Ferry,” probably the first one upstream of the mouth of Antietam Creek. Thomas Kitchin’s 1757 map of Maryland and Delaware also showed Williams Ferry on a road sweeping down from “Gap” at the Pennsylvania line, probably the one closer to the later Williamsport village. Fry and Jefferson made almost no corrections to their map although many changes had happened, including the erection of Frederick County. However, in regard to Williamsport, Thomas F. Hahn noted in his Towpath Guide, p. 149, that the first ferry run by Evan Watkins was authorized by the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1744. Its location was about 150 feet downstream of the present U. S. 11 bridge and at the foot of Salisbury Street in Williamsport per the guide book. The second ferry operator was Eli Ardinger, and the business continued in his family under license from Washington County until 1910, at which time it was rendered obsolete by a new bridge completed in 1909; the boats were purchased by McCoys Ferry. Location in terms of the C. & O. Canal is Mile 99.71. In the modern ADC atlas, location is grid 19-H-13 in the Washington County volume. In recent years, the west end of Salisbury Street has become River Park Drive, and the presumed landing site is in Potomac Park. Williamsport was laid out as a planned town in 1786 by General Otho Holland Williams. Some maps of the 1820s showed Williamsburg instead of Williamsport.

The Watkins Ferry area was a place for collecting supplies during the French and Indian War and was also the crossing place of large armed forces. “Sundry inhabitants of Washington” prayed the General Assembly for making a turnpike road from Baltimore-Town to Elizabeth-Town, and from thence to Williams-port,” and the measure was turned over to a committee during the session of November 1796 (Archives of Md., Volume 105:122).

Most of the Potomac fords saw action in the Civil War, what with Confederate raids and invasions, and two complete, well organized retreats by Lee’s army from Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns.

Another crossing of the Monocacy was needed for the Frederick to Georgetown Turnpike in 1829; that route now designated Md. 355 included a wooden covered bridge designed by Louis Wernwag. That location near Gambrill’s Araby Mill was the scene of the Battle of Monocacy in July 1864. A small National Park preserves the battlefield and provides hiking along the Monocacy.

The Nicholson’s Gap Route

It is more difficult, perhaps impossible, to find surviving links of the Great Wagon Road that entered Maryland at Nicholson’s Gap in South Mountain at the Mason- Dixon Line. Charles Varlé in 1808 showed Nicholson’s Gap just north of the Mason-Dixon Line. One source states that the Western Maryland Railroad used Nicholson’s Gap to get over the mountain at Pen Mar. The great Wagon Road was shown entering Maryland and passing through Maryland to the present Williamsport on Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson’s maps of 1751 and 1775. That map predates Hagerstown and shows a not-very-detailed route to the Potomac. Fry and Jefferson did not know where Baltimore-Town was and placed it on Bush River rather than the Patapsco. They did show Williams Ferry, probably the one at Williamsport. In the vicinity of Winchester, Virginia, they showed “Indian Road by the Treaty of Lancaster.” Northwest of Winchester they showed two branches marked “Wagon Road” headed for Maryland and the Potomac.

In a letter of July 31, 1754, Governor Robert Hunter Morris of Pennsylvania wrote to Governor Sharpe the year before the Braddock expedition that “there is a very good wagon road from this city [Philadelphia] to Watkins Ferry on Potomack.” (Archives of Md., 6: 126). Morris noted, “The people of this province have for thirty years past carried on a trade to the River Ohio and were seated at the very place where the French had built their last fort, yet I cannot learn that we have any thing more than a Horse Way through the woods and over the Mountains, very difficult, if not impracticable to transport any considerable quantity of provisions” (Archives of Maryland, 6: 125). The first route mentioned would indeed be the westernmost of the two parallel roads to Virginia. Early Maryland records give almost no clue to the origin of that road, although it is hard to see how packhorse travel routes could be expanded into wagon routes without some public input, if only in the form of court orders for citizens to widen their local segments with their own sweat and that of their slaves.

Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia urged Governor Sharpe to build a road from Rock Creek to Will’s Creek in a letter of July 31, 1754 (Archives of Md., 6:77). On September 5, Dinwiddie wrote to Sharpe to say he was pleased the order for the “new road” had been given (Archives of Md., 6:97). After the Braddock disaster, Governor Sharpe wrote to Captain Evan Shelpy on June 15, 1758, that he had ordered a straight road from Fort Frederick to Fort Cumberland (Arch. Md., 9:206)). Thus, efforts for westbound roads were given high priority.

The cross-Washington County wagon road was also shown on the 1780 map by John Hinton. At the scale of those maps, no useful details could be extracted. The road seems to travel across the headwaters of Antietam Creek in the Leitersburg Election District.

The justices of Frederick County in November 1771 created the Elizabethtown Hundred, and their verbal description of the lines stated that the Hundred was bounded “by the road from Watkins Ferry by Capt Hagars dwelling plantation to John Scotts on the Province Line” (Jeffrey A. Wyland, “The Hundreds of Washington County,” MHM, Fall, 1972, 67:305.) Wyland noted that the roads used as boundaries had probably vanished:

It appears that the extant roads are the Hopewell Road, Long Meadow Road, and the precursor of Maryland Route 60 which ran considerably to the north of the current route 60, intersecting the Antietam Creek very near the Maryland State line. Evan Watkins’ ferry was at the mouth of the Conocheague, modern Williamsport; Hagar’s dwelling plantation was near the settlement of Bostetter, he having left Hagar’s Fancy in 1739; and John Scott lived on a portion of Burkett’s Lot, near the State line.

Wyland also noted that the last hundred created was Jerusalem Hundred around the present Funkstown and he deduced that the boundaries included “the old Hagerstown Road which passed Stull’s mill, closely paralleling current U. S. route 40, the Little Beaver Creek, and the Antietam Creek” (MHM 67:306).

