When the American revolutionaries booted out the British and finally celebrated their independence, the United States was a divided nation, split in two by the dense forests and disjointed backbones of the Allegheny, Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains. Tracks and trails meandered through the hardwoods for foot and hoof, but bulk trade between west and east had to travel a tortuous route down the country’s great riverways. For example, to get from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, two cities in the same state, cargoes were floated down the Ohio River into the Mississippi and then south. At New Orleans, loads were transferred from flatboats to keel boats, which sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, round the Florida Straits and back up the Atlantic coast. An overland journey of some 300 miles became a 4,000 mile odyssey. The emergent nation desperately needed a passage to what was then the West or the Old West. It needed it for trade, immigration and political bonding.
The man who best understood this was a young surveyor employed by the Ohio Company called George Washington. On company business, Washington had travelled extensively around the Old West and knew how frustrated farmers were with the limitations of the ‘wet roads’. He had also had a bad time fighting the French in the mountains and realised the strategic importance of uniting the country. In his cabin, still standing across the river from the Cumberland tourist information centre, he began devising alternative routes for what would become the National Road of America. After years of argy-bargy by self-interested parties in Congress, a line from Cumberland to the Ohio River was finally selected for the country’s first federally financed highway.
The woman with the expensive dental work in the tourist office explained that Cumberland’s good fortune lay in its position at the foot of the two strongest outflows east of the Allegheny Mountains — Wills Creek and the North Branch of the Potomac. The Ohio Company’s fortified trading post became a key junction for road and river traffic and, when black gold was discovered in the surrounding mountains, the settlement blossomed into a major industrial centre on the back of the railway and canal. What most distinguished Cumberland from hives of industry like Baltimore, however, was the size of its itinerant population. Strolling through downtown in search of the stagecoach offices, Forty-Niners bumped into a world of nations in transit from the eastern seaboard. The kaleidoscope of cosmopolitan apparels and tongues on the streets encouraged one diarist en route to California to observe that he had arrived at a ‘the crossroads of the world’.
By the end of the twentieth century, the coal was about as played out as the demand for fossil fuel, the canal terminus had been replaced by a vast freight yard for the successor to the B & OR, and the pedestrianised streets of downtown were empty. Businesses were in the final days of closing down sales and vacant premises were plastered with ‘To Let’ signs. Once Maryland’s second largest and most prosperous city, Cumberland had been relegated to the National Register of Historic Places. Outside of the architecture, there was little to delay me from venturing onto my first stretch of American blacktop since the Ride from Hell from Dulles Airport.
The traffic on the National Road, otherwise known as Route 40, was light but constant, and getting out of Cumberland was unexpectedly easy. As the town receded, the road swung right to pair up with the contra-flow of Wills Creek and started to climb. Tarmac and spewing river breathed in as they squeezed between two mighty headlands which reared up like sperm whales breaking through the swell of the flood plain. Either side of me, Haystack and Wills Mountains were freeze-framed, poised at the apex of their leap, ready to come crashing down as soon as I was through. Once the Gateway to the West when the West was still in the east, the Cumberland Narrows were like the nozzle of a funnel, accelerating everything that flowed through, including my legs.
Beyond the chicane, the valley opened out to allow a sibling of suburbia to spread its wings. Unkempt yards surrounding shabby homes became progressively more groomed as I climbed towards La Vale. An extraordinary number of families were holding porch, yard or garage sales, possibly pending the sale of the rest of the house, and it was election time. Small polythene banners promoting candidates were planted in verges and the fixed grin of James ‘Jim’ Stakem started to bug me as his roadside plaques repeatedly stared me down like targets on a firing range. The incline was long and steady, igniting twisted knots in my quads which burned hotter the higher the road ascended.
