National Road
Garrett County, Somerset County, Maryland
Marker Inscription
Our first national road; fathered by Albert Gallatin. Begun in 1811 at Cumberland, Md.; completed to Wheeling in 1818. Toll road under State control, 1835-1905. Rebuilt, it is present U.S. Route 40.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
The National Road was the nation's first federally funded highway, championed by Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin as a link binding the young country to its western territories. Construction began at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811 and reached Wheeling on the Ohio by 1818, carrying settlers, freight, and mail deep into the interior. After 1835 the states ran it as a toll road for seventy years, and in the automobile age it was rebuilt as U.S. Route 40.
Why it matters
As America's first great national highway, the road embodied the federal commitment to internal improvements and opened the door to the settlement of the trans-Appalachian West.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the young United States faced a stubborn problem: it had claimed a vast interior but had almost no good way to reach it. West of the Appalachian Mountains lay enormous territory, but the ridges in between were a formidable wall. Moving people and goods across them meant slow, punishing travel over poor traces and rough tracks. A nation that wanted to grow westward first had to figure out how to physically get there.
The answer that took shape in this era was the idea of "internal improvements" — roads, canals, and other public works that would knit the country together. It was a genuinely new and somewhat controversial notion: that the federal government itself might build the infrastructure binding the seaboard to the frontier. The National Road became the great early experiment in that idea.
This marker sits in that mountainous borderland where the road had to climb and thread its way west, in the rugged country where Maryland and Pennsylvania meet. It was precisely the kind of difficult terrain that made the whole undertaking so necessary — and so ambitious.
People & events
The National Road is remembered as the nation's first, and this marker credits Albert Gallatin as its father. Gallatin, one of the era's leading statesmen and financial minds, was among the strongest advocates for using the national government to build the connections a growing country needed. It was a visionary argument, and the road became its most tangible result.
The work itself began in 1811 at Cumberland, Maryland — the launching point for a highway meant to push west into the interior. Building a road across mountain country in that age was a massive labor of surveying, clearing, grading, and surfacing, mile by hard-won mile. By 1818 it had reached Wheeling, on the Ohio River, opening a genuine overland corridor from the East toward the western waters.
The road's later life reflects the changing times. From 1835 it was run as a toll road under state control, a status it held for seventy years until 1905 — travelers paying their way along a route the nation had opened. Then, in the age of the automobile, it was rebuilt and absorbed into the modern highway system as U.S. Route 40, so that a corridor first cut for wagons and stagecoaches carries traffic still.
Its place in the American story
The National Road is one of the foundational threads in the story of American expansion. It was the country's first great federally supported highway, and as such it represented a national commitment to reaching and settling the trans-Appalachian West. Before it, the interior was hard to reach; the road helped turn a line on a map into a living stream of settlers, freight, and mail flowing westward.
Its significance is as much about the idea as the pavement. By building it, the federal government put real weight behind the principle that the nation should invest in connecting its own far-flung parts. That principle — debated, expanded, and fought over — would shape American development for generations, running forward through the canals, the railroads, and eventually the interstate highways.
And the road never really died. Its evolution from a wagon route, to a state-controlled toll road, to modern U.S. Route 40 makes it a rare piece of infrastructure that has served every age of American travel in turn. Few things so plainly connect the era of the stagecoach to the era of the automobile as a single road that carried both.
If you visit
The best way to appreciate this marker is to pay attention to the land it crosses. You are in high, rugged mountain country, and the moment you feel the grades and the ridgelines you understand why the National Road was such an achievement. What looks routine to a modern driver was, two centuries ago, a genuine feat of engineering and sheer human effort.
There's a special pleasure in knowing that the modern highway beneath you follows the same corridor that once carried Conestoga wagons, stagecoaches, and westbound families with everything they owned. Traveling here, you are quite literally driving the path of the nation's first great road — a living route that has simply been rebuilt for each new age of travel.
This makes an ideal stop for a road trip themed on westward expansion and the history of American travel, and it invites you to keep going. The road was meant to be followed, after all. Read the marker, look west toward the mountains it was built to conquer, and let it set the stage for the larger story of how a young country reached across the Appalachians to claim its future.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Albert Gallatin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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South Union Township, PA · est. 1996
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Uniontown
South Union Township, PA · est. 1946
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