Historic Highways of America/Volume 2/Chapter 5

by Archer Butler Hulbert

CHAPTER V

LEAVES FROM AN EXPLORER'S NOTEBOOK

ON a morning of one of those summer days which come as a surprise in March, I left the Ohio and Little Kanawha railway train at the little station of Roxbury, Ohio, and crossed the broad Muskingum into the southern extremity of the valley, which, because of its splendid dimensions, was named "Big Bottom" by the earliest pioneers.

Here, on the second "rise" from the river, upon what is now the Obadiah Brokaw farm, one of the colonies of the Ohio Company settled late in the black year 1791. I came now to decide for myself a question as to the location of the historic "Big Bottom Blockhouse," where the terrible massacre of January 2, 1791, opened the Indian war which ravaged the West until 1795.

I found Mr. Brokaw buried in a great pile of white, fragrant shavings, but he hospitably left his work to become my guide. We went into the field beside his house where, near a white shock of withered corn, a little stone post marked the spot where Mr. Brokaw many years ago discovered unmistakable evidence of the original site of the blockhouse. It will be remembered that the relief party which came to Big Bottom the day after the massacre buried the dead within the half-burned building for, elsewhere, the ground was frozen. The bodies were removed later to their present resting-place on the hillside to the east, but when plowing very deep one spring Mr. Brokaw found the old burial place, and, consequently, the site of the old blockhouse; here he erected the little monument which marks the spot.

Beside this stone and with the wind sighing in the withered corn, Mr. Brokaw pointed out, on the range of hills beyond the river, the old path over which the Indians came. He said the trail was as plain there today as the country road yonder. Noting my growing curiosity to know more of such an odd thing as an old trail, my friend promised that his boy would "set me" over the river after dinner, and I could look over Big Bottom from where the Indians watched the colony during the day preceding the massacre.

The promise was kept. And that afternoon, as I reached the foot of one of the spurs of Wallace Ridge, my young, barefooted guide pointed out a slight rounded trough which led away north and south. It was what remains yet of the old, deep-worn path of Indians and the pioneers of the valley, who, for many years, followed only the runways of the red race which preceded them there. In the chestnut oak forest on the summit of the ridge the path, as Mr. Brokaw had remarked, was as plain as a country road. I had found an Indian trail—and a most interesting and original approach to the whole study of the early history of America. For I saw the narrow path as that murdering band saw it a century before; I rested where they lurked, overlooking the sports of the garrison below them, before descending to their deadly work. Then with the passing years the long line of pioneers passed by me in

Trail on Wallace Ridge

search of unclaimed tracts of land, or passing to and fro between the distant settlements. To one whose imagination is grounded in the annals of these early days, a walk on one of the old-time thoroughfares is a glimpse backward which, for vividness and meaning, will prove of more inspiration than a year spent in any of the best of our museums.

By Hutchins's old map, drawn for Colonel Bouquet when he led the first English army that ever crossed the Ohio, I found that this thoroughfare I was shown that day crossed through Fairfield and Perry counties from the Scioto valley where the Shawanese lived. It can be found on the upper waters of Wolf creek, in Morgan county, near the Mills Hall farm, and followed over the highland and along the ridge some two dozen rods east of "Eve's Schoolhouse." It passes then through the old Jeremiah Stevens farm on the Harmar and Lancaster road, and from thence over the ridge to the William Pickett farm on the branch of Bald Eagle creek. It follows the hills down Bald Eagle creek valley to the Muskingum. Running out on the hills just behind Stockport, it takes to the summit of Wallace Ridge, which it follows to Roxbury and "Big Rock."

From "Big Rock"—a noted landmark which stood in the Muskingum river near the present railway "cut" north of Lake Chute—the old trail strikes south for the Ohio river. Crossing the ridge, it came down to the west branch of Wolf creek at the mouth of Turkey Run, went through the George Connor farm and Quigley Flats to the south branch of Wolf creek, which it crossed two miles above the junction of the forks; thence due south on the watershed to the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Little Kanawha (Belpre, Ohio).

Here it joined another trail which came eastward from the lower Scioto valley and the two went on together to the "Monongahela country."

