By Stephen Smoot
The first in a multipart series celebrating the 100th birthday of one of the most important highways to the state and the nation’s history, United States Route 50
It extends from the beaches of Maryland to the capital of California. It runs directly between the White House and the Washington Monument, but another stretch has earned the moniker “the loneliest road in America.” Its name in one section symbolized the personal economic aspirations of the first President and also a book by Stephen King.
Happy birthday to United States Route 50!
According to West Virginia historians, such as Otis Rice, and those of the region, such as Leonora Wood of Hampshire County in the 1930s, Mountain State roadways had an interesting set of local “architects.” As Wood wrote for the 1937 Hampshire Review, “motorists over Route 50 will be interested in knowing that they are following the trails marked out by buffalo.”
Rice confirmed in West Virginia, a History, that herds of animals marked the original trails now followed by major state roadways. Herd created the trails, bands of American Indian hunters followed and widened them, and colonial, then state governments, granted official status and supported their development into useful highways.
When traversing the myriad and numerous “switchbacks” of Preston County’s stretch of US 50, keep in mind who first laid them out!
Wood’s history shared that the original idea for a road came from Daniel Morgan in 1748, years before he emerged as a War of Independence hero. For over a decade, the Great Wagon Road brought thousands from the Philadelphia area west through Lancaster, then south across the Potomac River through Martinsburg to Winchester and then points south.
Countless German and Dutch made their way to America to escape war and privation. Younger generations seeking their own land came across this road to find the land on which to make their dreams. So many of those families braved crossing the forbidding ridges, untamed wilderness, and threat of Indian attack to carve their lives from it.
Morgan and George Washington, as early as his teenage years, saw the potential for colonial growth and personal profit through survey and sale of lands in the west. America’s Pater Patriae was born and lived in the eastern part of Virginia, but his heart and aspirations always tried to pull him west.
After the War of Independence, but three years prior to the Philadelphia Convention, Washington wrote that “I conversed a great deal with Genl. Morgan on the road from Winchester to the Western Waters. He seemed to have no doubt but the counties at Freder (ick), Berkeley, and Hampshire would contribute freely to the extension of Navigation of Potomac, as well as toward opening a road East to West.”
At the age of 16, 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.
On March 18, Washington penned in his journal that excessive rains and fast 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.
Cresap and Washington later found themselves at odds over tracts in and near the Ohio River Valley.
Shawnee Old Town lay almost across the Potomac River from current Green Springs, where the South Branch and the North Branch join waters. Washington and Fairfax had apparently given up on the road, which the Founding Father described as “the Worst road that was ever trod by Man or Beast.” 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.
Interestingly, had those surveys reflected that the true headwaters of the Potomac lay in its South, rather than North, Branch, Maryland would have extended farther south due to the legal definition of the grant to Lord Fairfax from the British Crown.
Lands already surveyed by Washington also made Morgan’s proposed roadway an ever more potentially lucrative proposition. The Fort Edwards Foundation in Capon Bridge, the easternmost town on West Virginia’s U.S. Route 50, shared that “in the late 1740s, George Washington came into the area surveying for Lord Fairfax and laid out several parcels” for Joseph Edwards. Edwards’ property soon also hosted one of George Washington’s frontier line of forts constructed after his actions against the French helped to spark the Seven Years’ War, or French and Indian War as it is known in the United States.
Another settlement roughly directly west of Fort Edwards, later Capon Bridge, served as home to the families of Job and John Pearsall. They established homesteads along the South Branch that attracted 200 hardy settlers who called their village Pearsall’s Flats.
Fort Pearsall protected them from Indian attack during the Seven Years’ War and Lord Fairfax toward the close of the conflict convinced the colonial government of Virginia to establish the Hampshire County seat there. Interestingly, he had it named “Romney” after a medieval southeastern port in England rather than a placename from their home base in the rugged north country from which they came.
By the 1780s, Harrison County was established with Clarksburg already a primary settlement and many more to come. A settlement referred to originally as Frankfort, a name that now colloquially covers several northern Mineral County communities, emerged in 1787.
Originally, Hampshire County’s 1854 boundaries included all of the modern county plus also Mineral, Hardy, and Grant, and well as the small section of modern western Morgan County that contains the Town of Paw Paw.
Settlements also extended upstream to the south. Isaac Van Meter, for example, established ownership of property at Old Fields in the late 1730s and constructed a homestead there about 10 years later, which hosted Port Pleasant during the 1750s warfare. When the family first acquired it, historian Samuel Kercheval related that Van Meter described the land upstream from “The Trough” as the finest he had seen in his travels, a sentiment echoed by Major General Jubal Early when he entered the valley a few decades later at the head of his fighting men..
The Van Meters and Washington did not enjoy initially pleasant communications, as the settlers disputed that their land was part of the Fairfax grant. The War of Independence settled the matter in the favor of the Van Meters.
Subsequent settlements confirmed the rich and broad lands in the valley as perfect for cultivation. Descendants of German and Dutch immigrants came across the ridges in droves to establish farms in current Hardy and Pendleton counties, many of those same families farm the same lands today.
Virginia in its early years as a Commonwealth joining a Republic focused its road building initially on “the Old State Road,” later the James River and Kanawha Turnpike after a general Assembly vote in 1820. U.S. Route 60, then more loosely Interstate 64, followed this route. The National Road, which started at Cumberland, would also bisect the Northern Panhandle at Wheeling.
In 1827, the General Assembly saw the increasing traffic of those using the National Road for both trade and immigration. Determined to secure a share, Virginia authorized the planning and construction of the Northwestern Virginia Turnpike to connect Winchester and Parkersburg. Meant to unify the state from east to west, as the West Virginia Encyclopedia online suggests, it and the Baltimore and Ohio that started construction 30 years later, contributed to the northwest’s economic and social ties to the Union rather than Virginia when the time came to choose.
Continued next week.
