Transportation
5
Americans have long been an adventurous people, using changing forms of transportation to move and resettle, and George Washington envisioned a highway joining east and west. In 1806, Thomas Jefferson authorized a road from Cumberland, Maryland, to Ohio, creating the United States Road. Built in the early 1800s as America’s first federal project, this thirty-foot-wide crushed-stone highway spanned rivers, crossed mountains, and opened the western frontier to the Mississippi. Merchants, traders, and families from around the world traveled it to claim land, expand markets, and build new lives, and much of the approximately 800-mile National Road is still marked by historic milestones.
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Boonsboro, Maryland · United States