A clew to its eastern course was found in Hildreth's Pioneer Sketches. The doctor told of visiting a patient near "Dry Ridge," where the old path to the Monongahela country ran on the watershed between the Ohio and Little Kanawha rivers. My route was by rail and then by horse, and I soon found there was more than one Dry Ridge, though one brown countryman informed me that ridges were the only things in that country that were dry. After following what seemed my best course for half a day, I put in at a snug-looking cottage for further directions. On the lawn I found two aged men, one leaning on a cane on one side and his comrade on the other. Receiving the hearty salutation usual from these hospitable people, I then asked my question. I found I had been traveling in the wrong direction—but lo! there stood unsteadily before me one of the old-time frontiersmen who knew the Monongahela trail as well as I did the Baltimore and Ohio railway.

My visit here in that little cottage was of utmost, timely inspiration; for wherever you find them, these few trembling men of the olden day are more than glad to find others interested in the days which they are living over and over as they sit idly awaiting a long, hard life's end.

Suffice it that I found Dry Ridge and learned all the course of the old thoroughfare from the Ohio to the Monongahela. Crossing at the mouth of the Little Kanawha (Parkersburg, West Virginia), it passes near the old "Neal's Station"—now Ewing's Station, on the Baltimore and Ohio railway—and goes north of Kanawha station and above Eaton's tunnel. There it takes to Dry Ridge, where Dr. Hildreth knew it, which it pursues to Doddridge county (West Virginia), through Martin's Woods and north of Greenwood to Center Station. From there it turns east to West Union tunnel (Gorham's or "No. 6"), and then on to the highland on the head of Middle Island creek. Reaching the watershed in Harrison county by way of Tom's Fork, it runs into the valley of Ten Mile creek, which it follows down into the Monongahela valley.

At one point a country road ascended Dry Ridge and crossed the old-time highway which courses along the summit. At the junction of the two routes stands an aged tree bearing on one side the bright, clean gash of the surveyor's ax, on the other the dark, half-healed blaze of the "Long-knives" of Virginia. These are the trade-marks of two centuries, the signs of two races—one of which opened and conquered an empire, another which settled it and is making it what the Creator purposed.

The great road broken open by Colonel Henry Bouquet in Pontiac's Rebellion, from the Ohio to and down the Muskingum river to Coshocton, Ohio, can easily be followed and mapped throughout its length. It is one of the most historic routes of the Central West, for Bouquet followed the Great Trail closely. Following the northwest shore of the Ohio to the mouth of Big Beaver, this highway takes to the northwest from that point (as the fastest trains from Pittsburg to Cleveland do today), and goes on to the watershed between the Beaver river and Yellow creek. It passes north of New Lisbon, Ohio, into the Big Sandy valley. Passing near Bayard it runs by way of Pekin (now Minerva, Stark county), Waynesville, and Sandyville—crossing Nimishillen creek half a mile above Sandyville—and comes to the Tuscarawas at the "Crossing-place of the Muskingum," at Bolivar. From this point Bouquet turned southward, but the Great Trail ran westwardly on its course to Detroit. It passed through the old Baptist burying-ground one-half mile south of Wooster and crossed the Kilbuck north of the bridge on the Ashland road. Turning west it coursed near the present village of Reedsburg to the well-known Indian town "Mohican John's Town" and thence northwest near Castalia in Erie county to Fort Sandusky on Sandusky river.

When visiting at the historic village of Gnadenhutten during the centennial celebration of 1898, I endeavored to locate the Muskingum trail which passed through this region. From no one could I gain any clew, until when in conversation with the venerable Bishop Van Vleck of the Moravian Church I brought up the matter of early highways. The bishop at once recalled a remark made by a parishioner who told him that when coming to church he followed an old roadway in order to make a short cut. On this clew I started and reaching, by the common highway, the range of hills beyond the Tuscarawas, I found there the plainest pathway on the heights. Following the old course, I was