In his History of the Leitersburg District, Herbert C. Bell stated that the road from Harris’s Ferry on the Susquehanna to the mouth of the Conococheague cut across Washington County. Bell noted, “Its course through Washington County was nearly identical with the present [1898] Williamsport to Greencastle Turnpike” [p. 15]. The old version of U. S. 11 from Hagerstown to Williamsport could have been the Great Wagon Road, but the LeViness book stated that the road was entirely lost.

After 1958, the Interstate I-70 changed a lot of local roads. Even before that, the dual U. S. 40 of the 1940s had made a number of changes. In 2009, John Frye of the Western Maryland Room at the Washington County Free Library stated that no links of the Great Wagon Road survived. Jill Craig of the same library supplied us with some map sheets whereon the Nicholson’s Gap Road had been worked out in considerable detail on a number of county tax maps by James Nelson and Amos Hostetter in 1981. Around Ringgold and Rocky Forge the lines are nowhere near roads we can travel today. Almost nowhere does a modern road touch the colonial road, except for a few yards north of Ringgold where the old road had the same bed as today’s Maryland Route 60.

Herbert C. Bell in History of the Leitersburg District reported that the citizens in 1770 appealed to the Frederick County Court to build an adequate replacement of the original road:

The humble petition of the inhabitants of Conococheague to the Worshipful Bench of Frederick County now sitting beg leave to inform you that there was a road led from the mouth of Conococheague to Nicholson’s Gap, but at present it is quite useless, your petitioners therefore humbly beg your Worships will be pleased to grant an order that the public road shall lead from the mouth of Conococheague through Elizabeth-Town until it intersect the road that leads through said gap, and they as in duty bound will pay.

Bell noted that by 1776, the road reached Marsh Run at the Rench Mill (p. 78).

The 1794 Dennis Griffith map showed Renshaw’s Mill which was actually the Renchs Mill improperly spelled, still later Ziegler’s Mill, on the south bank of Marsh Run, south side of Maryland Route 60 of the present day. The route shown by Griffith was possibly the last map to show any surviving lines of the Great Wagon Road. The General Assembly in 1799 approved a new route for a turnpike company plotted by Ludwig Young. Joseph Sprigg, Jr., and William Lee. Bell in his History of Leitersburg District, p. 93, stated that the aforementioned mill was on the Nicholson Gap Road also called the Waynesboro Turnpike. That mill eventually became the Ziegler Mill. Ziegler Mill still survived as a residence when surveyed by the Maryland Historical Trust about 1980. Thus, we can locate at least one point on the road by documentary methods if not by geometry. Bell further stated that the turnpike was laid out in the period 1799-1800 and was certainly in use by 1802. Bell has a number of footnotes with memoirs of people who traveled the post-1776 version of the road.

Public authorities frequently changed roads. For example, Laws of Maryland, Acts of 1803, Chapter 11 ordered that the road from Hagerstown to Nicholson’s Gap be moved from the lands of Peter Wrench, deceased. “Wrench” sounds suspiciously like an alternate spelling of Rench, the owner of the mill.

The old wagon road probably followed the present Virginia Avenue and U. S. 11 out of the southwestern part of Hagerstown to Williamsport. This route was shown on old topographic maps of the early 20th century, much like the Griffith map of 1794, but by the late 20th century, it has been all chopped up by the interstate.

One of the alternate branches of the Great Wagon Road ferried travelers via Opequon Road downstream of Williamsport. John Hinton’s 1780 map showed the way to Winchester, Virginia, by both Williams Ferry and by a nameless ferry that had to be either at Opequon or Falling Waters. The lower crossing was spelled Opekon Ferry on Varlè’s 1808 map.

Digges Road or Roads

A westbound road from Baltimore Town was “John Digges’s Wagon Road,” mentioned as lying on the dividing line between Baltimore County and Frederick County in Laws of Maryland, Acts of 1750, Chapter 13. Digges had an act passed in 1742 to exempt the workmen at his copper works from compulsory road building (Archives of Md., 42:281, 430). A petition filed in 1749 mentioned “the Road that leadeth from Baltimore Town to Diggs Copper Works (Frederick County Court Records, August 1749, Liber A, folio 135). The road was somewhere near Burnt House Woods and Parrs Spring. Burnt House woods was the present Taylorsville per Janet Davis, historic sites planner of Frederick County. John Digges was an enterprising planter with mines in present Frederick County and a settlement with family and tenants near Hanover, Pa., which was presumed to be in Maryland when he settled there. The road was frequently mentioned in deeds and patents. In the 150th anniversary book for Carroll County, George Horvath, Jr., provided a map showing the Digges’s Wagon Road as “the Old Liberty Road,” which ran roughly NW from Eldersburg on present Liberty Road to Linwood and then westerly to Union Bridge. Old Liberty Road appears in the Election District No. 5, Freedom, plate in the 1877 atlas of the county. No perfect candidate for the Digges route appears on the 1949 topographic map of Carroll County. A short stretch from Linwood to Union Bridge could have been the old route. Some of Md. Route 407 may have been an improved version of the Digges’s Road. To sum up, the Coppermine Road of Frederick County is an ancient route, running SE from Woodsborough; the possible links could be Coppermine into Windsor Road, Oak Orchard Road (which some old sources actually call Old Liberty Road as well as Buffalo Road), to Sams Creek Road and Sams Creek Mill. The owner of Sams Creek Mill in 1795 prayed for an act of assembly because the new road authorized in 1790 had by passed his mill on its way from Charlton Gap to Baltimore. The miller, Joshua Howard, was placated by building a connecting road (Laws of Md., Acts of 1791, Chapter 16). From Sams Creek Mill, the old road probably went to Marston, then followed Md. Route 407, the Baker Road. Then the rest of the route easterly probably followed Arthur Shipley Road. and Bushey Road (actually shown in the 1877 atlas of Carroll County as “Old Liberty Road). Finally the old road reached the present Md. Route 26.

