This study traces how the road network of the early republic was stitched together between Baltimore and Cumberland, Maryland — the privately financed turnpikes (the “pikes”) whose surfacing, grades, width, and stone mile-markers turned rough traces into dependable commercial roads. Lorna Hainesworth sets the turnpike era against the larger national anxiety, voiced by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, that the trans-Appalachian West might drift away from the seaboard states for want of an overland connection.
That anxiety is the throughline to Lewis and Clark. The same political drive to bind East and West — pressed by Jefferson’s treasury secretary Albert Gallatin — produced the National Road, which Jefferson signed into law in 1806, extending the improved corridor from Cumberland toward the Ohio River. The roads described here are the eastern arteries along which the expedition’s people, supplies, and correspondence moved.
This summary is provided for reference on the Lewis and Clark Research archive; the full article by Lorna Hainesworth is available at the source link.