Whether the Forty-Niners travelled by stagecoach, mule or Shanks’s pony, the road they took across the Appalachians was the best maintained and best serviced turnpike in the country. It was the mail road to the Old West and the highway that opened up the mountain wilderness to settlers. Although half a century away from being paved, stage lines boasted they could cover 100 miles a day on the crushed stone, even over the highest cols. As frequently as every mile, the roadside was punctuated by inns, taverns and drover stations. Anybody who could cook could hang out a shingle and make money out of travellers in a hurry to eat and move on. If anything delayed progress down the pike it was the drovers herding pigs, sheep, cows and geese to market. A decade before the Gold Rush, the flow of livestock was somewhat reduced by the introduction of road tolls, but drovers quickly forged ‘shunpikes’ which looped round the hexagonal toll booths, designed to provide a clear view of the turnpike but not the back of the building. The La Vale Toll Gate House had been carefully restored in a brash coat of white with black highlights, but the little museum inside was closed when I arrived.
According to the map, the road I climbed was U.S. Route 40. At Clarysville I stood before a blue and white shield confirming that. Another sign on the same post indicated I was on the National Road. A third, pointing to a side road off to my left, said I was at the junction with the Old National Pike. In Cumberland, the woman in the tourist information centre had called it Braddock’s Road, but said it should rightly be called Washington’s Road. Confused? I thought I was on the Cumberland Road. That’s what the Forty-Niners called it in their diaries. I sat myself down beneath the signs, pulled out notes made in Washington and tried to unravel the highway’s genealogy. Wills Creek had cut an obvious line for an Amerindian mountain trail leading from the Shawnee camp that later became Cumberland. When the Ohio Company set up shop, the trail became known as Nemacolin’s Path, after the Delaware Chief hired by the company to recce a westward passage up the valley for prospective settlers. As the French moved in on their turf, the company sent the inexperienced George Washington to warn them off. Little more than a squiggle of squelched leaves and snapped branches, Nemacolin’s Path was inadequate for the passage of a large platoon. Washington and his men had to cleave a way through the tangled mountain chaos — a delay which proved disastrous when they encountered the French.
When Washington’s expedition failed, the British sent in the big guns under General Braddock. Setting out with nearly two thousand troops, Braddock similarly found Washington’s Road too narrow. He likewise lost time hacking back the forest and had to lay a corduroy road of felled tree trunks for his heavy wagons. The route Washington recommended and Congress later approved for a national road followed pretty much the same line as Braddock’s Road, and there were cast iron plaques beside the highway that were not going to let me forget it. The Old National Pike was the new name for the old National Road after it was handed over to the states it passed through and became a toll road. Its route was the sole line through the mountains until Maryland became over-run with automobiles in the 1920s and began building bypasses of numbered roads.
I continued my flog up the National Road, Route 40, climbing through the drab linear developments of La Vale, Eckhart, then Frostburg — small towns with a big litter problem. A large rock scarred with an engraving slipped into view. It was one of a spaced row of boulders marking the boundary of a small colonial house which sat like a painted island in a painted sea of perfectly manicured lawn. Nearby were the metal uprights of the old turnpike barrier. The rough engraving said, ‘J.B.H. March 20 1871 G Z I’. My spirits lifted. I had seen the La Vale tollhouse and old cast iron mile posts beside the highway, but this was the first indication that I journeyed where real flesh and blood pilgrims had gone before.
As the waning sun cast long shadows across the road like palm leaves before my donkey, I achieved the summit of Big Savage Mountain. To my chagrin, it was barely a thousand metres up, but I was whacked, and slumped beneath a solitary rowan to stuff fuel into empty legs. For the first time since leaving Washington, I had reached a vantage point. Unfurled before me was a panoramic view of the panhandle of Maryland. It reminded me a lot of Bavaria. Rolling hills the height of Britain’s tallest mountains were crested with dense forests which flowed like green mud slides into the valleys below. Etched in deep shadow, the contoured harvest rings of yellowing corn fields nudged into the green goo dominating the landscape. Here and there the sun picked out whitewashed farmsteads and Dutch barns planted in the corn.
The National Road swooped off the watershed and wandered forth like a lackadaisical eel exploring the seabed with no mind for the line of least resistance. Beside its thin grey trail, a fault line as straight and cruel as a Samurai’s slash split the panorama between north and south. An even newer new National Road had appeared on the scene, thankfully sucking the traffic away from my route. Big Savage Mountain had been tamed and rent in two by Interstate 68, the latest update on U.S. Route 40, which the interstate was also called. To add further confusion, my road now became Alt. 40.