Dr. Arthur Tracey studied the Digges Wagon Road sometime before 1984 and also located Digges Copper Mine near Middleburg, Carroll County. Digges had received a patent for the tract Clark’s Discovery in November 1736. John P. Dern and Dr. Grace L. Tracey in Pioneers of Old Monocacy reported (p. 339) that property owner Charles Diehl once entered the adit and walked 200 yards but the tunnels had subsequently collapsed and left sunken or funnel like areas on the surface. They reported that in 1749, the citizens had petitioned for a road to meet “the road that leadeth from Baltimore Town to Digges Copper Works and to fall into said road near Burnt House Woods” (Frederick County Judgment Records, A:135). Dr. Arthur Tracey’s notes in the Historical Society of Carroll County show a number of access roads to the copper mine, including “the John Digges Copper Mine Road,” a fairly straight length of road going SE from Union Bridge where no 19th or 20th century road can be found on maps. Another map of his shows the the last miles to the mine were the same route along Sam’s Creek that the Western Maryland Railroad followed, plus the public paved road going toward Taylorsville; Dr. Tracey labeled that route as “Copper Mine Road.” Joe Getty, member of the Maryland General Assembly and noted historian, documented the mine for the Maryland Historical Trust inventory in 1984 and placed it about 1.25 miles south of Middleburg on Md. Route 641, the Johnstown Road, set in a loop of Little Pipe Creek downstream of the bridge, downstream of Buckey’s Mill (MHT Site CARR 11). This mine was far beyond settled areas when started. John Park in Maryland’s Mining Heritage Guide, p. 22, has a different location for the mine, one on private property down a private road. See also, Newsletter of Carroll County Historical Society, June 1952 1:3ff.) The colonial access road link between the mine and the other identifiable sections of Digges Wagon Road around Sams Creek and Marston are not readily apparent, possibly the route passed through the area where Union Bridge later developed.

The present Liberty Road is a widened form of an old turnpike of ca. 1800, not an 18th century route. How an 18th century wagon road got to the vicinity of Eldersburg is unknown. In Baltimore County, an 18th century route went out Pennsylvania Avenue past the One Mile Tavern and meandered to present Milford Mill Road. A known owner of Milford Mill was George Swingle, and he advertised a mill nine miles from Baltimore on Gwynns Falls and Frederick Road (Maryland Journal, January 21, 1785). That route ultimately passed Allens Mill at the North Branch of the Patapsco and present Md. 26. Allens Mill had been established in 1754 when Edward Pontany took out a writ of ad quod damnum “on the Main Falls of Patapsco.” Pontany’s survey began “near the Wagon Road that leads to Frederick Town.” Solomon Allen advertised to hire a miller in the Maryland Journal, April 21, 1784, and described the site as 18 miles “on the road to Frederick.” The older route from Allen’s Mill to Eldersburg was nowhere as straight as the version traveled today.

One contemporary reference to “Diggs Wagon Road” occurred in a Baltimore County Deed made on July 18, 1752, from John Baker, planter, and his wife Mary to John Hawkins for 50 acres on that route. When that property was next sold, the deed mentioned that it was near Patapsco Falls.

Diana Miller Scott in her book, The Forgotten Corner, A History of Oakland Mills, has numerous references to John Diggs Wagon Road as the ancestor of the Liberty Road near that cotton factory on the North Branch of Patapsco Falls. Ms. Scott reported that a section of abandoned road was discernible in the woods on the family farm of Elizabeth Hush Meadows near Liberty Reservoir and the drowned Oakland Mill town. Data from George J. Horvath, Jr., suggested that the Digges Wagon Road joined or was the same as Soldiers Delight Rolling Road. Of course the name Liberty could not have been used for the road until the foundation of Libertytown in 1782.

Fry and Jefferson’s map of 1775 was useless, at least for Maryland, and showed neither Frederick nor Frederick County. Samuel Lewis published a map in 1795 showing an almost straight path from Baltimore Town to Frederick. Dennis Griffith’s 1794-1795 map showed that one still had to go out Pennsylvania Avenue to Hookstown on present Reisterstown Road and then take present Milford Mill Road to Allens Mill on present Md. Route 26, and then take the Old Liberty Road into the interior of Frederick County. That route did not pass Sams Creek Mill.

Dr. Hanford D. Hopkins in 1975 informed the author that he had been to John Digges copper mine. It was in an angle formed by Green Valley Road and Copper Mine Road, apparently the SW corner; there were dangerous holes in the ground and the ruins of the mine manager’s cabin, a location east of the Liberty Mine. The location was within grid 24-A-1 in the modern ADC atlas of Frederick County. The Liberty Mine was in the adjoining grid to the west at 25-K-1. John R. Park, in his Maryland Mining Heritage Guide (2002), p. 22, reported that only a caved-in adit survived near the old Western Maryland Railroad right-of-way, probably on private property, the site of the first copper mine in the State.

John P. Keffer in his Catholic Colonial Conewago presented a map showing the present Md. Route 30, the Hanover Road, as “John Digges Wagon Road.” His chief source was the writings of John Timon Reily. The Historical Records and Studies published by the old U. S. Catholic Historical Society, 5:357, also date Digges Wagon Road at 1736. Neal F. Brooks and Erick Rockel in their History of Baltimore County call that highway’s oldest version a “wagon road” and dated it at 1737. Various Catholic writers were interested in Digges’ plantation near Hanover, Pa., rather than his mining adventure in Prince George’s County/Frederick County. Numerous families in the Conewago Valley trace their ancestry to Maryland pioneers who were Catholic. Dawn F. Thomas in The Green Spring Valley (1978) also mentioned the Digges Road by name. Still lacking is a quotation about Digges Road from the 18th century. The librarians of Hanover, Pa., were unable to supply a purely 18th century reference.

