Riding the Old Westward Pike
by John Stuart Clark

In crossing the United States following historic trails, Clark discovers the National Road of America, a highway more significant than Route 66 and a neglected treasure.

"If it wasn't for cyclists, the National Road would probably be a trace by now or at best a dirt road. Back in the Eighties, it was cyclists mounted the campaign to repair the old pike and bring it back into use."

Dick Baltzby was a retired teacher and volunteer at the National Road Museum, Norfolk, Ohio. He was referring to the 1880's, when the League of American Wheelmen appeared. For four hours Dick talked and walked me through the history of America's first federal highway, every minute of it fascinating. This singular line provides a unique insight into the rapid and chaotic evolution of the country's young infrastructure, and explains a lot about the mechanics of America's westward expansion.

"When the railroads were built, we dropped stagecoaches and buggies like hot coals and shifted to the tracks. For a short time we got the cycling bug, forcing the federal government to appreciate that roads were still important. Then the automobile appeared. We dropped the railroad, went back to the turnpike and began bitching about the state of it. By then the structures were in place to upgrade and pave the highway -- thanks to you cyclists."

In pedalling the National Road, I came to appreciate history is a disposable commodity in the United States. Only in the last decade have the authorities woken up to the importance of heritage as an earner. Belatedly realising their formative century is even more intriguing for foreign visitors than Hollywood gives it credit for, the nation has started searching out the artifacts, renovating the buildings and preserving the documentation of their forefathers. Mostly it is too late. As with the railroads, when America moved with the new, it dished the old.

"You gonna cycle the full length of Braddock's Road?"

It was an exclamation more than a question. The woman in the tourist centre at the start of the National Road was amazed a Brit could be interested in a length of American blacktop which wasn't Route 66 or the Pacific Highway. Calling it 'Braddock's Road', she alluded to a stage in its life important to Maryland and Pennsylvania. In Illinois, it was called the Cumberland Road. Elsewhere, it was the National Pike or Washington's Road but, throughout its 800 mile journey, the course of the old turnpike is now Route 40.

From its start at Cumberland in Maryland, the road snakes through the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains, heading towards Pittsburgh. Before reaching the Quaker city, it kinks, realigns due west, and runs straight through Ohio and Indiana. At Indianapolis, it kinks again, setting off south-west across Illinois towards St. Louis. A dispute between state and federal authorities caused it terminate at Vandalia, sixty miles short of its projected destination on the banks of the Mississippi. A link to the Gateway City was later laid.

In the course of its journey, the historic line crosses just two types of terrain: the densely forest mountains of the eastern spine and the undulating farmlands between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Short variations such as the billiard table plateau of eastern Illinois make the ride more entertaining than topographical maps might suggest, but the two landscapes provide a clue to why the road was originally cut.

Before the colonies were wrestled away from the European powers, the mountains were a barrier to trade between the Old West and the East. Agricultural produce from west of the mountains had to travel down 'wet roads' (rivers) and through coastal waters to reach consumers east of the mountains. A land journey of less than 400 miles became a boat trip of 3,000 miles. After booting out the British, an umbilical between the two sides of the country became imperative. The nation needed it to unite the newly formed United States.

The project was one which had been festering in the mind of George Washington for many years. As a young surveyor stationed at Cumberland, he had been dispatched along an old Indian trace to confront the encroaching French, hacking a way through the undergrowth to widen the path for his troops. When his sorte failed to halt the interlopers, a larger force under General Braddock was dispatched, again widening Washington's road, laying corduroy (felled tree trunks) to roll wagons and gun carriages across the quagmire. The line of Braddock's Road essentially became the route of the National Road through the mountains.

If the history seems all too boring, it is quickly brought alive beside the highway, particularly for the cyclist. Within a dozen miles of departing Cumberland, I was discovering the graffiti of pioneers who travelled the road in the eighteenth century. Etched into rocks and cliff faces were their initials and the dates they passed by -- monickers historians at the museum knew nothing about. They had only travelled the road by car.

