The National Pike was our destination for today. The section we covered was only about 30 miles long in western Maryland but the original road started over by D.C. and ran to nearly St. Louis. It was built as a toll road intended to make it easier for mid-18th century travelers to get from the east coast to the American frontier. In current times, it is shown as US-40 and it is a skinny, two-lane blacktop road running through spectacular scenery and historic towns.
Going east from Grantsville, the first town we encountered was Frostburg, a particularly scenic little town with beautiful old houses and a National Pike toll house that remains from the old days. There is a schedule of tolls listed on the outside of the toll house indicating how many pennies it would cost to go a certain number of miles based on the type of livestock, wagons, oxen, or carriages using the road. A rich person’s carriage with four horses cost more than a peon leading a horse, for instance.
US-40, at least around here, is a very curvaceous road with considerable climbing and descending between small towns. Sometimes the road is atop ridges with fine views and sometimes the road runs alongside creeks or rivers through canyons with steep rock cliffs on each side. It is quite pretty. On our way back east from Frostburg and Cumberland, we took some side roads and found ourselves going to places unintended. We did find a working strip mine and it is pretty plain why folks do not want to live near them. It was a tremendous gouge into the earth and there were massive spoils piles of different colors and materials spread over maybe 1000 acres. The water at the bottom of the excavation looked funny. There were gigantic mining machines belching exhaust and making a tremendous racket as they bustled about getting to the coal.
We left the strip mine and headed back home but we made a side trip to downtown Grantsville which is a tiny burg with a old National Pike masonry bridge that was built by a distant ancestor of the Schriver family. It is a beautiful structure and it was the longest span bridge (80 feet) in the country at the time it was built.
We cut our tour off early today so we could do a little prep for departure tomorrow from this part of the world. We will continue mostly west in the morning.
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