Sioussat in 1899 called it the “Patapsco Road” and stated that it ran from the Conewago and Hanover area to Baltimore Town and had a branch running to Elkridge. It was substantially the Hanover to Reisterstown to Baltimore route of his era. Sioussat also found a letter of August 1743 from James Logan to Thomas Penn saying, “The people are very intent on ye thing and have opened a road to Patapsco.” (Siousssat, 3:132, also John Gibson, ed., History of York County, Pa., p. 514). Gibson in his 1896 history spelled the Indian town “Conestogoe” and claimed that the tract “Digges Choice” was in Prince George’s County rather than Baltimore County. He stated that the town of Hanover falls within the old lines of Digges Choice (pp. 78, 82).

John Gibson noted, “for half a century much of the trade was by pack horses” and extended to Baltimore. Live calves and live poultry was marketed this way and iron bars were transported, bent to fit over the backs of the steeds. The horse drivers were on foot at the head and tail of the trains. Their heyday lasted a half-century, and the drivers objected to widening the roads for carts. Clyde C. Cale reported that the first pack horse trail was Nemacolin’s Path to the Monongahela River, a forerunner of Braddock’s Road, previously mentioned. Packhorse operators conveyed parties of settlers and their essential domestic supplies into the frontier country as well as carrying merchandise west and fur pelts east. It took twenty days to reach the Ohio River. Sometimes, settlers used their own horses to return for a visit to their former eastern neighborhoods. The horses, up to fifteen in a string, were loaded with about 200 pounds of merchandise fitted into panniers, or slatted baskets on either side, some of it their own feed, a light load for a horse, but the drivers realized that feeding along the way was so poor that a heavy load would starve the animals. An important export was salt. The horses were fitted with bells to help round them up if they strayed into the woods at the roadside hostelries. The drivers had to do some repair work on the buffalo trails to provide passing places and to shore up the path along steep ascents. The paths grew to a width of two feet more than the breadth of the largest horse. Even in pack-horse times, there were a few inns along the road provided with paddocks. Some of the traders sold guns and ammo to the Indians to the outrage of the settlers. One trader was thoroughly beaten up by the patrons of Tomlinson’s Tavern at Little Crossings in present Garrett County (“Era of Pack-Horse Transportation,” Glades Star, September 1994, 7:437-441). Cale’s article contains some line drawings of pack-horses from Pennsylvania sources. No known, strictly Maryland, illustrations are known. The earliest memoirs of packhorse travel were probably Joseph Doddridge’s Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania, published at Wellsburg, Pa., in 1824. Later writers might have met wagon drivers but not the pack-horse travelers.

John Gibson noted (History of York County, p. 321) that primitive wagon wheels were entire slices of tree trunks. He also presented the metes of the road in Lancaster and York Counties and noted that it turned SW at Kitzmillers Mill to enter Maryland (p. 322). Gibson’s date for laying out a road from Hanover to Baltimore was 1736, crediting an order of the Baltimore County Court in the period before drawing the “Temporary Line” between Maryland and Pennsylvania. It was the first road laid out in York County, he stated. A petition of Hanover residents in 1766 asked for improvements to the road to Baltimore, stating that it was laid out in 1736 and was “as useful a road as perhaps any in the Province of Pennsylvania and not on record in this Province” (p. 322).

In places, old bypassed segments of the 1736 or 1737 packhorse route to Hanover survive in NW Baltimore County as the Old Hanover Road. The very driveway into Hannah More Academy grounds is a old bit of roadbed, as is Craddock Lane. Family historian Llewellyn A. Digges in October 1967, wrote to John McGrain that his ancestor John Digges bought Lot No. 54 of the original planned Baltimore Town and had warehouse and dwelling built there by at least 1744. Location was present South Street and Sharpings Lane. Mr. Digges noted that Lexington Street was labeled as Conewago Street on Folie’s 1792 map of the town and the name reflected the Pennsylvania plantation of the colonial Digges family where much of the entrepreneur’s produce originated. Conewago Street terminated at the Digges town house, probably one of the structures shown in the 1752 drawing of Baltimore Town. Mr. Digges also noted that Clay Street had been Wagon Alley and ran past some of the Digges lots. In short, Conewago Street and Wagon Alley of earliest Baltimore Town were the last links of the Conewago Road that wended its way to Hanover, Pa. The very name of Pennsylvania Avenue is another piece of the puzzle.

The anonymous author of “Reisterstown Reminiscent” stated in 1906, “At ample wagon yards attached to the taverns would be filled with wagons, the horses haltered to either side of long troughs filled with feed, there to remain during the night, while the equally tired drivers joined in the hilarious fun long into the night. It was no uncommon sight to see from fifty to one hundred of these large canopied wagons line on either side of the turnpike, leaving only passage room for vehicles to pass.” John Timon Reily noted that wagon men brought their own bedding rolls, which they laid out on the inn floors. Sometimes a fiddler would entertain the sojourners. One Owings Mills tavern keeper tried to persuade people to go to bed by putting out the last jug of spirits and retiring himself.

Dennis Griffith’s 1794-1795 map showed an unnamed road crossing out of Baltimore County into Anne Arundel County at Ellicotts Upper Mills, which we know to have been Airs Ford. That road was variously called Old Frederick Road and Johnnycake Road. The road continued westward in a meandering fashion through what is now Howard County toward Poplar Springs. Those road segments were labeled Old Frederick Road on the 1949 topographic map of Howard County and still appear in the present ADC atlas plates of Howard County. Griffiths Map also showed a parallel road that became the Baltimore and Frederick Turnpike Road. The road was authorized by an act of assembly in 1787. One wonders if Griffith showed it as a road of the future, as there were no inns along its course.