The Old Muskingum Trail

at last repaid, after a six mile tramp, by finding the gentleman I sought. At his home, beside a roaring threshing machine, I learned the course of the ancient highway—of which the county records at New Philadelphia make no mention, though dates there recorded went back into the eighteenth century. Descending the Tuscarawas on the western bank from the "Crossing-place of the Muskingum," it crossed Sugar creek near the present site of Canal Dover. Stone creek was crossed near its mouth, as was Old Town creek. From that point the trail took to the highland farms of A. W. Patrick, A. Rupert, David Anderson, Elia Mathias, Chas. Kinsey, P. F. Kinsey, the Sweitzer heirs. It crossed Frye's creek and went on the farms of B. Gross and Mr. Wyant, and from there followed the Tuscarawas to the site of the Moravian town Salem (now Port Washington). Thence it turned westward to the hills near Chili and into Coshocton county, where was the Delaware capital Gosh-goshing, the modern Coshocton. As a highway, this old route was deserted during my old guide's boyhood—but with the vivid recollections of youth which so many elderly persons possess, he remembered that it was used even by the old-time traveling circuses which were wont to come that way. He also informed me that if I would follow the path steadily I would find myself at length in a traveled road. And, on the day following, as I pursued the course, his words proved true and I suddenly came into a traveled road. The old highway was still in use as far as a farm-house located at a distance from the main highway. It was not blocked up, for many still use the old road as a footpath across the hills. For the explorer of old highways there is perhaps no spot in America which can equal in romance and interest the three great pathways, one built upon the other, which wind through the Alleghanies of northwestern Maryland and southwestern Pennsylvania, from the Potomac to the Ohio river. Each of these paths was an important item in great campaigns, and the course leads on through scenes as memorable as any on this continent. You may follow any one of the three courses—that of the Indian path, over the summits of the

An Indian Trail Becomes a Modern Road

hills, or Braddock's great road which nearly followed the Indian's course, or the Cumberland Road which followed closely the general alignment of Braddock's Road. By any route the journey will be an inspiration which no description can by any means convey.

If you follow the Indian path from hilltop to hilltop you will seem to see yet the blazes on the trees made by Cresap's Indians for the Virginian gentlemen who were eager and anxious to try that celebrated test case with France to decide who was master in these western forests. For this little path, starred white by the Indian's ax, was more than a mere road westward, much more than a blazed trader's course to the Ohio. It was a path for Saxon commerce, and if for commerce then for conquest, as the quick-witted Frenchmen well knew—and nothing could have brought on that decisive war more quickly than the blazing of that Indian trail and the granting of the one hundred thousand acres to which it led.

You may travel that famous path with the little company of men who set out westward over it in 1752 to spy out the West and learn what the French were doing on the Allegheny. Many of the heights over which Washington passed on that rough ride look today much as they did a century and a half ago—for a century is a short period in the depths of the Alleghanies. And as you peer into the valley where the once famous Cumberland Road winds along, you will remember that it became the realization of the youthful Virginian's earliest dream; for while moving westward over the Indian path in 1752, Washington was already planning a highway which should bind the East and the West—a dream that so wonderfully came true when the next century was only eighteen years of age.

In the year after, Washington led over this same narrow path the little vanguard which in the intense stillness of these mountains should open with a savage roll of musketry the momentous war which could never end until in far Quebec, Wolfe laid down his life at the cry of victory. On the hillside to the south you may look down upon the waving grasses of Great Meadows where faint mounds of earth still mark the site of Fort Necessity where the first battle in the West was fought and where Washington signed his first—and last—capitulation. From Fort Necessity you may pick your way westward along the old path as it climbs slowly the stately shoulders of Laurel Hill; deep in the valley you will find a little pile of stones surmounted by a rude cross where the French "embassador" Jumonville was buried when Washington's Indians ran him to cover. In the pursuit which followed, the young major, with his handful of Virginians, floundered over this narrow path to Washington's Spring and then downward to the cliffs from which that first volley of the old French war was fired.

Or go back again to Cumberland on the Potomac, where Braddock's troops are impatiently awaiting the order to advance. At least six hundred swarthy men are sent forward to open a great road over the Indian track. The army soon marches in their wake—a very plain wake of felled trees, uprooted bushes and vines. It is desperately slow work. The army camps night after night within hearing of those ringing axes which herald the coming of the flower of Ireland's slums.

But if the army was an army of degenerates, its general was one of a thousand! Who else would have hewed such a road against such odds, with the listlessness of the colonies, whose salvation he was, and the chicanery of disreputable contractors combining to make his expedition a failure from the very beginning? You may walk over Braddock's Road from where it left the Potomac to the pool of blood where it stopped, and that rough track—its tremendous gorges which the rains of a century have not effaced, its great furrows through the open, its wide pathway through the forest—is a monument to the sheer grit and determination of the man for whom it is named and who was buried somewhere in it.

Even in the open country west of Braddock's Run the old road may be followed easily to the orchard where Braddock died, breathing those last brave words. Here Washington, it is supposed, read the service over the remains which were then buried in the very center of the road in order that the wagons might hide the grave from desecrating hands. This was done so completely that even Washington, at a later but happier day, could not identify it.

