In April, 1811, the first contracts were let for building the first ten miles of the road from its eastern terminus and were completed in 18191.More contracts were let in 1812, 1813, and 1815.Even in those days of war when the drain on the national treasury was excessive, over a quarter of a million dollars was appropriated for the construction of the road.Onward it crawled, through the beautiful Cumberland gateway of the Potomac, to Big Savage and Little Savage Mountains, to Little Pine Run (the first "Western" water), to Red Hill (later called "Shades of Death" because of the gloomy forest growth), to high-flung Negro Mountain at an elevation of 2325 feet, and thence on to the Youghiogheny, historic Great Meadows, Braddock's Grave, Laurel Hill, Uniontown, and Brownsville, where it crossed the Monongahela.Thence, on almost a straight line, it sped by way of Washington to Wheeling.Its average cost was upwards of thirteen thousand dollars a mile from the Potomac to the Ohio.The road was used in 1817, and in another year the mail coaches of the United States were running from Washington to Wheeling, West Virginia.Within five years one of the five commission houses doing business at Wheeling is said to have handled over a thousand wagons carrying freight of nearly two tons each.The Cumberland Road at once leaped into a position of leadership, both in volume of commerce and in popularity, and held its own for two famous decades.The pulse of the nation beat to the steady throb of trade along its highway.Maryland at once stretched out her eager arms, along stone roads, through Frederick and Hagerstown to Cumberland, and thus formed a single route from the Ohio to Baltimore.Great stagecoach and freight lines were soon established, each patronizing its own stage house or wagon stand in the thriving towns along the road.The primitive box stage gave way to the oval or football type with curved top and bottom, and this was displaced in turn by the more practical Concord coach of national fame.The names of the important stagecoach companies were quite as well known, a century ago, as those of our great railways today.Chief among them were the National, Good Intent, June Bug, and Pioneer lines.
The coaches, drawn by four and sometimes six horses, were usually painted in brilliant colors and were named after eminent statesmen.The drivers of these gay chariots were characters quite as famous locally as the personages whose names were borne by the coaches.Westover and his record of forty-five minutes for the twenty miles between Uniontown and Brownsville, and "Red"Bunting, with his drive of a hundred and thirty-one miles in twelve hours with the declaration of war against Mexico, will be long famous on the curving stretches of the Cumberland Road.
Although the freight and express traffic of those days lacked the picturesqueness of the passenger coaches, nothing illustrates so conclusively what the great road meant to an awakening West as the long lines of heavy Conestogas and rattling express wagons which raced at "unprecedented" speed across hill and vale.
Searight, the local historian of the road, describes these large, broad-wheeled wagons covered with white canvas as "visible all the day long, at every point, making the highway look more like a leading avenue of a great city than a road through rural districts....I have staid over night with William Cheets on Nigger [Negro] Mountain when there were about thirty six-horse teams in the wagon yard, a hundred Kentucky mules in an adjoining lot, a thousand hogs in their enclosures, and as many fat cattle in adjoining fields.The music made by this large number of hogs eating corn on a frosty night I shall never forget.After supper and attention to the teams, the wagoners would gather in the bar-room and listen to the music on the violin furnished by one of their fellows, have a Virginia hoe-down, sing songs, tell anecdotes, and hear the experiences of drivers and drovers from all points of the road, and, when it was all over, unroll their beds, lay them down on the floor before the bar-room fire side by side, and sleep with their feet near the blaze as soundly as under the parental roof."Meanwhile New York, the other great rival for Western trade, was intent on its own darling project, the Erie Canal.In 1808, three years before the building of the Cumberland Road, Joshua Forman offered a bill in favor of the canal in the Legislature of New York.In plain but dignified language this document stated that New York possessed "the best route of communication between the Atlantic and western waters," and that it held "the first commercial rank in the United States." The bill also noted that, while "several of our sister States" were seeking to secure "the trade of that wide extended country," their natural advantages were "vastly inferior." Six hundred dollars was the amount appropriated for a brief survey, and Congress was asked to vote aid for the construction of the "Buffalo-Utica Canal." The matter was widely talked about but action was delayed.Doubt as to the best route to be pursued caused some discussion.If the western terminus were to be located on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Oswego, as some advocated, would produce not make its way to Montreal instead of to New York? In 1810 a new committee was appointed and, though their report favored the paralleling of the course of the Mohawk and Oswego rivers, their engineer, James Geddes, gave strength to the party which believed a direct canal would best serve the interests of the State.It is worth noting that Livingston and Fulton were added to the committee in 1811.