After building the U. S. 40 and I-70 in the 20th century, the former turnpike was designated, where it survived at all, as Md. Route 144. It still appears as Old Frederick Road in the present day ADC atlas. Segments of Old Frederick Road run through Poplar Springs and Lisbon and on to Marriottsville Road. Old Frederick Road meets Woodstock Road at grid 4694-J-10 in the Howard County ADC atlas. Woodstock Road meets Old Court Road on the Baltimore County side of Patapsco River near the Woodstock Job Corps Center, ADC Atlas, grid 4695-A-7. Old Court Road is a well known colonial route widened from an Indian trail; it ultimately went to the port town and county seat of Joppa Town on Gunpowder River. Not far from Woodstock, it met Windsor Mill, an ancient road headed for Baltimore Town. That road crossed Gwynns Falls at William Miller’s Ford, where Windsor Mill was later constructed. The old Garrison Forest Road was one of the first routes from the Baltimore area and probably pre-dated the 1729 birth of Baltimore Town. William B. Marye found court proceedings of 1757 where citizens testified that the road had existed for 30 years and served as a cart road and a rolling road before a landowner blocked it with fencing—thus it could have been in use as early as 1727 and had probably branched off the Garrison Forest Road. One of the petitioners was Edward Pontany who had established Allen’s Mill a few years before. (Maryland Historical Magazine, 16:246).

Dr. Grace L. Tracey in a 1954 letter to Mrs. C. M. Payne, Jr., of Clarksville, Howard County, stated that the Frederick County Court in 1750 laid out a road from Fredericktown to Poplar Spring “which approximated the old National Pike. On the patents of the 1750’s it was usually called the road from ‘Fredericktown past Richard Holland’s.’” Dr. Tracey further suggested that the route linked up on its east end with the roads attributed to John Digges (MHS VF, s.v. “Historic Roads”).

Griffith’s 1794-1795 map showed the Red House Inn along the Old Frederick Road near what became Cooksville in Howard County. The house was depicted in Joetta Cramm’s 1987 Pictorial History of Howard County, p. 78. It was described at length in an inventory form on file at the Maryland Historical Trust and survives near the interchange for I-70 and Md. Route 97, about 200 feet NW of the intersection, designated MHT Site No. HO-4. After those reports, the property was developed in the late 1980s as Red Lion Inn Estates, a new access road called Red Lion Drive was laid out, and the house numbered as 14631 Red Lion Drive. The French traveler Ferdinand M. Bayard and his lady had visited the inn in the year 1791 and they found the highway very difficult.

The next year, citizens filed a petition for a better road, and that document mentioned that “from time immemorial there hath been a road leading from Baltimore Town to the town of Frederick by the Red House.” Once the Baltimore and Frederick Turnpike was cut through by a privately incorporated company, the Red House was no longer on the beaten path (Celia M. Holland, Old Homes and Families of Howard County, 1987, pp. 282-284). A rival inn on Old Frederick Road was called Black’s but it has not survived.

Old Annapolis Road is an ancient thoroughfare and had its origin in a number of petitions sent to the General Assembly in May and June of 1739. Philip Lee, Esq., forwarded to the Lower House “a petition of several inhabitants at and about the Blue Ridge als Chanandore Mountain and also the petition of several inhabitants on the Potomeck River and back country and the petition of several inhabitants of the West Side of Potomeck River on the Back Parts of Virginia praying that a good Waggon Road might be made at Public Charge from the several places aforementioned to the City of Annapolis” (Archives of Md., 40:220). One known point along the requested road was the Cragg Mill or Avignon Mill on Linganore Creek, developed after William Cummings, Gentleman of Annapolis, took out a writ of ad quod damnum on September 1, 1748. Such writs were issued to persons who wished to condemn someone else’s property to build a mill. When advertised in the Maryland Gazette, February 24, 1754, Cumming [sic] and his partners stated that the Cragg Mill was “on the main road that leads from Frederick Town to Annapolis and Baltimore Town.” Presumably a good road was needed to take Frederick County grain to one of the port towns, although Baltimore’s first recorded grain shipment was not until 1748. At the time of the road petition, Frederick Town had yet to be laid out. Jane Bowman Fleming, writing in Howard’s Roads to the Past, 2001, p. 25, equated the petitioned road of 1739 with later route of the turnpike through Poplar Springs and past the Red House.

Baltimore County has not only Frederick Road but also an Old Frederick Road, and Johnnycake Road that some older maps showed as another distinct Old Frederick Road. To add to the confusion, about 1940 a modern dual highway was given the name of Baltimore National Pike although it was not paid for by the nation nor was it as toll-charging turnpike. The oldest of those routes was Johnnycake Road which crossed the Patapsco at Airs Ford, still later called Ellicotts Upper Mill, and much later Hollifield. Johnnycake Road has survived the construction of the Baltimore Beltway and Interstate 70. It was called Old Rolling Road on J. C. Sidney and P. J. Browne’s 1850 county map. Uria Brown in his June 1816 trip west noted going from Powhatan Cotton Manufactory “on the painted path to Jonney Cake Town” (MHM, 10, September 1915, p. 263. But what was a “painted path?” Johnnycake Town was shown on Sidney and Browne’s 1850 map and also on the 1863 military map showed Journey Cake Town. The 1818 tax list of District 1 also used the name Mackville. The village was probably at the present interchange of the I-695 Beltway and I-70. Both Johnnycake and Journey Cake can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary and one suggested derivation is from Shawnee Cake.” The Baltimore Sun, March 14, 1916, quoted inhabitants of the area who claimed that Old Frederick Road was changed into Johnnycake Road by a cartographer’s error in 1875. That map maker was not working on the G. M. Hopkins county atlas issued in 1877 because the road was shown without any name in that publication. A letter from “J. S. of N.” to the editor was entitled “A Letter from the White Grounds” and the writer said that Johnnycake Town was a place where “an old woman served Johnnycakes on a board” (Baltimore County Union, September 2, 1871). A receipt for making Johnnycake was published in Eat, Drink and Be Merry in Maryland, 1932, p. 195. While the product consisted mainly of ground Indian corn or maize, the Shawnees would have lacked a quart of milk, three eggs, wheat flour, and “saleratus” (sodium bicarbonate) to produce the Shawnee Cake. On the other hand, Scharf in History of Western Maryland, p. 1:57, said that Shawnee Cake was only ground maize and water cooked on a flat stone; his footnote suggested that the word is merely a corruption of Journey Cake or Johnny Cake.

