Fascinating stuff! The route for I95 along the fall line was new. A question that came to mind is what’s the history of east west connections over the Appalachians? To the north it’s the St Lawrence, the Erie Canal, then the C&O? Today, it’s a 3-4 hour drive west on I64 to get to the rivers that connect eventually to the Mississippi. When/how/who envisioned the first connections off the east coast and the lands over the mountains? Brings to mind Allen Taylor’s histories of the revolutionary period and his explanations for why the British won out over the Spanish and French. A pedantic note, crew and team are redundant, the crew is the team. And crew’s row, they don’t scull. Scullers scull with sculls. Crews row with oars. Two hands on one oar, one hand per scull.
Al, I knew I was in rough waters when I mentioned crew and sculls; clearly, I learned nothing in the several decades since, so thanks for the clarification.
On the E-W connections, that's a great question, and I only have a superficial knowledge--you probably know more than I do on it. I believe, like in the Far West later on, trappers and hunters began the trans-Appalachian movement and were followed by settlers who cleared small homesteads and moved on with frequency. But the big push came with the land companies, like the Ohio Company that George Washington's elder half-brother Lawrence Washington co-founded. They bought up or were granted by the Crown hundreds of thousands of acres of land beyond the Appalachians. Later, after Independence, land ceded by Britain at the Treaty of Paris, usually without recompensing the Indians, was also bought by newly-formed American land companies, who then sent out settlers.
David McCullough's last book, "The Pioneers," told the story of the first organized settlement beyond the Ohio River, at Marietta, Ohio, in 1788, from a group organized out of Massachusetts; others from New England followed, as the land there became less and less productive. Simon Winchester, in "The Men Who United the States," has a nice chapter on the land surveys beyond the Ohio that plotted the regular patterns of township settlement mandated by the Northwest Ordinance (he makes a big error later in the book, however, in his chapter on the first Transcontinental Motor Convoy, of 1919; but that's for another time).
I've read conflicting assessments: either the English and Scots-Irish settlers were pouring over the Appalachians in uncontrollable numbers, or not enough could be tempted to fill the territory given the uncertainties of security and governance. It was to have some semblance of order in settlement in the Ohio Valley that the various Ordinances were passed. Thomas Jefferson penned the first, in 1784, and there was a follow-on in 1785, before the more workable Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was passed. A bit further south, on this side of the Ohio, settlers started moving through the Cumberland Gap in numbers in the 1790s, but had trickled through starting decades earlier, settling large parts of Tennessee and Kentucky.
On actual physical E-W connections, George Washington, of course, started the Patowmack Canal, which I wrote about in an earlier post, on the etymology of "Patowmack." Washington hoped to link the Potomac Tidewater with the Ohio River, which never happened; even the C&O Canal only made it to Cumberland, Maryland, outclassed by the Erie Canal almost immediately.
The land connections also developed helter-skelter. Eventually, many old Indian trails, like the Cumberland Gap, became permanent roads, and the territories became states (KY in 1792, TN in 1796). The National Road, or Cumberland Road, was started in the early-19th century (1811) and linked western Maryland with Vandalia, Illinois, well past the Ohio but not quite to the Mississippi. A century later, that became part of the National Old Trails Road, built for automobiles, starting in 1912, which spanned the continent.
So, not sure that answers your question, but as with everything, there were multiple movements, influences, and interests operating at the same time. The nice thing is, many of the early roads and trails still exist in some form, and you can drive the National Old Trails Road out into Frederick County and farther west, and the Cumberland Gap is a National Historical Park, which I hope to get to sometime soon.
Fascinating stuff! The route for I95 along the fall line was new. A question that came to mind is what’s the history of east west connections over the Appalachians? To the north it’s the St Lawrence, the Erie Canal, then the C&O? Today, it’s a 3-4 hour drive west on I64 to get to the rivers that connect eventually to the Mississippi. When/how/who envisioned the first connections off the east coast and the lands over the mountains? Brings to mind Allen Taylor’s histories of the revolutionary period and his explanations for why the British won out over the Spanish and French. A pedantic note, crew and team are redundant, the crew is the team. And crew’s row, they don’t scull. Scullers scull with sculls. Crews row with oars. Two hands on one oar, one hand per scull.
Al, I knew I was in rough waters when I mentioned crew and sculls; clearly, I learned nothing in the several decades since, so thanks for the clarification.
On the E-W connections, that's a great question, and I only have a superficial knowledge--you probably know more than I do on it. I believe, like in the Far West later on, trappers and hunters began the trans-Appalachian movement and were followed by settlers who cleared small homesteads and moved on with frequency. But the big push came with the land companies, like the Ohio Company that George Washington's elder half-brother Lawrence Washington co-founded. They bought up or were granted by the Crown hundreds of thousands of acres of land beyond the Appalachians. Later, after Independence, land ceded by Britain at the Treaty of Paris, usually without recompensing the Indians, was also bought by newly-formed American land companies, who then sent out settlers.
David McCullough's last book, "The Pioneers," told the story of the first organized settlement beyond the Ohio River, at Marietta, Ohio, in 1788, from a group organized out of Massachusetts; others from New England followed, as the land there became less and less productive. Simon Winchester, in "The Men Who United the States," has a nice chapter on the land surveys beyond the Ohio that plotted the regular patterns of township settlement mandated by the Northwest Ordinance (he makes a big error later in the book, however, in his chapter on the first Transcontinental Motor Convoy, of 1919; but that's for another time).
I've read conflicting assessments: either the English and Scots-Irish settlers were pouring over the Appalachians in uncontrollable numbers, or not enough could be tempted to fill the territory given the uncertainties of security and governance. It was to have some semblance of order in settlement in the Ohio Valley that the various Ordinances were passed. Thomas Jefferson penned the first, in 1784, and there was a follow-on in 1785, before the more workable Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was passed. A bit further south, on this side of the Ohio, settlers started moving through the Cumberland Gap in numbers in the 1790s, but had trickled through starting decades earlier, settling large parts of Tennessee and Kentucky.
On actual physical E-W connections, George Washington, of course, started the Patowmack Canal, which I wrote about in an earlier post, on the etymology of "Patowmack." Washington hoped to link the Potomac Tidewater with the Ohio River, which never happened; even the C&O Canal only made it to Cumberland, Maryland, outclassed by the Erie Canal almost immediately.
The land connections also developed helter-skelter. Eventually, many old Indian trails, like the Cumberland Gap, became permanent roads, and the territories became states (KY in 1792, TN in 1796). The National Road, or Cumberland Road, was started in the early-19th century (1811) and linked western Maryland with Vandalia, Illinois, well past the Ohio but not quite to the Mississippi. A century later, that became part of the National Old Trails Road, built for automobiles, starting in 1912, which spanned the continent.
So, not sure that answers your question, but as with everything, there were multiple movements, influences, and interests operating at the same time. The nice thing is, many of the early roads and trails still exist in some form, and you can drive the National Old Trails Road out into Frederick County and farther west, and the Cumberland Gap is a National Historical Park, which I hope to get to sometime soon.