America's First Road Trip: Driving the National Road Across Ohio and Pennsylvania Today

Before there was Route 66. Before there was an Interstate Highway System. Before most Americans had ever traveled more than fifty miles from home there was the National Road.

Built starting in 1811 from Cumberland, Maryland, and pushing steadily westward through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, it was the first highway the United States government ever funded. Thomas Jefferson signed it into law. George Washington had lobbied for it years before. And for a generation of Americans, it was the only road that mattered.

Today, most of it still exists as US Route 40 a two-lane road that quietly runs parallel to I-70, bypassed by nearly everyone in a hurry and discovered by everyone who isn't. If you live in Ohio or Pennsylvania, you've probably crossed it a dozen times without realizing what you were driving over.

It's time to get off the interstate and actually drive it.

A Country That Needed a Road

In 1800, the United States was an Eastern Seaboard nation that happened to own a vast interior it could barely reach. The Appalachian Mountains formed a wall that separated the coast from the Ohio River Valley, and the trails that crossed them were barely passable muddy ruts in summer, frozen channels in winter, and dangerous in every season.

The young country had a problem. Settlers were already flooding into Ohio and Kentucky, but there was no reliable way to connect them to the markets, mail, and government of the East. Ohio's statehood in 1803 made the issue urgent: Congress actually included road-building funds in Ohio's enabling act.

Albert Gallatin, Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury and one of the most underrated figures in American history, developed the concept. In 1806, Congress authorized construction. Jefferson signed it. And in 1811, workers broke ground in Cumberland, Maryland beginning the first 10 miles of what would eventually stretch 620 miles to Vandalia, Illinois.

The engineering was ambitious for its time. The road was 20 feet wide, built in layers using a Scottish technique called macadamization, large stones on the bottom, smaller crushed stones on top, packed tight enough to drain water and support heavy loads. Nothing like it had been built in America before.

The Main Street of America

By 1818, the road had reached Wheeling, West Virginia, on the Ohio River and the effect was immediate. The National Road became the busiest highway in America almost overnight.

Massive Conestoga wagons hauled by six- and twelve-horse teams carried frontier produce east and returned with coffee, sugar, and manufactured goods west. Stagecoaches ran on regular schedules. Entire families packed everything they owned and headed toward a new life. Towns sprouted along its path every few miles inns, taverns, blacksmith shops, tollhouses.

The tollhouses especially became iconic: distinctive octagonal stone structures positioned to collect fees from westbound travelers. Many still stand along the route today, quiet sentinels on the shoulder of a road that once thundered with traffic.

The National Road reached its cultural peak around 1825, celebrated in song, painting, and poetry. It earned the nickname it still carries today: the Main Street of America.

A National Road tollhouse built 1835 one of the surviving toll gates that collected fees from westbound travelers. Photo: Library of Congress, HABS collection.

What You'll Find There Today

The National Road today is one of the most rewarding drives in the eastern United States not because it's dramatic or remote, but because of what's sitting quietly along its shoulders, waiting to be noticed.

Maryland: Where It All Started

The road begins in Cumberland, Maryland, where a historical marker stands near the site of Fort Cumberland the same fort where a young George Washington once served as a colonial officer. From there, US-40 climbs into the Appalachians through some of western Maryland's most beautiful scenery.

Near Boonsboro, the National Road Museum tells the full story of the highway. The Wilson Bridge, dating to 1819, still spans a small stream near Clear Spring one of the oldest bridges of its kind in the country. Stop and walk across it. Those stone arches have held for more than 200 years.

Pennsylvania: Conestoga Country

The Pennsylvania stretch winds through the Laurel Highlands some of the best scenery in the Mid-Atlantic. Watch for the surviving S-bridges near Scenery Hill: beautifully engineered curved stone bridges built in the early 1800s, still standing in quiet fields. These S-shaped spans were a trademark of National Road construction, designed to meet the road at the proper angle while crossing a stream.

One worthwhile detour: Ohiopyle State Park sits just south of the National Road via PA-381. Twenty thousand acres of rugged Pennsylvania wilderness, the Youghiogheny River Gorge, natural waterslides, and some of the best whitewater rafting in the eastern US.

West Virginia: The Gateway Crossing

The road reaches Wheeling at the Ohio River the endpoint of the original 1818 construction. The Wheeling Suspension Bridge here opened in 1849 as the longest vehicular suspension bridge in the world. It still carries traffic today.

Standing on that bridge and looking west across the Ohio River, you're seeing exactly what westbound travelers saw in the 1820s: the gateway to the frontier. The difference is you have a truck waiting on the other side.

The Wheeling Suspension Bridge over the Ohio River when it opened in 1849 it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Photo: Library of Congress, HAER collection.

Ohio: The Heart of the Route

The Ohio stretch 228 miles from the West Virginia border to the Indiana line is where the National Road experience really comes into its own. Open country, small towns, a steady rhythm of historical markers and 19th-century architecture.

In Zanesville, the National Road and Zane Grey Museum is a genuine find a detailed diorama walkthrough of the entire route and a surprising second gallery on Zanesville's native son Zane Grey, who became America's most popular writer of Western novels. The combination of the road that opened the West and the writer who romanticized it, in one building, is hard to beat.

West of Columbus, watch for the Madonnas of the Trail statues twelve monuments installed in 1928 to honor the pioneer women who traveled these roads.

Camp Here Tonight

Why It Still Matters in 2026

America turns 250 this year. It's worth pausing on what that actually means.

The National Road is one of the earliest expressions of a specifically American idea: that a free people should be able to move. To go somewhere new. To pack up, head west, and build a life on the other side of a mountain range. The road wasn't just infrastructure; it was a declaration that this country would not be confined by geography.

Two hundred years later, the instinct hasn't changed. The same desire that loaded Conestoga wagons in Cumberland and pointed them toward the Ohio River loads trucks on Friday afternoons and points them toward somewhere with a campfire and no cell service.

The road is still there. It just goes by a different name now.

Get off I-70 and find US-40. Stop at a tollhouse. Walk across a stone bridge built in 1819. Pull into a Wayne National Forest campground on the Ohio River on a Thursday night when you have it mostly to yourself. Modern gear and a pickup truck will take you to the same places that once required a Conestoga wagon and six months of supplies.

The Main Street of America is still open. It's waiting.