The most convenient east-west road was depicted on a map published in Nuernberg by John Baptist. Homann in either 1714 or 1759. The road went east from the mouth of the Susquehanna near Smith’s Falls through present Harford and Baltimore Counties and struck the Potomac near present Williamsport by best estimate. No such road exists even today; no other map showed it, and was apparently totally imaginary (See Papenfuse and Coale, 1982, Figure 25, p. 24).

The packhorse trail from Hanover to Baltimore was eventually improved by turnpike companies and there was heavy traffic of Conestoga wagons. The pike to Westminster joined the older Hanover route at the fork in Reisterstown. That village was a long strung-out town with several inns. Part of the village was once called Germantown when Ironmaster and Lutheran Bishop Benedict Swope lived there. A mortgage made by Jacob Mediary in November 1797 described his lot as on the “east side of the road that leads from Germantown to Reister’s-Town.” Dr. Isaac N. Dickson in his memoirs recalled that the toll road was once called the Wheelbarrow Road [probably for the jailbirds sentenced to work on it]. But few teams were traveling the road in 1870 or putting up at the inns. Lists of the inns appeared in John Timon Reily’s Collections, Volume 5, under the heading, “Old Turnpike Taverns.” Another tour de force was published in “Reisterstown Reminiscent,” Maryland Monthly Magazine, 1 (July 1906): 7-13.

John Timon Reily of McSherrystown, Pa., wrote in his Collections that after the decline of wagon travel, farmers encroached on the Adams County parts of the great road until in places two farm carts would have difficulty passing. James Shriver reported the same problem to the Secretary of War about farmers fencing in and even building houses within the 60-foot right-of-way of the National Road (Maryland Historical Magazine, Spring 1977, 72:100). The Managers of the York, Frederick, and Reisterstown Turnpikes advertised that the width of their several roads, as established by law, was 66 feet, and they warned the public against improvements that extended to within 33 feet of the center (Baltimore American, February 28, 1810).

John Timon Reily collected the story of wagon driver Old Joe from Emanuel Bushman. Old Joe had become homeless after the wagoning era ended and he slept in stables and dined at taverns. Bushman claimed that Joe could chew up and even swallow glass, although it was other witnesses who saw it happen. “Old Joe was a great fisherman too. He usually took his bow-net and started out on Sunday, I do not think there was any law at that time to prohibit him from fishing on Sunday—at least no one ever disturbed him. I never saw Joe fish, (his nearest point was out at Marsh creek, three miles from here,) but others did, and he either charmed or bewitched the fish, for as soon as he put his net in the creek the fish came splashing from every direction without him making any effort to catch them.” Joe would select the best fish and sell them at the tavern and trade them for spirits (Reily, Collections, p. 166).

The Conestoga drivers were famous for their two-for-a-cent cigars, the “stogies,” which might have eased the discomfort of sitting behind as many as twelve horses. Their powerful teams could haul four to six tons in wagons usually painted blue and covered with white hemp awnings. Poets spoke of the white sails coursing through the countryside. Reily quoted Edward McPherson who had gathered stories of the pre-turnpike era on the Hanover route, “When the roads were bad, old men told me that there was a great difficulty in getting along with a few barrels of flour” (Reily, Collections, 2:260, 1892-1893).

The York Road was opened in 1745 and its first route was from Joppa to York via the present Manor Road and Old York Road in the NE corner of Baltimore County, Shirley B. Clemens in From Marble Hill to Maryland Line, 1983, p. 10, cited a 1761 deed to John Almony’s land in the 7th Election District which placed the property “on the wagon road that leads from Joppa to York.” Mrs. Clemens proved that there were three roads to York, some of which are now drivable but merely local byways. The Middle Road to York crossed the Gunpowder Falls at a Millers Ford and still later at a bridge NE of Hereford; that route is now Bunker Hill Road. It followed present day Middletown Road and passed into Pennsylvania at the village of Stiltz. Mrs. Clemens also counted as one of the three roads, the Falls Road, a 19th century turnpike that eventually linked with York-bound roads. The colonial era road that accessed Baltimore Town followed a more meandering course than today’s York Road and Greenmount Avenue. Sioussat reported that sixty wagons reached the port the first month it was open. Some of the route followed Brittain’s Ridge Rolling Road from the vicinity of present Towson.

Dennis Griffith’s 1794-1795 State map showed the Old York Road in the My Lady’s Manor area and also some of the route via Middletown Road, as well as the predecessor route of the present Md. 45; however the map did not show the road crossing into Pennsylvania at Maryland Line village. Griffith showed the Baltimore-Harford County line too far to the east, which failed to show Old York Road swing through Harford County. Old York Road was the route George Washington traveled on June 5 and 6, 1773, on his way back from Carlisle, Pa. Washington’s diary shows that he stopped at Sutton’s Tavern at My Lady’s Manor and also had breakfast at Slade’s. An historical marker at Black Horse Tavern near Norrisville claims a stop there, but it was not recorded in the travel record. The first State map to depict the Baltimore and Yorktown Turnpike completed through Maryland Line village in 1810 was Fielding Lucas’s map of 1819. The turnpike provided a mostly smooth trip from Baltimore to York, except for the arduous ascent at Fifteen Mile Hill, a twisting climb from Western Run and Shawan Road past Jessop’s Church, to Sparks where the teams had to climb 200 feet in elevation in only about 0.7 miles from the stream valley.

