During the era of stagecoach travel, Highland anchored a relay station where coach journeys, broken into stages of about 10 miles, paused so fresh teams could be hitched and tired horses could be fed, watered, and rested, helping companies maintain schedules despite weather and difficult roads. Highland residents also worked to bring the National Road through their community after Joseph Shriver's 1828 survey left it off the route. With help from James Semple, soon to become a U.S. senator, they won approval to reroute the road through Highland on the condition that the town build the new route itself. The community then supplied funds, labor, and equipment as area residents felled trees, graded earth, built bridges, and carried the road across the Silver Creek flood plain on a timber or corduroy road, and by late 1843 stagecoaches were traveling the National Road through Highland. In the early 1920s, Highland resident C.J. Hug also shaped the National Road in another way when he was contracted to pave it from Pocahontas, Ill., to Troy, Ill.; after finding existing commercial vehicles unsuited to the work, he designed a new truck for roadwork, began manufacturing his trucks in 1922, and in the years that followed Hug trucks were shipped worldwide.