Eastern Kentucky Railway

Paintsville, KY

John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo (1864–1914) rose from a schoolteacher of modest means to become the wealthiest man in Kentucky by quietly buying up the mineral rights beneath the eastern Kentucky mountains using the notorious 'broad form' deed. As coal transformed Appalachia around the turn of the twentieth century, Mayo promoted the railroads that carried it out and helped organize the banks that financed the mines and lines, knitting Paintsville and the Big Sandy Valley into the industrial economy. With his fortune he endowed churches, schools, and financial institutions meant to lift the mountain people among whom he had grown up, and built a grand mansion in Paintsville that still stands as the emblem of that coal-boom wealth.

Maysville, KY

Chartered in 1829, the Maysville and Washington Turnpike laid down the first macadamized road in Kentucky—and reputedly the first anywhere west of the Alleghenies—when its opening four-mile stretch was completed in 1830. By 1835 the improved road ran all the way from Maysville to Lexington, threaded with thirteen tollhouses and six covered bridges. It carried the Bluegrass region's goods and travelers over a smooth, engineered surface that muddy frontier tracks could never match.

Monroe Township, OH

This cast-iron nameplate is a surviving relic of the original Grant Memorial Bridge, a steel truss span erected between 1925 and 1927 during the great era of American road-building, when reinforced steel and concrete were replacing the wooden and iron crossings of the previous century. The bridge carried its name in honor of Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general and president who was born just a short distance away at Point Pleasant in Clermont County. When the original structure was eventually retired, this nameplate — one of two — was preserved and set into the walkway so that travelers could still touch a piece of the old bridge.

Belpre, OH

In 1791 the Ohio country was raw frontier, and the settlers clustered near Belpre—many of them Revolutionary War veterans who had come west with the Ohio Company—needed a reliable way to turn grain into flour. Jonathan Devol, a resourceful millwright, answered by mounting a gristmill on two boats anchored in the Ohio River, letting the current itself drive the stones. Sheltered beside Farmer's Castle, the fortified stockade built during the Indian wars of the early 1790s, his floating mill ground 25 to 50 bushels a day and served families scattered across some thirty miles of riverbank.