[Gutenberg 44648] • Braddock Road

Braddock Road by John Kennedy Lacock

The Braddock Road was a military road built in 1755 in what was then British America and is now the United States. It was the first improved road to cross the barrier of the successive ridgelines of the Appalachian Mountains. It was constructed by troops of Virginia militia and British regulars commanded by General Edward Braddock of the Coldstream Guards, part of an expedition to conquer the Ohio Country from the French at the beginning of the French and Indian War, the North American portion of the Seven Years' War. George Washington was an aid-de-camp to General Braddock (one of his favorites) who accompanied the expedition. The expedition gave him his first field military experience along with other American military officers. A number of these men would profit from this experience during the Revolutionary War.

On September 24, 1754, Major-General Edward Braddock was appointed by the Duke of Cumberland, captain-general of the British army, to the command of the British troops to be sent to Virginia, with the rank of generalissimo of all his Britannic Majesty’s forces on the American continent. Before the expedition could start, however, many weeks had to be spent in extensive preparations, a delay which became so irksome to Braddock that he determined to wait no longer on the tardy movement of the transports. Accordingly, on December 21, 1754, accompanied by Captain Robert Orme, one of his aides, and William Shirley, his military secretary, he set sail for Virginia with Commodore Augustus Keppel, and on February 20, 1755, anchored in Hampton Roads. It was not till January 14, 1755, that the rest of the ships were actually under sail, and not till about March 15 that the entire fleet arrived at Alexandria, Virginia, where the troops were disembarked and temporarily quartered