And it is spotting historic sites such as the old tollhouses which keeps you crunching happily but interminably over successive peaks the size of Ben Nevis. The ride through the eastern spine is challenging, particularly in the humidity of summer. It isn't often you achieve a rewarding vantage point in these forested highlands. When they filmed The Deerhunter, hunting scenes which included a mountainscape had to be shot in the Rockies, such is the density of maples, sycamores and oaks in the east.

In towns the size of villages, focusing on the gingerbread splendour of period homes, coaching inns and smithy shops helps to obliterate the uglier side of modern America. With Wal-Mart sucking the retail life out of small towns, many high streets were ghostly apparitions of boarded up properties and crumbling real estate. I saw few people walking the streets and found even fewer stores selling the sort of sustenance a cyclist requires. Pit stops between towns, however, provided a meal for four in a serving for one, and I quickly learned to select roadhouses with pick-ups in the car park.

In the corners of fields, on driveways and under canvas, I began to notice relics of the sort of vehicles which once plied the highway. Conestoga wagons, stagecoaches and a Model T offered for sale at $75,000. You still see the odd pony and trap clipping along the old pike. Pennsylvania is Amish and Mennonite country. I rode beside a Mennonite elder climbing out of Farmington in a black buggy, more like a hearse. Every hundred yards he paused to rest his nag. They might eschew modern technology, but he knew his bicycles inside out. The elder had "no truck with frivolities like suspension." He rode a Columbus from the Fifties, he said, equipped with "first-generation Campag'" throughout.

I encountered no cyclists crunching up the summits, but was invited to stay with folks who rode Schwinns from the Forties and tinny Elgins with on-board radios built into the top tube. West of the Alleghenies I mostly met elderly dudes on tricycles pottering around town, and my first 'proscription cyclist', an ex-trucker and coronary patient whose doctor had proscribed a bicycle for recovery, an idea only introduced into the UK in June 2000. In their mid-fifties, he and his wife had become recumbent nuts.

There were few official historical sites in the mountains, but Fort Necessity was typical of what America has had to resort to. Set in a marshy clearing, the old stockade was where Washington got whupped by the French -- except it was a reproduction, the tenth the federal authorities had built. As the Park Ranger assured me, "It'll be the last one. The footings of the old fort kept rotting. This time we got polyurethane footings to the bottom of the posts." There are places in America where state historical sites owe a debt to Walt Disney.

Finally the Alleghenies peeled back and I reached Laurel Ridge, the edge of the range. Ahead I could see clear across middle America to a flat horizon. Somewhere beyond the curvature of the earth lay the Rockies, the next land over 2,000 feet. If the peaks were lower, the sharp foothills petering down through Pennsylvania were equally capable of cramping muscles. Only once did I hit what the British would understand as a ridge route. From Beallsville twenty miles north-west, the road bounded along a spine with sweeping panoramas either side. Here villages the size of hamlets had found a new role. In much the same way that Hay-on-Wye is a book town, places like Scenery Hill have become antique villages.

After bridging the Ohio River, contours softened and the road straightened out. The landscape mutated into large rectangles of farmland, predominantly corn fields and frequently of dry stalks several seasons old. Conversations in local stores revealed the demise of cash crop agriculture in the United States. With prices at an all time low and corn mountains alarmingly high, farmers no longer bothered reseeding. The creeping poverty of farmsteaders was evident in the number of Farmall tractors which spluttered past me. Knock-kneed vehicles thirty years old, with front wheels clustered immediately beneath the bonnet, they are kept going by raiding salvage yards beside the old pike.

A rhythm began to infer itself upon the road. Every eight to ten miles I pedalled through a 'pike town', general taking no longer than a couple of minutes to reach the far side. Most are now attractive 'sleeper towns' for commuters who drive as far as a hundred miles each way to an office in a real town. The pace was set back in the nineteenth century, before the automobile shrank distances. Evidence of coaching stables, blacksmiths and wagon-works spoke of a time when the community serviced the stagecoaches and teamsters who followed the route out West.

