The National Road by Tim Morris

Where are you going this summer? people asked in the spring of 2022. To see my son in Virginia, I replied, but then I’m going to drive back along the National Road. Where to? they followed up. Nowhere, I said. I’m not taking it to get anywhere. I want to see the National Road itself.

When you look at the National Road route on a map today, you’re struck by the aimlessness of it. Its official endpoints are Vandalia, Illinois, and Cumberland, Maryland—not places many people want to get to or from anymore. The Road lurches northwest out of Cumberland across a depopulated corner of Pennsylvania, nips across West Virginia, and then plows into the prairie. Its convenience as a route from Columbus to Indianapolis is most obvious, explaining why I-70 closely parallels it there today.

But back in its heyday, the early-mid-19th century, the National Road was a vital corridor. Cumberland was as far up the Potomac as one could effectively navigate. The Pennsylvania portion of the Road was the most efficient cut across the shortest reach of the Appalachians. Wheeling gave the Road a Virginia and Ohio River port (long before West Virginia seceded). The westward stretch connected (at the time) three state capitals: Columbus, Indianapolis, and Vandalia.

I don’t entirely know what I expected to find. I mused vaguely that hewing to each twist and turn of the National Road would prompt synesthetic images of primeval stagecoach journeys or even lower-tech ramblings from the past. I wanted to take a dynamic dip into history—to imagine what it was like to ride the Road, to bounce along it in a stagecoach, to drive flocks of sheep on it to market. I would sojourn a while in the steps of long-ago pilgrims, stripping away the accretions of modern development—and, of course, this all turned out to be complete nonsense. I might as well have stayed home in bed, read books about the Old Pike, and daydreamed about the picaresque days of yore.

***

In any case, historic roads, as tourist attractions, are by definition nothing like what they used to be. Not an inch of the road you take will be what people traveled even a century before. Most of it will barely resemble what you drove all that way to drive.

In her wonderful book The Ruins Lesson, Susan Stewart observes that even ruins must be continually maintained. When you visit the Baths of Caracalla, you brush past the ghosts of long-ago Roman bathers, and also those of slightly less-long-ago medieval and Romantics and archeologists and curators who all brought something—in many cases took away something—to produce the half-wild grandeur that the Baths display now, evoking what we can only imagine they were, to begin with.

With roads, Roman or otherwise, the transformation is total. Even to be perceptible amid the forces that constantly threaten to close over it, a road must be constantly re-hewn out of its surroundings. Leave a road not taken too long, and it will not only lie in leaves no step had trodden black; it will disappear entirely underneath brush and saplings and successor forests. If you can drive (or ride on horseback or bicycle, or for that matter walk) that road, it must be continually repaved and often re-graded and re-metaled.

Along the National Road, this reworking has meant replacement not just of surfaces but of the whole road structure. Especially between towns where the old route still follows the originally surveyed path from Cumberland to Vandalia, the successor roads—US-40, I-70—rarely follow the original cuts. Over its two centuries, the Road has been widened, deepened, straightened, moved—rationalized to conform to the best practices of new generations.

The resulting pattern resembles the sinuous rewinding of ancient river channels. A typical stretch of National Road, let’s say in Ohio, might consist of several different parallel streams. I-70 attracts most of the traffic and is the least cognizant of its environment. The wide lanes and medians of the Interstate float on their imperceptible supporting tissue of bridges and overpasses. Here and there, a frontage road escorts them; entrances and exits carry the inflow and overflow. I-70 attracts almost all the traffic. Alongside—sometimes miles away, sometimes hemming I-70 so close that it doubles across and back, under and over the Interstate, at times subsumed altogether into the big road—runs US-40. Then, at intervals, a road called “Old 40,” or just “National Pike,” will diverge from the US highway to throw 40 itself—which might otherwise look now like a minor backroad—into relief as a great no-nonsense barreler—through from a century past.

“Old 40” often leads into a village where it becomes Main Street. The buildings on Main Street sometimes hug it close, as in Centerville, showing that they were once homes and inns on the “Old Pike.” But sometimes, it’s clear that Main Street itself is a widened alternative to the original route, which lingers on as old Old 40, running a block or two away, a parallel, barely trafficked street. Often, these old Olds dead-end, vestiges of the National Road that trail off or vanish into the grid of the town. Sometimes, the Old Pike becomes an oxbow, connecting to Main Street at neither end, accessible only from a tortuous turnoff. But even those oxbows must still be graded and paved and pothole-patched, winter after winter if they’re to stay in the street grid at all. Under their motley surfaces, they come as close as you can get, by car or ultimately only on foot, to the routes so many stagecoaches plunged along in the mid-19th century. They are not the genuine Road anymore. That Road, temporary from the get-go, now lies inaccessible under their living surface. They persist as neglected but still viable paths. People still live on them; shops struggle to make a go of it even as the great rivers of commerce pass them by—in their seclusion on cutoffs from half-abandoned highways that nip at the flanks of frenetic Interstates.

