Searight's Tollhouse
Menallen Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Erected by Pennsylvania, in 1835, to collect tolls on the old National Road.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
This stone tollhouse was raised in 1835 to collect fees from travelers on the National Road, America's first federally funded highway, which stretched from Maryland toward the Ohio Valley. By the 1830s the road had passed to state control, and Pennsylvania built distinctive hexagonal tollhouses like this one to fund upkeep. Wagons, stagecoaches, and droves of livestock all paused here to pay before rolling west.
Why it matters
As a rare surviving tollhouse on the National Road, it marks the young republic's ambitious effort to bind East and West with a public highway and the everyday commerce that flowed along it.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Toll House
Menallen Township, PA · est. 1947
This toll house is one of six original gatehouses built along the Cumberland Road — the great National Road that was the first federally funded highway in the United States, pushing west across the Appalachians toward the Ohio country. The roadway was completed through this section of Fayette County in 1817–18, and when the federal government handed the road over to Pennsylvania in 1835, the state built these toll houses to collect the fees that would maintain it. Travelers, freight wagons, and Conestoga teams once paused here to pay their way west.
National Road
Redstone Township, PA · est. 1948
The National Road was the country's first federally funded highway, championed by Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin as a way to bind the eastern seaboard to the growing western settlements. Construction began at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811 and reached Wheeling on the Ohio River by 1818. Later handed to state control as a toll road from 1835 to 1905, its route was eventually rebuilt as U.S. Route 40.
Uniontown
Uniontown, PA · est. 1946
Uniontown traces its founding to Henry Beeson, who raised a blockhouse here in 1774 on the very ground where the county jail would later stand. For decades it was a modest frontier settlement, but its fortunes turned when the National Road pushed through after 1811. As the great highway threaded the mountains, Uniontown became a busy waystation on the route west.
Fayette County
Uniontown, PA · est. 1982
Formed from Westmoreland County in 1783, Fayette County honors the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who fought for American independence. Its rolling ground holds Fort Necessity, where a young George Washington fought an early engagement of the French and Indian War in 1754. Later the county's seat, Uniontown, incorporated in 1796, sat astride the National Road, the young republic's great federally built highway west that became U.S. Route 40.