The straight York Road of the present is the result of laying out the Baltimore and Yorktown Turnpike Road in 1809. The Federal Gazette, January 10, 1809, described the work in progress and noted that tolls had been collected for the previous two months. Here and there in both city and county there are traversable fragments of the old road: Old York Road in Waverly and Govanstown, Cedar Avenue and Delaware Avenue in Towson, and Hereford Road between Piney Hill and Monkton Road. Dulaney Valley Road north of the Towson roundabout is an Old York Road, and parts of it were shifted after building Loch Raven upper dam in 1914. That old route had been improved into a turnpike in the 19th century, and a paved, abandoned road of stones can be found in the woods east of the present Dulaney Valley Road not far from the submerged Hampton Furnace. The name of the road has been consistently misspelled in the automobile age; the actual family spelled their name Dulany. Old memoirs of Towsontown cite the great number of wagon teams that put up at Towson’s Tavern and the Black Bear Hotel. One account stated that the teamsters kept dogs in their wagons while they were inside the inns, yet there was no “thievery” to worry about. The number of wagons would not fit in the Payne Hotel yard per an account by Thomas H. Taylor in 1897. The oldest of the inns was the 18th century log and frame Towson’s Tavern, which later became Shealey’s and was ultimately razed in 1863 (Baltimore County Advocate, December 12) or early 1864. Towson, as well as Catonsville, saw a lot of livestock on the hoof going to market in Baltimore; some of the inns were equipped with pens to allow the drovers to break their journeys. Baltimore even had a financial institution called the Drovers and Mechanics Bank. The culture of wagon men was much like that of present-day truckers, hardy souls who liked to smoke and drink and devour well deserved meals at the end of a journey. One wonders if the drivers were beset by vagrant women; the historians haven’t told us. Scharf’s history of city and county in 1881 noted that the Red Lion Inn on the Great Eastern Highway near White Marsh in Baltimore County was “once kept by the celebrated Moll Roe,” but feigned not to know the cause of the lady’s celebration.

Roads to Elizabethtown or Hagerstown:

Aubrey C. Land in Dulanys of Maryland, p. 175, quoted a record of Colonel Cressap in his unique spelling, giving the mention of a place “Near a mile below the Great Road that leads from John Stull’s Mill to the Mouth of the Minorcocee” (1739). The boundaries of Antietam Hundred in 1739 were described as running “from Potomack River & ye Mill Road to ye Mill. Thence by ye Wagon Road yt comes by John Stulls to Monocousy” (Louise Joyner Hienton, “The Hundreds of Prince George’s County,” Maryland Historical Magazine, Spring 1970, 65:58).

In Daniel Dulany’s patent of 100 acres in Frederick County called “Watson’s Welfare,” there was a reference to a tract of land that had its “beginning at a bounded hickory tree standing on the east side of Kitocton Creek a Draught of Potowmac near a mile below the Great Road that leads from John Stull’s Mill to the mouth of Minorcocee, Surveyed 27 December 1744” (Patents TI l:118).

A road from Vulgamot’s Mill to Stull’s Mill was mentioned in Frederick County Judgments, 1748 (quoted in M. M. Rice, That Was the Life, p. 7. (Vulgamot’s Mill was later Kemp’s Mill a little upstream of Williamsport, a mill that survives as “The Old Mill Tavern”.)

The patent of a tract of land called “Stony Batter” was issued to Jonathan Hagar after a survey made on March 20, 1762, and had its Beginning at an oak tree on the south side of the road from Stull’s Mill to Conochugue (Patents BC & GS 14:611).

Stull’s Mill also called Rochester’s Mill, was somewhat downstream from Hagerstown’s municipal power generating station on Antietam Creek, per Jeffrey A. Wyand, writing in the MHM, 67:304. This “great road” was not the inter province Great Wagon Road but a branch that led to the developing population center of Hagerstown. Wyand in his article on the Hundreds of Washington County noted that the old Hagerstown Road, the predecessor of the mid-20th century U. S. 40, passed Stull’s Mill. The old road survives in places, bypassed but not far away, especially near Doubs Mill on Beaver Creek. The wagon road from Stull’s Mill apparently followed Mount Aetna Road over South Mountain, the Shennandore Mountain listed in old road orders of Prince George’s County. Stull’s Mill was mentioned almost yearly in the Prince George’s Road orders (Patricia Abelard Andersen, “Petitions, Constables and Overseers of the Roads in Frederick County Before 1748,” Western Maryland Genealogy, January 2002, 18:33-47.

Other roads cited by Ms. Andersen included:

Mouth of Monocacy to the Shannandore
Shannandore Mountain to Mouth Antietam
Mouth of Seneca to Mouth Monocacy
Monocacy to 1st Mountain
Antietam to Conochego
John Stulls to top of Shannandore
From Shannandre Mtn to Kitoctin Mtn
Antietam Wagon Road and Ford to Covocochego
From Stulls Mill to Conocheague
Little Pipe Creek Wagon Road to the head of the creek
From Beall Town by George Moore’s over Rock Creek to Eltings Mill to the Sugar Lands
From Beall Town to Henry Cramphins then to Monocacie then to Conocheague and upwards

The Uttermost Corner

In the SW corner of Garrett County near Maryland’s vanishing point, there is an historic roadside marker put up in the 1930s by the State Roads Commission commemorating “McCulloch’s Path.” The sign is on U. S. 219 at the intersection of what the Indians called the Great Warriors Path. An early resident named Samuel McCulloch attached his name to this path that explorers and traders used to reach he Ohio River. McCulloch was only 19 years old at the time. After the American Revolution George Washington traveled this route in 1784, exploring the upper Potomac for better routes to the west. The future president wrote of the route as “McCulloch’s Path which owes its origin to buffaloes, being no other than their tracks from one lick to another.” The Warrior Path led on southward to Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama. Local authorities state that the Great Warriors Path, or Seneca Trail, or Samuel McCulloch’s Pack Horse Trail is the present, at least in part, route of U. S. 219 itself which was used as a local road during the 19th century and in the 1930s upgraded to an interstate designated highway. On the other hand, the Garrett Journal, December 17, 1908, described a plan for a State road from north to south that is essentially the present U. S. 219, a totally new route in some sections. (Glades Star, December 1994, 7:485). A fixed point on the path was “Archy’s Spring,” which is a stone spring house near Gortner on the Beachy farm one mile east of the roadside marker (Glades Star, December 1989, 6:366-367).