The tank hadn’t been filled. Three cheese triangles and a bottle of Gatorade weren’t going to get me far over the hurdles Alt. 40 had in store. Half an hour later, with a pit in my stomach the size of Hades, I caught a glimpse of a Miller Lite neon flickering in the window of a long sullen shed which was more of a deserted workshop than an inviting roadhouse. It didn’t look promising but the neon sign cast zany reflections on a row of dusty pick-ups parked against the boardwalk.
Round an L-shaped bar, men were absorbed in a raucous conversation with women who gave as good as they got about a barn dance which had degenerated into a fist fight the night before. The men were of the denim dungarees and check shirt variety, with sleeves rolled up exposing the grubby long arms of a once white grand-dad undershirt. The women were of the tight jeans, tight top, big bones, deep cleavage type. They had ‘don’t-fuck-with-me’ writ large across their foreheads. Pausing long enough to satisfy myself they weren’t going to eat me alive, I pulled up a stool next to the only geezer who wasn’t wearing a baseball hat and ordered a beer.
The chatter rounded on Joanne, a dead ringer for Susan Sarandon sitting between a couple of square jawed bookends who would have crushed her if they leant inwards. Everybody seemed to have a take on her sex life. Her guy was a heel (general laughter) and had left the roadhouse the previous Wednesday with another woman (“What’s new?” “Shelley ain’t no woman!”), never to be seen again (“I give it a week.” “Nar. He’ll be in tomorrow. Sunday. Shelley’s Lutheran.”). Joanne said she was definitely going to move on this time, and a couple of the boys offered up their beds. Each got a clip round the ear. It was Happy Hour and then some, and the rumbustious bar-flies included me in their banter in the same way that the father rapers in Alice’s Restaurant included Arlo Guthrie when he sat in the prison reception. I might have been wearing lycra, but we all reeked of sweat and were caked in grime.
Jack (the guy without the baseball hat) had just finished a day down at Meyersdale laying a cyclepath. He worked for a local contractor, but the project was for the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. Similar to Sustrans in the UK, “R2T” (as Jack called them) had converted over 10,000 miles of abandoned railroads into recreational corridors and traffic-free cycle routes in the last decade. The old Meyersdale station was going to be renovated and transformed into a café, maybe with dormitory accommodation. Jack hoped the route would attract tourism into an area wounded by the demise of the coal and farming industries. Like the rest of the lads round the bar, Jack used to be a farm worker. “Only Big John is now. His Pa owns a place over towards Accident.”
Pushing aside the bookends, Joanne slid round the bar and gently interrogated me. Clapping her hand on my thigh, she informed me I “sure got the legs” for crossing America.
“I can’t ride a bicycle myself,” she said, “Impossible. The only time I tried riding a bike I rode into a cow.”
“I don’t suppose that happened in Accident?” I asked. The alcohol was kicking in fast.
“Nar, Ohio.” The dime dropped. “Oh, I get it. No... you know why they called it Accident?” I couldn’t wait and cracked another can.
Sometime during the Civil War, two engineers from the opposing camps were lined up, facing each other, in two locomotives. They were on the same single stretch of the B & OR track running through Garrett County, and each wanted to proceed. Neither was prepared to back up to a passing point, so each stoked up the fires, built up a head of steam, and let the locos rip. If we are to believe Joanne, where they met was where Accident was born, on the back of an enterprising farmer’s wife who set up a lemonade stall to cater for the folks that poured in to survey the devastation.
The state I was in by the time I staggered out of the roadhouse, I would have believed Bill Clinton had he stood before me claiming to be an avowed monogamist. I had trouble steering a straight line and threw my sleeping bag down on the first bit of sheltered ground to present itself. This turned out to be an island of land between where the Old National Pike prescribed a sharp left-hand bend and the younger National Road, Alt. 40, smoothed it out on Negro Mountain, known as Nigger Mountain during the Gold Rush. Close by, several Forty-Niners from the coastal plain stayed at a ‘stand’ or hostel run by William Sheets. Short of sleeping by the side of the road, stands were the simplest, cheapest, most unsavoury accommodation available along the National Road. Catering for drovers and teamsters, they provided pens out back for their herds, while inside the two-story cabin, road weary men flopped down for a night on the floor of the bar, feet pointing towards the fire. With five cans of Bud and a double portion of Joanne’s spicy wings inside me, I was toasty enough beneath the stars.
