Americans long traveled in search of new opportunities, using changing forms of transportation to move and resettle, and George Washington envisioned a highway linking east and west. In 1806, Thomas Jefferson authorized a road from Cumberland, Maryland, to Ohio, creating the United States Road as America’s first federal project. Built by the next generation as a thirty-foot-wide crushed stone highway, it crossed rivers, traversed mountains, and opened the western frontier to the Mississippi. Merchants, traders, and families from around the world traveled this route to claim land, expand markets, and begin new lives, and much of the approximately 800-mile National Road is still marked by historic milestones.