HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA

VOLUME 6

Cumberland Gap and Boone’s Wilderness Road

HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
VOLUME 6

Boone’s Wilderness Road

by
Archer Butler Hulbert

With Maps and Illustrations

THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
CLEVELAND, OHIO
1903

COPYRIGHT, 1903
BY
The Arthur H. Clark Company

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

The naming of our highways is an interesting study. Like roads the world over they are usually known by two names—the destinations to which they lead. The famous highway through New York state is known as the Genesee Road in the eastern half of the state and as the Albany Road in the western portion. In a number of cities through which it passes—Utica, Syracuse, etc.—it is Genesee Street. This path in the olden time was the great road to the famed Genesee country. The old Forbes Road across Pennsylvania soon lost its earliest name; but it is preserved at its termination, for the Pittsburger of today goes to the Carnegie Library on the “Forbes Street” car line. The Maysville Pike—as unknown today as it was of national prominence three quarters of a century ago—leading across Ohio from Wheeling to Maysville (Limestone) and on to Lexington, is known in Kentucky as the Zanesville Pike; from that city in Ohio the road branched off from the old National Road. The “Glade Road” was the important branch of the Pennsylvania or Pittsburg Road which led through the Glades of the Alleghenies to the Youghiogheny. One of the most singular names for a road was that of the “Shun Pike” between Watertown and Erie, in northwestern Pennsylvania. The large traffic over the old “French Road”—Marin’s Portage Road—between these points on Lake Erie and French Creek necessitated, early in the nineteenth century, a good road-bed. Accordingly a road company took hold of the route and improved it—placing toll gates on it for recompensation. Those who refused to pay toll broke open a parallel route nearby, which was as free as it was rough. It became known as the “Shun” Pike because those who traversed it shunned the toll road.

Few roads named from their builders, such as Braddock, Forbes, Bouquet, Wayne, Ebenezer Zane, Marin, and Boone preserved the oldtime name. Indeed nearly all our roads have lost the ancient name, a fact that should be sincerely mourned. The Black Swamp has been drained, therefore there can be now no “Black Swamp Road.” There are now no refugees and the “Refugees Road” is lost not only to sight but to the memory of most. Perhaps there is but one road in the central West which is commonly known and called by the old Indian name; this is the “Tuscarawas Path,” a modern highway in Eastern Ohio which was widened and made a white man’s road by the first white army that ever crossed the Ohio River into what is now the State of Ohio.

One roadway—the Wilderness Road to Kentucky from Virginia and Tennessee, the longest, blackest, hardest road of pioneer days in America—holds the oldtime name with undiminished loyalty