National Road

A National Route Known by Many Names

Section of 1924 road map of Licking County with National Road and local villages along its path.

The National Road, also known as the Cumberland Road, the National Pike, and the Old Pike, was a critical piece of early American infrastructure that connected the established states east of the Appalachian mountains to the new states and growing territories to the west. At its greatest length, it extended for 600 miles from Maryland to Illinois, crossing the length of Ohio. The National Road was often compared to ancient Rome's Appian Way—a lasting and utilitarian monument to a state's greatness.

After the admittance of the state of Ohio to the United States in 1803, much of the new state's territory remained very difficult to access; water-borne travel enabled commerce and contact to flow to the earliest settlements of Ohio, yet diverse modes of transport that connected the state's interior were needed to expand the movement of people and goods.

On March 24, 1806, the U.S Congress took a critical step to enable travel to and from the Ohio River Valley. Congress provided the Jefferson Administration with the authority tof "lay out a road from Cumberland [Maryland]...to the Ohio River" with the terminus of the Road completed at Wheeling as a federally funded project. Passengers could board steamboats at Wheeling for travel further down the Ohio, yet this first leg of the National Road was only the beginning.

National Road in Ohio

The National Road crossed into Ohio in 1825, the same year that construction began on the Ohio-Erie Canal. By 1833 the Road had reached Columbus on its march across the state. An English traveler praised the Ohio portion of the Road in 1840, writing that "from Wheeling to Zanesville, we found the road admirable all the way, as good indeed as the Road from London to Bath...it was no ordinary luxury to travel on this smooth and equable National Road, where we were driven at an uniform rate of about seven miles an hour."

The Road proved both a feat of early American engineering and yet another example of the difficulties with paying for and maintaining critical infrastructure. The upkeep on the Road was expensive, and states turned to tolls to pay the bills. This system of tollgates and turnpikes helped give the Road its other name - the Old Pike. Ohio constructed toll gates roughly every ten miles, but the tolls raised never covered the cost of maintenance.

The spread and expansion of railroad lines would take the spotlight from the National Road as a means of efficient travel across the eastern part of the country, yet the Road would enjoy a rebirth as the American obsession with the automobile grew.

Route 40 in Licking County

Map of Hebron from the 1875 Atlas that shows the intersection of National Road and Ohio-Erie Canal.

U.S. Route 40, what would become the highway designation for the National Road pathway, bisected Ohio almost in half, cutting right across the middle of the state from St. Clairvsville through Columbus to Dayton and beyond. It passed along the southern edge of Licking County, traversing the communities of Gratiot, Brownsville, Jacksontown, Hebron, Kirkersville, Luray, Etna, and Reynoldsburg.

While the National Road was critical to each of these communities, the town with arguably the strongest connection to the route was Hebron. Hebron was founded as a nineteenth-century transportation hub because it was destined to be the connection point between the National Road and the Ohio-Erie Canal. A group of Columbus investors, having assessed the planned routes of both the Canals and the Road, purchased 169 acres of land in the vicinity of what is now Hebron in August 1825, shortly after construction began on the canal in Licking County. They began to sell subdivided sections of land for the town by the fall of 1825 and floated the name of Hebron for their new community. Their foresight paid off when the National Road did in fact arrive in Hebron in 1832. Five years later the population had almost trebled and commerce boomed in the village.

Hebron was not the only village that owed its founding to the National Road: Gratiot, Kirkersville, and Etna all were born alongside the construction. Neighboring Newark, desiring to be the site where canal and Road intersected, had petitioned the construction overseers to divert the Road from its nearly straight, Western-bound path, but the attempt to divert the course was rejected.

In the 20th century, the National Road enjoyed a resurgence with the boom in automobile ownership. Diners, truck stops, and other services that catered to the drivers and passengers that utilized Route 40 enjoyed a resurgence along its path, and the condition of the thoroughfare was updated and modernized.

Decline

The National Road remained a critical part of transportation across the Midwest until the construction of the interstate highway system. The new road system, which permitted faster travel across the state without the impediment of slower travel through the many villages and towns on highway routes, proved transformative to American society, and often destructive to the communities that relied on the traffic on highways like Route 40 to bolster local economies.

The National Road remains a tourist attraction; those who prefer a scenic route over the speed of the interstate can still stop along it towns and villages today. Visitors can learn and experience more history of the Old Pike at the National Road and Zane Grey Museum in Zanesville, Ohio.

J.G.