Americans have long been an adventurous people, traveling by feet, horses, wagons, stagecoaches, canals, railroads, bicycles, automobiles, trucks, and buses as they continually changed their plans and homes. Centuries ago, George Washington envisioned a highway linking east and west, and in 1806 Thomas Jefferson made that vision real by authorizing a road from Cumberland in Maryland to Ohio. Built by the next generation, this United States Road was a thirty-foot-wide crushed-stone thoroughfare that crossed rivers, traversed mountains, and opened America’s western frontier to the Mississippi. Merchants, traders, and families from around the world traveled this route seeking land, wider markets, and 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.