Indian trails of Garrett County from Glades Star, December 1992.

Other sources hold that the Warrior’s Path was the Demarcation Line of 1763, established by the British Crown to prevent settlers from moving into Indian lands. Scharf stated that the line was drawn across the heads of rivers that drained to the Atlantic (History of Western Maryland, p. 1:68). A map of the line in the Scribner’s Atlas of American History, 2d ed., 1984, pp. 70-71, shows it cutting through the Northwest corner of Garrett County. A more locally accurate map appeared in the Glades Star, March, 1993, 7:144. About one-third of Garrett County would have been barred to settlement under those terms. Needless to say, the land-hungry illegal immigrants paid no intention to the foreign-imposed forbidden line if they even knew where it was. Many settlements were already beyond the line when it was imposed. Theoretically, the settlers were expected to “forthwith remove themselves” and move back eastward. George Washington, as a land speculator was well aware of the regulation and hoped for its relaxation. The decree was based on the theory that all land belonged to the king and landholders enjoyed possession subject to various feudal duties and reversions. However, in the proprietary colonies, the Royal charters had practically made the Calverts and Penns local equivalents of kings to whom quit rents and feudal obligations were due. About nine years later, in March 1772, after the death of Frederick Calvert, Governor Robert Eden demanded a list of the lands that had been granted (if any) west of Fort Cumberland since the year 1763 and ordered a halt to further surveys and warrants (Archives of Maryland, 73:297-298). Equally fascinating was the Quebec Act of 1774, which placed most the land reserved west of the mountains into the Province of Quebec, which began north of the Ohio River and had its eastern boundary approximately where Cleveland, Ohio, developed. The parliamentary act left Fort Duquesne (i. e., Pittsburgh) and Wheeling, West Virginia, in the Indian’s reservation. Needless to say, the American Revolution wiped out the gigantic expansion of Quebec, leaving intact the Massachusetts and Connecticut claims of a strip of land from sea to sea.

South of present Oakland, U. S. 219 meets U. S. 50 in Garrett County where the Northwestern Turnpike chartered by the State of Virginia in 1827 reached into the interior of its vast domain nearing completion in 1840. This was to be another road to the American west. Chief engineer was a Napoleonic veteran, Colonel Claudius Croset (Glades Star, March 1993, 7:306). Not many years later the turnpike and the National Road were both rendered merely local roads by the completion of the railroads, and in 1863, during the Civil War, a new State, West Virginia, was formed, probably unconstitutionally, out of northwestern Virginia.

The book entitled The Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia to the South by Parke Rouse, Jr., (McGraw-Hill Book Company: New York, 1973) might be expected to contain all the specifics and exact dates; it is very well written but it is almost entirely about the flow of people into the Appalachians, all the way to Augusta, Georgia.

Early in the 21st century, the Maryland Office of Tourism issued a leaflet guide to the “Historic National Road. The Road That Built the Nation.” The fold-out map shows the Maryland part of the road, also the sections leading to Illinois and St. Louis, as well as the non-Federal links from Baltimore to Cumberland. The name of “Negro Mountain” is still in use. The place name was in fact a tribute to Nemesis, an African American who in some stories stood bravely by Michael Cresap or Thomas Cresap in a skirmish with Indians in 1756 and fell in the fight. The Maryland Gazette of June 10, 1756, said he was free person in the party of Thomas Cresap, who was also killed by the Nettonay tribe, some 40 miles west of Fort Cumberland at the head of Youghiogheny River. He was supposedly named Nemesis, or in some accounts Goliath, and was said to have been a giant of a man; the Pennsylvania Gazette of June 17, 1856, merely called him “an old Negro.” Some accounts called him a slave of Thomas or Michael Cresap. This figure’s commemorative mountain is the highest point on the National Road, some 3,074 feet in altitude, not very high in comparison the American West, but a lofty place for small but history rich Maryland. Even the altitude of the mountain appears as a widely variant number in different modern sources. The Maryland Geological Survey gives 3075 feet. The first map to show the 30-mile-long mountain by name was apparently Thomas G. Bradford’s 1838 State map. It is also shown by name in Martenet’s 1872 State atlas. Persons who knew the true story testified for keeping the name in 1995 included Edward Papenfuse, State Archivist of Maryland, and Marguerite Doleman of Hagerstown who had built a large collection of African American history and artifacts.

Gilbert Grosvenor noted in “A Maryland Pilgrimage,” that driving up the six mountains between Hagerstown and Cumberland added up to an ascent of one of the passes over the Rockies (National Geographic, February 1927, 51:202.) The magazine’s photo of the National Road between Frostburg and Cumberland showed a route barely two touring cars wide in blacktop with concrete shoulders just sufficient for bikeways. August Mencken of 1524 Hollins Street in Baltimore once told the author (in 1961) that he engineered a lot of those State motor roads, but in his opinion, they weren’t safe to drive.

The wagon roads leading out of the Baltimore region to the Old West of pioneer times played a part in settling the country, bringing Europeans into conflict with the indigenous people, in pursuing the aims of war against the French and the Indians, building up regional trade, in developing Baltimore into a grain exporting port, and finding suitable places for new industrial cities, such as Cumberland, and Hagerstown, which in turn became magnets for railroad lines.