David Snively built the Federal-style Pennsylvania House in 1839 along the newly constructed National Road. This tavern and inn became an important stopover for livestock drovers and pioneers traveling westward by foot, on horseback, or in Conestoga wagons during the nineteenth-century expansion of the United States. Dr. Isaac K. Funk, later associated with Funk & Wagnalls, lived there in the 1840s while his father served as tavern keeper. After the Civil War, the building closed as an inn and later served as a doctor's clinic, boarding house, and secondhand shop before falling into total disrepair. The Lagonda Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution saved it from demolition and has owned and operated it as a museum since 1941, and it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. Authorized by Congress in 1806, the National Road was the nation's first federally funded interstate highway, created to forge closer political and economic ties between east and west through an all-weather route across the Allegheny Mountains. Regarded as a major engineering achievement, it opened Ohio and much of the Old Northwest Territory to settlement, gave Ohio goods access to eastern markets, and helped Ohio citizens take important roles in the nation's affairs. Celebrated in the stagecoach era for its many quality inns and taverns, the Road declined after 1850 as railroads became the preferred means of travel, then revived with the automobile as U.S. 40, a busy round-the-clock artery lined with truck stops, motor courts, and diners until interstate highways superseded it in the 1960s.
