In America’s First Interstate, author Roger Pickenpaugh provides an engaging and accessible account of the historic National Road, a 620-mile thoroughfare that extended from Cumberland, Maryland, to Vandalia, Illinois, spanning six states and linking the Potomac and Ohio River basins to the western prairies of the expanding United States. Drawing from extensive primary sources, Pickenpaugh brings the history of the National Road to life, from its political supporters and detractors to the emigrants, travelers, and others that made the National Road “a continual stream” of humanity and products in the early 1800s (140). When construction began in Maryland in 1811, the National Road became the young republic’s first major, and often contentious, internal improvement project.Pickenpaugh opens America’s First Interstate with a brief history of western movement across the Appalachians, with a focus on George Washington and his six expeditions to the trans-Allegheny west from 1753 to 1784. Washington knew first-hand the difficulties of western travel, experiencing the challenging construction of Braddock’s Road from Fort Cumberland to the Monongahela River in 1755, and was an astute observer of navigable waterways and possible overland routes that could open the coveted Ohio Country to settlement and trade. In a letter penned to Governor Benjamin Harrison of Virginia in 1784, Washington wrote “how necessary it is to apply the cement of interest, to bind all parts of the Union together by indissoluble bonds, especially that part . . . which lies immediately west . . . with the middle States” (6). Part of that “cement” Washington envisioned for the emerging Union would become the National Road.A key stimulus for realizing the National Road, detailed in chapter 2, was the granting of statehood to Ohio in 1803, as statehood provisions stipulated that funds be reserved to build roads linking Ohio with the Atlantic states. In December 1805, deliberations of the Senate Committee on Ohio Statehood were presented to the full Senate, with the recommendation that the new road to Ohio begin in Cumberland, Maryland, to take advantage of existing roads linking Baltimore and the District of Columbia. The suggested route was approved by the Senate in a bill passed on December 27 but the House did not consider the measure until March 1806. After considerable debate and two failed motions for postponement, the House passed the measure on March 24 with Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia dissenting. President Thomas Jefferson signed the bill into law on March 29 and the National Road was born. An initial appropriation of $30,000 was provided to prime the project, one of many over three decades of road construction and repair.The act required the president to appoint three impartial commissioners to lay out the route of the National Road from Cumberland to the Ohio River, and to secure permission from the states through which the road would pass. After two months of surveying possible routes, the commissioners reported their findings in December 1806. However, construction would have to wait for years, as politics and finances significantly delayed the project. First, in 1807, the Pennsylvania Legislature approved construction of the road within its borders but with one proviso: the route had to pass through the communities of Uniontown and Washington. That fall, commissioners surveyed a new route to meet Pennsylvania’s concerns, submitting their report in 1808. Then, monetary concerns emerged. The National Road was originally to be funded by 2 percent of sale proceeds from Ohio land, but shortfalls made it apparent that Congress would have to appropriate additional funds to make the project happen. Finally, in June 1808, the Senate approved a bill allocating $60,000 for National Road construction but it stalled in the House and was not approved until February 1810.Chapters 3 and 4 detail the construction of the National Road through Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to the Ohio River at Wheeling, and its path west across Ohio to the Indiana border. Under the aegis of the Treasury Department and Secretary Albert Gallatin, construction of the National Road to the Ohio River began with a call for proposals from contractors for road sections in November 1810. The demanding work was started at Cumberland in March 1811: trees bordering the road had to be cleared for sixty feet, stumps grubbed, the roadbed leveled for thirty feet, and drainage ditches dug on both sides of the road. Stone three inches in width, called “metal” by the roadbuilders, was to cover the road surface twenty feet in width and twelve inches in depth. Contracts were also procured for masonry and stone and wooden bridges to be constructed along the route.From the start, work on the National Road was slowed by the reliability and honesty of contractors and inflexible Department of Treasury payment policies. In 1825 President John Adams transferred construction of the road to the Army Corps of Engineers, which conducted route surveys and supervised contracted projects. A key change instituted by the Corps was to adopt the “McAdams plan” for road construction—named for the famed Scots road-builder John Loudon McAdam—which called for a flat road surface covered by impervious layers of stone (39). Despite the military precision of the Corps, a litany of factors impeded westward development of the National Road into and through Ohio: challenging Appalachian topography, bad weather, floods, dispersed stone quarries of varied quality, and the need for repairs of previously finished road. Even when road-building conditions in Ohio improved between Zanesville and Columbus, the cholera epidemic of 1832 struck and work halted. By 1840, when the Corps’ work on the National Road ended, much of the road from Springfield to the Indiana border remained unfinished. Construction of the National Road through Indiana and Illinois, described in chapter 5, fared worse. At the project’s end in 1842, finished portions of the road in Indiana totaled just nine miles, and in Illinois only thirty.The future of the National Road came in doubt after the election of Andrew Jackson as president in 1828, a foe of federally funded internal improvement projects. As a result, states began to assume control of the National Road within their borders, their efforts detailed in chapters 6 and 7. In 1831 Ohio became the first state to take ownership of the National Road, followed shortly by Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Unlike Ohio, the legislatures of Pennsylvania and Maryland included a stipulation that they would only accept the road after the Corps had completed needed repairs. Congressional appropriations from 1832 to 1834 funded repairs east of Ohio, and on April 1, 1835, Pennsylvania officially accepted the renewed National Road as its own. The states moved quickly to erect tollbooths on appropriated road sections to pay for upkeep and improvements, but tolls often failed to meet expenses as toll rates and emigration from the East fluctuated with time. Most also established internal agencies to collect tolls and oversee road improvements and repairs, as Ohio did in 1836 when the Board of Public Works was formed.First-hand experiences of the users of the National Road, described in chapters 8 to 12, depict a vibrant and dynamic landscape of movement. Expanding stagecoach lines carried travelers and politicians from the District of Columbia and Baltimore to Uniontown, Wheeling, and points further west; drovers moved large herds of livestock—cattle, pigs, horses, sheep—from Ohio and Illinois to eastern cities; Conestoga wagons carried freight from markets to warehouses east and west; coaches and express riders purveyed the US Mail at an ever-quickening pace; and emigrants or “movers” pushed west with families, livestock, and possessions through forest and prairie. Pickenpaugh brings these people and their experiences to life with pertinent quotes and anecdotes that provide glimpses of the landscapes and culture that was the National Road in the nineteenth century. An afterword provides a fitting finale for America’s First Interstate, bringing the history of the National Road full circle, to its incorporation into the National Old Trails Road in 1912 and its subsequent assignment as US Highway 40 in 1926.Pickenpaugh’s goals in writing America’s First Interstate were to provide both a solid narrative history of the National Road based largely on primary sources, and a resource for historians from other specialties to build upon (xii). He has accomplished these goals admirably. This book will be a useful reference for historians of the nineteenth-century United States, early transportation history, and westward movement, as well as general readers. I highly recommend it.