Beyond Columbus, Ohio, is roughly where easterners say America goes flat. Westerners might beg to differ, but I could stand in one village and see clear through to the next. Over creeks, the bee-line blacktop took a curve, often leaving the original roadbridge stranded. Called 'S-bridges', the old stone span was designed to straighten out the pike so eighteenth century stone masons wouldn't have to cut difficult angles. When the first motors took to the National Road with speeds of 15mph, they couldn't negotiate the S-bend. Ironically, the grandfather of Dick Baltzby's wife was the first motor fatality in Indiana on just such a bridge.

I learned little anecdotes like that all along the highway. Once people realised I was following the historic line, all manner of doors opened. I was taken to a derelict house from where the 'underground railroad' dispersed escaped slaves from the South. It was said to have secret tunnels radiating to escape hatches in the middle of fields. I met a stock-car driver whose dad laid the first brick cobbles on the abandoned section of the road still visible in Illinois. "Pa" had no legs and worked from a trolley. And in Gem, Indiana, I was treated to a tour of the Highway Patrol H.Q. and a ride in a hi-tech squad car giving chase to a lunatic, gun-toting driver. While I cowered, they nailed him. Alive.

Although not strictly in Tornado Alley, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois receive more than their fair share of twisters. In such an open landscape, it pays to be able to detect the warning signs. I was grateful for the quick educational presented by a Hoosier who thought I was "Loony Tune" to be cycling the National Road. When it rains in the Old West, it's a Dantian deluge. Precede the onslaught with a deathly silence, add winds of 60 mph and hailstones the size of gob-stoppers, and you know it's time to take cover. I spent an ear-shattering night beside an old Farmall while the galvanised barn was attacked by debris born on the wind. The twister missed me by a mile but the detrius which lay on the ground in the morning suggested I was wise not to camp.

Of course, the Hoosier could have been referring to the very act of trying to cycle across country on a trunk road. Preferring to follow cycle trails, it is not something American pootlists recommend. In the cities, it is not something I would recommend, but there are only three urban nightmares straddling the National Road. Out in the country, American drivers are a lot more considerate towards cyclists than the British. Along Route 40, motorists with places to go opt for Interstate 70, the most recent up-date of the old pike, laid in the Sixties and paralleling the old highway west of Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, in a couple of places totalling about sixty miles, it has gobbled up the historic way.

Bicycles are not allowed on interstates east of the Mississippi, though sometimes the only way forwards for a cyclist is to break the law and argue the toss if pulled by the cops. At both major river crossings, the Ohio and the Mississippi, it was as if cyclists and pedestrians didn't exist in America. The only way across the riverfront cities of Wheeling and St. Louis was by interstate. It was the same crossing the Indiana-Illinois state line, but there I got pulled. The crew-cut cop was most offended when I suggested America just didn't cater for cyclists.

"Yeh, well, we growed up," he said.

While aspiring to a tourist trail, the reputation of the National Road is still growing and there are few camp grounds along the way. B&Bs, motels and hotels are in abundance, and most are delightful Deco left overs from the heyday of motoring in the Fifties. When the interstate arrived, facilities moved to its intersections, leaving Route 40 mothballed in time. But I was travelling on a restricted budget which didn't allow for nights with a roof over my head. Knocking on doors to blag tent space ensured most evenings were spent with American families.

It quickly became obvious that, as a traveller down the National Road, I fitted firmly into their understanding of the American tradition. Along this highway, European immigrants -- their forebears -- moved west, peeling off north and south to settle the New World. The ideas and culture which made America uniquely American trundled this way, reflected in the marvellous wayside attractions. Without a doubt, what the Appian Way was to the Roman Empire, the National Road was to the American.

© John Stuart Clark