***

I started my tour after a much more functional drive east from Texas, on a venerable enough stretch of the Road in Hancock, Maryland, that features a toll house and a gravel pullout where you can park and walk around, though the building was inaccessible.

Inaccessible buildings are a big part of traveling the National Road. So is solitude. As I tramped the overgrown lawn at the Hancock toll house, I saw another car pull onto the gravel. It waited a few beats; nobody got out; it drove off. Those were my first five minutes on the Road, and that was the closest I got to having a fellow tourist anywhere I stopped. For the next three days, I would have the National Road to myself—not in the sense that there was no other traffic (though at times there was little enough of that), but in the sense that absolutely nobody else wanted to see the things I had come to see.

I slept fitfully outside of Cumberland, in a motel set absurdly up on the very top of a conelike hill, peering down at a cemetery in a valley below. I had allowed two-and-a-half days to drive to Vandalia—weirdly, both too much and too little time. Back home in Texas, I had spent weeks with Karl Raitz’s magisterial A Guide to the National Road (1996), making detailed notecards on just where to turn off to see what remarkable vestige of the Pike. I zoomed in on Google Maps until my laptop screen showed quirks of the route displayed in lovingly enormous scale—only to find in practice that I shot past them at 60 miles an hour, an 18-wheeler on my tail.

On US-40 west of Frostburg, big trucks flashed by ten or fifteen miles faster than I was going. The roles reversed as I passed an Amish horse and carriage. I think that’s the way to do this. If I could only ride a horse the length of the old Road. Or walk. Those would be 19th-century ways of seeing it. Though if I tried either, I would probably be struck and killed before even getting to Pennsylvania.

I stopped for reflection at Casselman River Bridge State Park—once again, the only person that morning who did so. By contrast to the modest effort in Clarysville, the Casselman Bridge is massive, a stone arch that in its day—its day being 1813—was among the engineering wonders of North America. The facing of the bridge dates from 1911, and the surface is much newer, almost unworn. Casselman Bridge was closed to car traffic long ago, though it looks in far better shape than the rusty structure that carries US-40 along beside it.

The Casselman Bridge survives by dint of sheer weight. It looks good for another 200 years. As I went back toward my car, it occurred to me that I was able to walk the Casselman Bridge because, in 1813, its builders messed up. They designed and constructed a bridge 40 or 50 times sturdier than it needed to be, a bridge that, unless deliberately detonated—and not even that would be easy—would long outlast the roadway it carried and even the concept of the National Road itself: a monument to the overpitched ambitions of its architects.

***

As the Road angled northwest into Pennsylvania, the blur gathered, and the day collapsed into a palimpsest of impressions. I had to give up on my plan of consulting my notecards every few miles and meticulously following the surviving vestiges of older road cuts as they peeled away from modern US-40. My 1996 guidebook, just 26 years later, reads like fiction now: businesses gone, landmarks destroyed, old cutoffs vanished. US-40 up through the western Pennsylvania woods is narrow, fast, and stressful.

Suddenly, a huge red sign loomed: DANGEROUS MOUNTAIN. Trucks were commanded to go at 10mph, in their lowest gear, and stop regularly at the mouths of runaway ramps. I was in a Honda Fit, but the grade was nearly impossible, even for my featherweight vehicle. Some behemoth had grabbed the Earth’s surface by the scruff and pulled it vertically in order to shake anything unattached into a tremendous dustpan. After barely getting uphill, I had to choose, on the descent, between stressing the motor in a dangerously low gear or riding the brake all the way down lest I fly off the hillside into the ether.

And apparently, this hilarious test of alacrity was always a feature of the National Road, from its beginnings “awfully precipitous, and darkly umbrageous,” as a traveler wrote in 1819. Stagecoaches used to thunder down, lethally overloading their horses’ knees. In the early automotive days, drivers would hire professionals to take their cars down Dangerous Mountain. Or so I learn now, returning to my guidebook. I should have taken better notes.