If not as long and grinding as the haul up Big Savage Mountain, the hills on Alt. 40 kept coming like storm waves rolling towards a beach the following day. The blacktop cleared a path through tangled sycamores in their bottoms and Sitka spruces on the tops. At the end of long driveways to hidden farmsteads, election flags promoting Chester H. Sines for sheriff and Russel T. Sines for commissioner suggested the family was something of a Family in local politics.
Five miles before I reached Keyser Ridge, a McDonald’s sign protruded high above the canopy of Savage River State Forest like a cocktail stick thrust in green froth. When I reached the crossroads, a dozen cars were parked beneath the 90 metre pole and the plastic diner was packed. Across the intersection, next to the Highway Department’s yard, Little Sandy’s Truck Stop looked a more tempting choice, recommended by a parking lot stuffed with 18-wheelers. I placed my order and took delivery of a small chicken salad which could have fed an African nation.
I hadn’t anticipated having problems finding good food in America, but was discovering that fresh fruit and vegetables were a rarity in town stores. Eating out, your options were severely limited if you discounted fast food. Little Sandy’s was the first café I had passed since leaving Washington whose menu wasn’t restricted to the frier and microwave. At Keyser Ridge, I set myself the challenge of crossing the country without anything so naff as a McDonald’s, Wendy’s or Burger King passing my lips. Little did I realise what a tough task I was setting myself.
Mealtimes might have been an unholy scrum, but the food the Forty-Niners fought over in the taverns and roadhouses would have stretched Dean & DeLuca. One diarist catalogued the fare on offer at the Neil House, a hostelry further down the National Road. Starting with oyster soup, diners were invited to choose from nineteen entrees, six different pickles, sixteen savoury pastries, thirteen creams and jellies, six confectioneries or fresh fruits, and eight preserved fruits. On top of that came the main course of Indian corn and venison stew or cock-a-leekie, swilled down with applejack or a quart of good metheglin. It is difficult to understand how burgers became the American staple.
The Old National Pike slipped away from Alt. 40 and I followed it on a meander into the historic logging town of Addison. ‘Village’ would have been a more accurate description for this delightful backwater, but it was not a word I had heard a lot of, and ‘hamlet’ didn’t seem to exist in the American lexicon. Few of the communities I rode through lived up to the title of a town. Somewhere along the line, the European hierarchy of terms for settlements had been dropped, perhaps in the hope that calling a hamlet a town or even a city would will it into being. Addison hadn’t expanded much since the Forty-Niners traipsed through. A peaceful couple of rows of clinker built houses were wrapped like a girdle round a pregnant Allegheny mound before tying back onto the main road. Midway round its girth, another tollhouse was preserved but again its museum was closed.
Since the episode at Williamsport where I missed linking up with the Chief Interpreter of the C & OC National Park, I had not had a lot of luck with heritage sites and interpretive centres. All the National Road tollhouses I called at on different days of the week were closed. In Jocky Hollow, I arrived at the National Road Visitor Center on the dot of 11.30am and discovered that, despite a large notice stating it opened on Sundays from 10.00am until 5.00pm, it was also locked and barred.
Most of these small tourist sites rely on volunteer staff from organisations like the Daughters of the American Revolution, a kind of Women’s Institute with attitude. Established over a century ago, the Daughters are a nonprofit making, non-political, voluntary service group dedicated to the memory and spirit of American Independence. Or, as the Pennsylvania chapter put it when I phoned them to enquire about the tollhouses, “We believe in honouring the flag of the United States of America, in the education of children and adults, in preserving history for future generations, in a strong military, in perpetuating the memory of men and women who achieved American Independence, and in God, Home and Country.”
The lilting voice on the end of the phone had to be reading a script, but it was pretty hard to square the beliefs she listed with the Daughters’ incorporation as a non-political organisation. Their “categories of common service” included committees for Historic Preservation, Patriotic Education and Genealogy. Lonely hours in a damp old tollhouse waiting for the American public to show any kind of interest in their only National Road must have seemed a fairly low priority by comparison.