Braddock's Road and the Cumberland Road were originally one as they left Cumberland. The course met again at Little Meadows near Tomlinson's Tavern and again at eastern foot of Negro Mountain. The courses were identical at the Old Flenniken tavern, two miles west of Smithfield (Big Crossing), and on summit of Laurel Hill, at which point Braddock's Road swung off northwesterly toward Pittsburg, following the old buffalo trail toward the junction of the Ohio and Allegheny, and the Cumberland Road continued westward along the course of the old portage path toward Wheeling on the Ohio.
Contracts for the first ten miles west of Cumberland were signed April 16 and May 11, 1811. They were completed in the following year. Contracts were let in 1812, 1813, 1815. In 1817, contracts brought the road to Uniontown. In the same year a contract was let from a point near Washington to the Virginia line. In the following year United States mail coaches were running from Washington, D. C., to Wheeling, and 1818 is considered the year of the opening of the road to the Ohio river.
The cost of the eastern division of the road was enormous. The commissioners in their report to Congress estimated the cost at $6,000 per mile, not including bridges. The cost of the road from Cumberland to Uniontown was $9,745 per mile. The cost of the entire division east of the Ohio river was about $13,000 per mile. Too liberal contracts was given as the reason for this greater proportional expense.
As early as the year 1822, it is recorded that a single one of the five commission houses at Wheeling unloaded 1,081 wagons, averaging 3,500 pounds each, and paid for freightage of goods the sum of $90,000.
The subsequent history of this highway and all the vicissitudes through which it has passed, has, in a measure, perhaps, dimmed the luster of its early pride. The subject of transportation has undergone such marvelous changes in these eighty years since the Cumberland Road was opened, that we are apt to forget the strength of the patriotism which made that road a reality. But compare it with the roadways built before it to accomplish similar ends, and the greatness of the undertaking can be appreciated.
Over the beginnings of great historical movements there often hangs a cloud of obscurity. Over the heroic and persistent efforts of George Washington, to make a feeble republic strong through unity, there is no obscurity. America won the West from England as England had won it from France--by conquest. Brave men were found who did what neither England nor France did do, settle the wilderness and begin the transformation of it. Large colonies of hardy men and women had gone into the Ohio valley, carrying in their hands the blessed Ordinance and guided by the very star of empire. Virginia had given the best of her sons and daughters to the meadow land of _Ken-ta-kee_, who were destined to clinch the republic's title to the Mississippi river. The Old Bay State had given her best blood to found the Old Northwest, at historic Marietta. New Jersey and Connecticut had sent their sons through vast wildernesses to found Cincinnati and Cleveland, names which today suggest the best there is in our American state. Without exaggeration, the building of the binding highway, which, through so many years, Washington championed, was the crowning act of all that had gone before. It embodied the prime idea in the Ordinance of 1787, and proved, finally, that a republic of loyal people could scorn the old European theory that mountains are imperative boundaries of empire.