Suddenly, I was in Ohio, and it seemed I had seen nothing at all. I redoubled my efforts to delve into old village street grids and fulfill my mission as a National Road tourist. The small towns of Ohio seemed to alert one another to gather their wits and resist my intrusion. Old Washington, Cambridge, New Concord – one village after another drew me into its streets and flung me out the other side without much sense of where the National Road cut across them. You would think that grids are grids and that if you stray, a strict algorithm of repeated turns should take you back to the road you came in on. Not so. I kept taking roads called “Eleventh Street,” which seemed sure bets to cross Elm or Cherry and provide a way back to Tenth and Ninth Streets, but no; Eleventh Street would morph immediately into a narrow country lane, channeled by fence lines and steep ditches, to hurtle me twenty miles out of town before providing any shoulder to turn from and retrace my steps.

For my one night in Ohio, I’d picked a motel outside of Zanesville, a stop to represent the car culture that replaced stagecoach life on the National Road. Bilious wall paint, dingy ceiling tile, green bathroom with a cunning ventilator set between glass bricks, and though No Smoking, my room was undeniably one where people had smoked steadily for decades and left behind an aura that could never be stripped away. But somehow, I slept better in that room than in any of the generic new motels in other states. The motel had aged organically, mellowing in tobacco smoke, and the air that snuck in through the vent was a welcome contrast to climate control.

***

From my stack of notecards, I picked a place called Gratiot to turn off and explore. Gratiot, Ohio, is a village of 200 with its own post office. The old Pike is Main Street; there’s a secondary street called South Alley. At one end of town, a stout stone bridge carries the roadway on its back so the cutoff can rejoin US-40 a mile further along. In June 2022, Gratiot had a land-that-time-forgot, middle-American scrubbedness under an aquamarine sky. Utility poles, American flags, and generous front lawns (unflanked by sidewalks) descend onto the asphalt of Main Street. 180 years ago, this was the busiest road in the United States. Today, as so often along the Road, I didn’t see a soul.

Then, through Amsterdam and Etna—all the placenames of Europe seem shaken up in a box and dumped onto Ohio—on my way to Columbus. Amsterdam is a typical Pike village, up on a rise above US-40: the current highway was later cut through a hill that the older National Road had climbed. The new route is more direct and wider; in Amsterdam, the houses huddle so close to the roadbed that no widening could occur. By chance, the surface of the Old Pike in Amsterdam had been repaved only days before. It glistened in the sunlight, a deep, satisfying blacktop above the bleached, patchy bed of 40 below. One of the oldest stretches of road I drove on during my trip was also the newest.

***

I paused at the art museum in Richmond, Indiana: a gem of a place that holds a priceless large-scale self-portrait of William Merritt Chase. Most people outside the Midwest do not even know there is a Richmond, Indiana. But like many of the other cities in the region, its past opulence has left a distillation of fine art behind, a high-water mark of a collecting culture fueled by long-ago industrialization (at one point, much of the recorded music in America was produced in Richmond).

The next morning was my last on the Road. I had spent far more time thinking about this trip than carrying it out—the reverse of my usual summer travel, where I get off a plane in Stockholm or somewhere knowing almost nothing about the place except the names of the fictional detective inspectors who solve murders there. US-40 follows the old National Road route through Indianapolis as Washington Street, though you would be hard-pressed to identify many survivors of the old Pike in the city. The same is true in Terre Haute, where 40 joins the street grid, passing a huge sign proclaiming the city as the Home of Clabber Girl Baking Powder.

In Illinois, I met more frustration; despite my sense that the National Road is better marked there as a scenic highway, its historic cutoffs are better tended than in other states. The expository infrastructure of US-40 in Illinois is excellent, but the roadbed becomes a washboard. Driving the highway was like hitting a speed bump every second and a half, and when I slowed to take them every two seconds, the benefit was minimal, and the annoyance to the huge pickup trucks behind me was all but palpable. I opted for I-70 as far as Bluff City, Illinois, and then risked my tires on the last few corrugated miles.

My trip ended at the Vandalia State House, the capitol building of Illinois, back when Abraham Lincoln was an unfledged legislator. And what had I learned? That Heraclitus, if he’d owned a car, might have remarked that you never drive on the same road twice. Something gets built, something gets torn down, something crumbles, something tunnels below the metal. Travelers, like molecules of water, wash away at the roads they drive, taking bits away, shedding bits they bring. I exchange words, as few as possible, but still the currency of language, with innkeepers, waitstaff, and guys who sit outside gas stations and complain about the weather. Their language changes mine and mine theirs, infinitesimally, without perception on anyone’s part.

Every itinerary everyone takes is like a snowflake or a thumbprint, in outline like the routes of thousands of others but irreducibly its own way. So, while one can set out to see a road the way one can the Brooklyn Bridge or the battlefield at Gettysburg, the sheer aliveness of the Road as a thing makes it an irreproducible monument, something you can never know entirely or ever show to others. And if you did, they would not care a whit.