By Stephen Smoot
Two centuries prior to the official establishment of the most vital highway across Virginia’s northwestern wilderness came the first legislation to promote road construction in the United States.
The House of Burgesses in 1632 agreed that “Highwayes shall be layd in such convenient places as are requisite accordinge as the Gov. and Counsell or the commissioners for the monthlie corts shall appoynt, or accordinge as the parishioners of every parish shall agree.”
Initial legislation also applied the medieval English tradition of taxing each able-bodied man in the colony a period of physical labor to build and maintain the roads. As late as the 1790s, the records of the Kanawha County Court confirm that paying taxes via road labor instead of cash was common. Military scouts who ranged through the hills and hollers of Western Virginia looking for Indian war parties in the first half of the 1790s did so to establish the best pathways for roads after General Anthony Wayne vanquished the Shawnee threat at Fallen Timbers.
Three years before casting its lot with other colonies to fight for independence, Virginia established the first toll road, soon to be called “turnpikes” for the bar crossing the road prior to paying the toll. In modern terms, the road had a $300 contribution from the County and a $900 “match” from the citizens who raised funds via a lottery held for that purpose.
Independence and the allure of western land profits, promoted heavily by George Washington himself, led to strong interest in road construction as the 1700s passed into the 18. He had surveyed many of the lands on and near the South Branch of the Potomac and Cacapon River watersheds as a teenager with Lord Fairfax, then Kanawha and Ohio lands much later in life.
Virginia historian Robert Hunter’s dissertation “The Turnpike Movement in Virginia 1816 to 1860” referred to “the Kanawha, the Northwestern, the Stanton and Parkersburg, and the Southwestern Turnpikes” as “the four superhighways” traversing and connecting the western hills and mountains.
The question of their support helped to lay bare the burden of Virginia’s east having over proportionate representation in the General Assembly, the eagerness to invest in the east versus the perceived paltry spending in the west, and related issues that created political discontent in the western counties right up until separation.
Harrison County also served as an early advocate for an improved road. As Jennifer Wilt wrote for the Doddridge History Guild, a public meeting on Oct 25, 1825 brought forth a petition that requested “a joint-stock company to construct a road from Wood County to Winchester.” Note that westerners always put the western terminus first in the description while eastern Virginians never fail to do the opposite.
Attorney Phillip Doddridge, representing an assemblage of counties farther west, asked “that the public engineer mark and explore a road connecting the town of Winchester and some other suitable point with some suitable point in the counties of Tyler and Wood on the Ohio River.
Hunter explained that the eastern dominated General Assembly would spend small sums in the western counties and call the investment very generous, then spend proportionately much more on rail in the east. “The westerners were not deceived,” he noted, then added “their often repeated complaint of discrimination . . . was one of the principal causes of dismemberment of the state.” The fact that roads in the west tended to be toll and those in the east fee free also likely exacerbated tensions.
“It must be acknowledged” explained Hunter, however, “that the three that crossed the Trans-Allegheny section (West Virginia) encountered enormous physical obstacles, and were beset with frustrating economic and physical handicaps as well.”
The Northwestern Turnpike was the highway that came with the specific blessing of Washington, who in 1784 proposed the route. Like modern State officials, he endeavored to keep the commerce as much as possible within his home Commonwealth and billed the road as an all-Virginia route to the Ohio River.
Perhaps Washington’s involvement inspired strong support even well after his death, but most likely competition from Maryland and Pennsylvania’s National Road did more to encourage progress. The 1827 act establishing the Northwestern Turnpike as an official Commonwealth highway also, unique for its time, provided 100 percent support from Richmond.
Despite traversing some of the most difficult terrain in America at the time, the grading and paving of the Northwestern Turnpike 100 percent by hand was completed between Winchester and Parkersburg 11 years after passage of the act.
By comparison, Corridor H construction started six decades ago and, despite the enormous progress and improvement it has brought, constant opposition from some have delayed progress repeatedly, leaving no end date for the road project in sight.
Survey work started under the supervision of Claudius Crozet in 1831, four years after the original enabling act. A road company came into existence in 1831 with the power to borrow up to $125,000 (around $4.5 million today.) It also established a 12 foot standard width for the road, which would use the then common McAdam method of using small stones on top of large to create a uniform and durable surface.
Travelers would encounter toll gates every 20 miles on the route, but Virginians had long since perfected the art of creating and using “shunpikes,” by finding locally known paths to circumvent tolls.
The Encyclopedia Virginia notes that the French Army veteran who served under Napoleon “was a civil engineer best known for his work blasting tunnels through the Blue Ridge Mountains.” Upon coming to the United States after Napoleon’s defeat, he taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point before a sometimes contentious tenure of service for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Crozet two years before the 1827 act had performed a survey of western Virginia and first recommended a canal system similar to New York’s. His vision of a centralized transportation network of water, road, and rail foundered on objections from locals and other interests. He resigned halfway through the Northwestern Turnpike project.
