Americans long traveled in search of new opportunities, using changing forms of transportation as they continually changed their plans and homes. George Washington envisioned a highway linking east and west, and in 1806 Thomas Jefferson authorized a road from Cumberland in Maryland to Ohio, making that vision real despite political risk. Built by the next generation as the United States Road, the thirty-foot-wide crushed-stone highway crossed rivers, traversed mountains, and helped open 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. Constructed 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.