On the summit of Laurel Hill a county road now follows for a distance the old-time war route. The spot where the former swings away westward may easily be discovered and your route turns again into the silent forests.

Or return once again to historic Cumberland—and before you a great avenue eighty feet in width has supplanted both the road of the Indian and Braddock's ancient highway; "it is a monument of a past age; but like all other monuments, it is interesting as well as venerable. It carried thousands of population and millions of wealth into the West; and more than any other material structure in the land, served to harmonize and strengthen, if not to save, the Union." It was the nation's highway—this famed old Cumberland road—which meant more to the whole West for half a century than any railway means to any part of it today. Over this great track the "Star of Empire" passed westward to that mighty empire to which Nemacolin's Path and Braddock's rough road led the way a century and a half ago. A century had proved that the West could not be held by water-ways. The question then was, could it be held by land approaches? The ringing of woodmen's axes, the clinking of surveyors' chains, the rattle of tavern signs and the rumble of stage coach wheels, thundered the answer—Yes!

So patriotic and so thoroughly American is the Central West today, that it is also difficult to realize by what a slender thread it hung to the fragile republic east of the mountains, during the two decades succeeding the Revolutionary War. The whole world looked upon the East and West as realms distinct as Italy and France, and for the same geographical reason. It looked for a partition of the alleged "United States" among the powers as confidently as we today look for the partition of China, and for very similar reasons. England and France and Spain had their well defined "spheres of influence," and the populated and flourishing center of the then West, Kentucky, became, and was for a generation, a hotbed of their wily emissaries. Through all those years when Burr and others "played fast and loose with conspiracy," the loyalty of the West was far less sure than one can easily believe. The building of the Cumberland Road was, undoubtedly, one of the influences which secured the West to the Union, and the population which at once poured into the Ohio valley undoubtedly saved the western states in embryo from greater perils than those they had known.

This road, conceived in the brains, first of Washington, then of Albert Gallatin, took its inception in 1806, when commissioners to report on the project were appointed by President Jefferson. In 1811, the first contract was let for ten miles of the road west of Cumberland, Maryland, which was its eastern terminus. The road was opened to the Ohio river in 1818.

In a moment's time an army of emigrants and pioneers were en route to the West over the great highway, regiment following regiment as the years advanced. Squalid cabins, where the hunter had lived beside the primeval thoroughfare, were pressed into service as taverns. Indian fords, where the water had oft run red with blood in border frays, were spanned with solid bridges. Ancient towns, which had been comparatively unknown to the world, but which were of sufficient commercial magnetism to attract the great road to them, became, on the morrow, cities of consequence in the world. As the century ran into its second and third decades, the Cumberland Road received an increasingly heterogeneous population. Wagons of all descriptions, from the smallest to the great "mountain ships" which creaked down the mountain sides and groaned off into the setting sun, formed a marvelous frieze upon it. Fast expresses, too realistically, perhaps, called "shakeguts," tore along through valley and over hill with important messages of state. Here, the broad highway was blocked with herds of cattle trudging eastward to the markets, or westward to the meadow lands beyond the mountains. Gay coaches of four and six horses, whose worthy drivers were known by name even to the statesmen who were often their passengers, rolled on to the hospitable taverns where the company reveled. All night, along the roadway, gypsy fires flickered in the darkness, where wandering minstrels and jugglers crept to show their art, while in the background crowded traders, hucksters, peddlers, soldiery, showmen, and beggars—all picturesque pilgrims on the nation's great highway.

It is a fair question whether our western civilization is more wonderful for the rapidity with which new things under the sun are discovered, or for the rapidity with which it can forget men and things today which were indispensable yesterday. The era of the Cumberland Road was succeeded in half a century by that of the railway, and a great thoroughfare, which was the pride and mainstay of a civilization, has almost passed from human recollection. A few ponderous stone bridges and a long line of sorry-looking mile-posts mark the famous highway of our "Middle Age" from the network of cross-roads, which now meet it at every step. Scores of proud towns which were thriving centers of a transcontinental trade have dwindled into comparative insignificance, while the clanging of rusty signs on their ancient tavern posts tell, with inexpressible pathos, that

"There hath passed away a glory from the earth."

From many of the sweeping stretches of this great road you may look to the hilltop where Washington dragged his swivels over the Indian path; nearer, perhaps close by, may be seen the great gorges of Braddock's Road—strange monuments to the indomitable British grit which finally overcame. And between these three great streams of human history you may read the story of the marvelous centuries now passed away.

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