Hi, I'm the History Guy. I  have a degree in history,  

I love history and if you love history  too this is the channel for you.

March 29th is an auspicious day in the history of  the United States of America because on that day  

in 1804, President Thomas Jefferson signed  into law what would turn out to be one of  

the most important acts in the history of the  United States Congress. An Act that represented  

not just a political shift of the time, but also  which represented a demographic shift that would  

transform the nation and set us on a path to the  future, all for the low low price of just thirty  

thousand dollars. And so today, the history  guy is going to review the importance of the  

1804 Act entitled, “An Act to regulate the laying  out and building of a road from Cumberland in the  

state of Maryland to the state of Ohio” the United  States very first federally funded National Road.

The origins of the Act actually go back to the  Treaty of Paris in 1783, that was the treaty  

between King George the 3rd of England and  the United States that officially ended the  

Revolutionary War, among other things the Treaty  of Paris stipulated that the land northwest of the  

Ohio River and south of the Great Lakes would  belong to the United States. This area, which  

at the time was called the Northwest Territory,  represented more than 260,000 square miles and  

all of the modern states of Ohio, Indiana,  Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of  

Minnesota. One of the most significant questions  of the huge Northwest Territory was how to divide  

that territory up in two states that could join  the Union, and the first of those was the state  

of Ohio. In 1802, Thomas Jefferson signed the  Enabling Act, which called for the admittance of  

Ohio as a state of the Union as soon as possible,  and while it took another year for there to be an  

agreement on the exact borders in order to create  a state, the 1802 Act was still important because  

of a provision in the act that said, “that 2% of  the proceeds from the sale of federal lands in the  

state of Ohio should go to the construction of  a road to Ohio”. The Act that Jefferson signed  

in 1806 appropriated funds from that fund, and  it was the very first time that Congress and the  

President had agreed to actually start to build a  road. What the Act allowed Jefferson to do was to  

hire three commissioners, at a rate of $3 a day,  who would survey a route from Cumberland Maryland  

to Ohio territory. They were required to put a  marker, plainly seen on either side of the road,  

at least every quarter mile and at every road  turn, the road was to be four rods wide. In  

addition, they could each hire a surveyor at  the rate of $2 a day, and 2 chains people and a  

marker, each who would make one dollar a day, for  an entire appropriation of $30,000. But the road  

that they were using was not exactly new, it had  been used by Indians for generations, and in the  

mid 1700s a Delaware Indian chief named Nemacolin,  was contracted to help turn one of these Indian  

trails from Maryland to the Ohio territory, into  a road large enough to accommodate freight wagons.  

Then in 1755, British General Edward Braddock led  an expedition up the Nemacolin Trail, the goal was  

to defeat French forces in the area and claim the  Ohio territories for the British. The expedition  

didn't work out very well for Braddock, to give  you an idea, the ultimate battle in the expedition  

was called the Battle of Braddock's Defeat and  he himself was killed. But the expedition which  

included British soldiers and Virginia militiamen  widened the Nemacolin path into a Military Road  

and that was the first improved road to cross the  Appalachian Mountains. The new road authorized by  

Jefferson would generally follow the Braddock  Road, significant work on the road however  

didn't actually begin until around 1811, when  the first contract for road building went to  

a man named Henry McKinley. The law called for a  road bed that would be 66 feet wide and stripped  

of all trees and brush and then have a road in the  middle 30 feet wide. The road would be built using  

a construction process called Macadam, named after  Scottish engineer John Macadam, which uses stacked  

layers of progressively smaller rocks which are  then all crushed together with a large metal  

roller. While Macadam roads solved the problems of  ruts and mud that could come from just plain dirt  

roads it was rather expensive, an 1812 report  to Congress reported that the cost of building  

the Macadam Road was varying between $14.50 and  $22.50 per inch. The rocks were broken by hand  

with a hammer and in order to make sure that you  have the right size rock stack, the workers had to  

fit the rocks through progressively smaller steel  rings in order to complete their back-breaking  

work. It was also not quite as permanent as they  had hoped, even though Macadam is a strong road,  

the effects of weather and traffic could still  wear the road down, and by the 1820s Congress  

was appropriating almost as much to repair the  existing road as it was to build a new road. In  

1818 the road reached Wheeling which was then in  the state of Virginia, and that opened a path for  

mass migration of settlers and goods to the  new state of Ohio and also a path to Navigo  

rivers that allowed the settlement of the entire  Mississippi basin. In 1839, the road reached its  

western terminus in the town of Vandalia Illinois,  at that point it seemed like river ways, canals  

and trains were the future of travel, and Congress  could no longer sustain the cost of maintaining  

the road, and so the road and its maintenance were  passed over to the states, and the last federal  

appropriation ended in 1840. But in that time the  National Road was used by hundreds of thousands  

of settlers in order to drive American expansion  into the new states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

Today U.S. Highway 40 follows much of the route of  the original National Road so you can still drive  

the road, although it did bypass a few sections,  so there are some pieces of America here and there  

we have today we take for granted that there's  a federal role in subsidizing infrastructure  

for interstate travel, but that was not always  an easy agreement. The early Federalists, who  

were championed by Alexander Hamilton, perceived a  stronger role for the federal government and part  

of that was the idea that the federal government  would subsidize infrastructure. But they were  

opposed by the Democrat Republicans, who were  championed by Thomas Jefferson, who thought the  

federal government should have a restricted role  and some of whom thought building a national road  

was downright unconstitutional. Ironically,  it was the law signed by Thomas Jefferson  

that ended up creating the National Road, but the  issue wasn't really resolved until something that  

was called the Era of Good Feelings, which was  the administration of James Monroe from 1817 to  

1825. Monroe ran and championed something called  the American System, which among other things,  

embraced a federal role in building transportation  infrastructure, and in doing so not only did we  

open the American West to expansion and create an  amazing feat of engineering, but we resolved some  

of the thorniest early political issues regarding  the size and scope of the federal government. And  

that resolution still impacts us profoundly today,  and so if you hop on an interstate highway you  

have reason to commemorate the date March 29th. I'm the history guy, I hope you enjoyed this  

edition of my channel, five minutes of history,  short snippets of forgotten history five to ten  

minutes long. If you enjoyed it hit the like  button on your left, if you have any questions  

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