Americans long traveled in search of new opportunities, 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. Built by the next generation as a thirty-foot-wide crushed stone thoroughfare, it crossed rivers, traversed mountains, and opened America’s western frontier to the Mississippi. Merchants, traders, and families from around the world traveled this route to claim land, expand markets, and build new lives. Built in the early 1800s as America’s first federal project, the approximately 800-mile National Road is still marked in many places by historic milestones.
