By Stephen Smoot
This opens a series of articles on the importance and the history of United States Route 220 on the 100th anniversary of the official founding of the U.S. Route system.
The Year of Our Lord 2026 features a number of celebrations, first and foremost that of the 250th anniversary of the United States itself. Of somewhat less luster, but still significant, the United States Highway System of “U. S. Routes” was established under President Calvin Coolidge in 1926.
Of local importance is the highway that started off as a long-distance connection of routes of both regional and local importance to the finished product, U.S. Route 220, once known as “the Yellow Brick Road of Rural America.” Before it could adopt that role, however, it served as a “warrior road” connecting outposts and providing a path for armed forces using it in attack and retreat.
Though never called “Warrior Road,” unlike the roads that would later become U.S. Route 1 and U.S. Route 11, the future U.S. 220 saw its share of soldiers and violence.
In the late years as a colony and early years as a Commonwealth, Virginia leaders focused on east to west routes through the northwestern counties. George Washington and War of Independence veteran General Daniel Morgan advocated decades ahead of its establishment for the road that would become U.S. Route 50, while the original “Old State Road” leading west from Richmond eventually connected it to the Kanawha and Ohio valleys on its way to modern Lexington, Kentucky.
Long-distance patterns of migration and trade used these east to west routes and others, such as the National Road, now U.S. Route 40.
In the area that would eventually become West Virginia, according to Otis Rice, author of West Virginia, a History, the Mountain State’s eventual main two-lane roadways had an interesting origin. As he described in his textbook for college and advanced high school students, the “roads” originated as trails laid out by herds of buffalo, deer, and other large animals as they moved from place to place in the rugged wilderness.
In their own fashion, they followed paths of least resistance. Indian hunting parties, particularly after the conquest of central Appalachia by the Iroquois League and Cherokee Nation, widened the animal trails by following in search of food supplies. Settlers used the same pathways and their governments, from time to time, saw utility in grading many and paving a few with crushed stone.
North to south routes connected emerging settlements and both public and privately built military posts. As early as the 1730s, settlers had moved upstream on the Potomac River to Shawnee Old Town, now Oldtown, Maryland, and Fort Cumberland constructed at the city that still bears the name.
When he was merely 16 years old, George Washington accompanied his employer, George William Fairfax to survey lands in the vicinity of the valleys of the various forks of the South Branch of the Potomac. They took the generally used route that extended upstream along the Potomac River itself and ran into the usual barriers.
By March 18, Washington shared in his journal that heavy rains and rapid snow melts “in the Allegheny Mountains” had raised the river and its tributaries to the point that the party had to wait at a host’s home for a few days. On the 21st, they took a canoe upstream to the trading post and home of Thomas Cresap, whose property lay 15 miles east of Fort Cumberland, near Shawnee Old Town.
Shawnee Old Town lay almost across the Potomac River from current Green Springs, where the South Branch and the North Branch join waters. From there, the team went upstream, crossed at the mouth of Patterson’s Creek, then made their way back to the South Branch. Their path of work took them up the South Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac “to one Michael Stump’s” and surveyed as far as 10 miles upstream from there.
Several years later, after his defeat at Fort Necessity, Virginia militia Colonel Washington labored to effect the construction of a series of forts in the modern Potomac Highlands of West Virginia. These would guard roadways, passes, and other strategic points in the South Branch watershed, while providing shelter for frontier families threatened by attack.
Official forts manned by Washington’s “Virginia Regiment” joined smaller stockades and fortified houses constructed by families or small communities of settlers. Every 15 miles, an official Virginia regiment fort guarded a line of defense patrolled by local militia to serve as a wall against attacks by the French or their allies among the American Indian nations.
According to historian Samuel Kercheval, American Indian nations outside of the orbit of the Iroquois League and centered north and west of the Ohio River regarded Virginia and its people with a powerful respect borne of fear. They called Virginia “the Big Knife” and its people “the Long Knives.”
From Cumberland south to Monterrey, new fortifications arose and of those built privately, some were strengthened and manned by the Virginia Regiment. Along modern U.S. Route 220 in Pendleton County stood lonely wilderness outposts such as “Trout Rock Fort,” which guarded a narrow area of the South Branch River several miles upstream of Franklin and Fort Upper Tract about the same distance north.
In the vicinity of modern Petersburg sat a number of private fortifications built at or near the homes of settlers by residents near today’s Pansy, Durgon, and other areas. More significant fortifications arose at Fort Buttermilk west of today’s Moorefield, the Old Fields property of Isaac Van Meter, at the Fort Pearsall settlement near modern Romney, and also at Fort Ashby.
Connecting all were various incarnations of U.S. Route 220 along both its original and modern paths, following the general southwest to northeast track of the ancient valleys and ridges.
After independence and the recession of the threat of attack by American Indians and foreign powers, those roadways again reverted to local travel and trade via connections to more heavily used roads and rivers.
The coming of the Civil War would bring back the warriors as once again the Potomac Highlands took on the qualities of a frontier. This time a frontier not between civilization and the wilderness, but between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America.