Under his direction, the Northwestern Turnpike extended west from Winchester, coming into Hampshire at Capon Bridge, extending west into a narrow slice of Maryland after crossing the North Branch of the Potomac, exiting into Preston County, then hugging the steep canyon walls of eastern Preston before exiting into the Appalachian Plateau country points west until coming into Harrison County. It was when the road hit Harrison that Crozet threw up his hands in frustration and left the project in the hands of his assistant, Charles Shaw. Shaw oversaw the completion to the Ohio River and its water highway to points farther west.
J. M. Callahan’s Semicentennial History of West Virginia, as quoted on the Historic Hampshire website, notes that the 1827 approved route on one hand utilized local roads already in some level of service. On the other, he shared that “the act in incorporation of 1827, authorizing subscriptions at Winchester, Romney, Moorefield, Beverly, Kingwood, Pruntytown, Clarksburg and Parkersburg, made the mistake of arbitrarily locating the route through important towns without proper consideration of the physical features of the country.”
One lay in Mill Creek Gap in Hampshire, proceeding from there until hitting the rugged Allegheny ridges and valleys. The Preston County leg caused so much difficulty that the project started to lose momentum and languished for a time. Though “much of the route passed through a vast wilderness interspersed here and there by a few old settlements and towns,” long distance travelers, personal and commercial, increasingly found utility.
Construction from Preston near Kingwood through to Parkersburg cost approximately $400,000, or about $17 million today.
Well before its completion, the Northwestern Turnpike sparked economic growth. As early as the year of its establishment in law, a stagecoach company sought to get in on the ground floor of serving those using the road.
A man named Clark, according to a document submitted for National Historic Preservation status consideration, purchased a tract of land between modern Burlington and New Creek. Back then, that lay in Hampshire, but currently is in Mineral County. On that land, he constructed a local stone, locally adapted Greek Revival style structure to serve the lodging, food, and other legitimate hospitality needs of stagecoach passengers and others who would travel on the road.
That stagecoach, connecting Baltimore and Parkersburg, continued in service until just after the European outbreak of World War I. Road use declined somewhat when canals, which moved more slowly, but could carry much more per vehicle, started to serve as primary carriers of commercial freight, they themselves swiftly replaced by railroads. The Baltimore and Ohio, constructed in the 1850s, followed the approximate path of the Northwestern Turnpike.
The Northwest Turnpike, however, would not see completion until years after the construction of the rest stop. Traveler’s Rest, as it became known, continued to operate according to its original purpose until the mid 1920s. Today it serves as a museum and fundraising shop for the Mineral County Historical Society whose determined work and loving care over many years has restored the original luster of the site.
During and after the War of Independence, posts that started as military when Indian attacks served as a threat quickly evolved into trading posts, then centers around which agricultural communities grew. Local roads emerged to connect these settlements as they expanded in number and size.
Levi Shinn’s construction of a fortified cabin in 1778 led to the establishment of Shinnston. Clarksburg started as a settlement at about the same time and was fully incorporated as a municipality by 1785.
Fort New Salem appeared by 1792 during the most intense years of attacks by Shawnee and allied nations on the Virginia frontier until the victory of General Anthony Wayne at Fallen Timbers. The fort was constructed as a fortified blockhouse, not a walled structure, originally.
The Doddridge County History Guild posted a lengthy description of events from Ned Jones’ 1901 History of Smithburg. He wrote that “in the growing view of the importance of the trading post at Clarksburg, and the rapid influx of settlers, it became manifest to the leading spirits of the past that some kind of a road, be it ever so villainous.” (Mr. Jones did not seem to always favor the economic development aspect of roadways apparently. His publication came during the start of West Virginia’s “Good Roads” movement that was highly controversial in the early 20th century in the Mountain State.)
Calling the Northwestern Turnpike “make-believe,” Jones did describe how “the opening of this road led to a very great deal of teaming and heavy teams constantly on the road, hauling dry gods from the eastern cities to Parkersburg.” He added that “and I have seen as many as one hundred and fifty cattle and eight hundred head of hogs in a single drove and have known ten thousand head to pass over it in one week.”
He also wrote, oddly enough, that “you must understand that the Northwestern Turnpike was at the time I write of (1840s) a beautiful road, wide enough for coaches to pass almost any place and they did so on the run. The road was kept in perfect order and there was no stone that would pass through an inch ring was allowed on it.”
That “beautiful road” still boasted some use in the 1850s, though that had declined as the Baltimore and Ohio roared to life. Ugliness of armed conflict, however, would put this road in the center of events. Strategic control of railroads and turnpikes served as a mission for both Federal and Confederate States forces operating in western Virginia, West Virginia by 1863.
General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, born within shouting distance of the Northwestern Turnpike in Clarksburg, would get to know its Hampshire County stretch very well. Romney would change hands 52 times, more often than any other point anywhere in the war.
The passing of that conflict and the onset of the Industrial Age would put roads far behind on transportation priorities until the Iron Horse started to give way to the Horseless Carriage, sparking the vital era in State history known as “The Good Roads Movement.”