The National Road was the first major improved highway in the United States built by the federal government. Built between 1811 and 1837, the 620-mile (1,000 km) road connected the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and was a main transport path to the West for thousands of settlers. When improved in the 1830s, it became the second U.S. road surfaced with the macadam process pioneered by Scotsman John Loudon McAdam.
Brownsville is a borough in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, United States, first settled in 1785 as the site of a trading post a few years after the defeat of the Iroquois enabled a post-Revolutionary war resumption of westward migration. The Trading Post soon became a tavern and Inn, and was soon receiving emigrants heading west, as it was located above the cut bank overlooking the first ford that could be reached to those descending from the Allegheny Mountains. Brownsville is located 40 miles (64 km) south of Pittsburgh along the east bank of the Monongahela River.
Nemacolin is a census-designated place (CDP) in Greene County, Pennsylvania, United States. It was founded as a company town around the workings of a Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company owned and operated coal mine in 1917. The name reflects a noted Amerindian ally Chief Nemacolin, who showed the Virginia and Pennsylvania settlers how to cross the successive Allegheny barrier ridges via the Cumberland Narrows and the Nemacolin Trail—which Braddock's Expedition widened into a wagon road through the mountains. The population of the CDP was 937 at the 2010 census.
West Brownsville is a former important transportation nexus and a present-day borough in Washington County, Pennsylvania, United States and part of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. The population was 972 at the 2020 census. Culturally, by postal route, and socially, the community is connected to cross-river sister-city Brownsville, for the two were long joined by the Amerindian trail known as Nemacolin's Path that became a wagon road after the American Revolution, but West Brownsville is a separate municipality. Brownsville was the first point where the descent from the Appalachians could safely reach the river down the generally steep banks of the Monongahela River. Between Brownsville and West Brownsville was a shallow stretch, usable as a river ford astride a major Emigrant Trail to the various attractive regions in the Northwest Territory, the first National Road, the Cumberland Pike.
Redstone Old Fort — or Redstone Fort or Fort Burd — on the Nemacolin Trail, was the name of the French and Indian War-era wooden fort built in 1759 by Pennsylvania militia colonel James Burd to guard the ancient Indian trail's river ford on a mound overlooking the eastern shore of the Monongahela River in what is now Fayette County, Pennsylvania near, or on the banks of Dunlap's Creek at the confluence. The site is unlikely to be the same as an earlier fort the French document as Hangard dated to 1754 and which was confusedly, likely located on the nearby stream called Redstone Creek. Red sandstones predominate the deposited rock column of the entire region.
Fort Necessity National Battlefield is a National Battlefield in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, United States, which preserves the site of the Battle of Fort Necessity. The battle, which took place on July 3, 1754, was an early battle of the French and Indian War, and resulted in the surrender of British colonial forces under Colonel George Washington, to the French and Indians, under Louis Coulon de Villiers.
Oldtown is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Allegany County, Maryland, United States, along the North Branch Potomac River. As of the 2010 census, it had a population of 86.
The Great Indian Warpath (GIW)—also known as the Great Indian War and Trading Path, or the Seneca Trail—was that part of the network of trails in eastern North America developed and used by Native Americans which ran through the Great Appalachian Valley. The system of footpaths extended from what is now upper New York to deep within Alabama. Various Native peoples traded and made war along the trails, including the Catawba, numerous Algonquian tribes, the Cherokee, and the Iroquois Confederacy. The British traders' name for the route was derived from combining its name among the northeastern Algonquian tribes, Mishimayagat or "Great Trail", with that of the Shawnee and Delaware, Athawominee or "Path where they go armed".
Nemacolin's Trail, or less often Nemacolin's Path, was an ancient Native American trail that crossed the great barrier of the Allegheny Mountains via the Cumberland Narrows Mountain pass, connecting the watersheds of the Potomac River and the Monongahela River in the present-day United States of America. Nemacolin's Trail connected what are now Cumberland, Maryland and Brownsville, Pennsylvania.
Colonel Thomas Cresap (c.1702—c.1790) was an English-born settler and trader in the states of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Cresap served Lord Baltimore as an agent in the Maryland–Pennsylvania boundary dispute that became known as Cresap's War. Later, together with the Native American chief Nemacolin, Cresap improved a Native American path to the Ohio Valley, and ultimately settled and became a large landowner near Cumberland, Maryland, where he was involved in further disputes near Brownsville, Pennsylvania, including in the French and Indian War and Lord Dunmore's War.
U.S. Route 40 enters Pennsylvania at West Alexander. It closely parallels Interstate 70 (I-70) from West Virginia until it reaches Washington, where it follows Jefferson Avenue and Maiden Street.In Washington, US 40 passes to the south of Washington & Jefferson College. Following Maiden Street out of town, the road turns southeast toward the town of California. A short limited access highway in California and West Brownsville provides an approach to the Lane Bane Bridge across the Monongahela River. From here, the road continues southeast to Uniontown.
Brownsville Road is a road between Pittsburgh, at Eighteenth Street and South Avenue in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania eastwards through Mount Oliver and generally highlands situated along or near the hilltops often overlooking the Monongahela River. It has had several names over its history, and was also known at the Red Stone Road and the period it was a Plank Road managed as a toll road, the Brownsville Plank Road, or the Brownsville Turnpike, or locally, as the area grew into a city, Southern Avenue.
Old National Pike or Old National Road, and sometimes Old Cumberland Road, Old Route 40, Old U.S. 40 are terms both colloquially and officially applied to bypassed parts of the United States' first federally funded highway (1811), the National Pike—which are essentially the parts of U.S. Route 40 (1920s) west of Baltimore and east of Missouri. Terms such as the 'Old National Pike' and 'Old National Road' are similar terms frequently built into the local business structure as official addresses, in advertising and generally refer to older roadway parts which have been replaced by newer, more convenient highways or in most cases modern multi-lane super-highways.
The Malden Inn is an historic, American building that is located in the unincorporated bedroom community of Malden, Pennsylvania at the junction of South Malden Road and Old U.S. Route 40 (US40).
Blainsburg is an unincorporated outlier community of West Brownsville, PA; by tradition a hamlet sized neighborhood with more actual housing acreage than West Brownsville proper in Washington County, Pennsylvania, United States. Named after a U.S. Senator, James G. Blaine. Blainsburg is part of the California Area School District. West Brownsville residence students attend Brownsville Area School District in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. The bedroom community is situated on the bluff above and slightly North-northwest of West Brownsville on the river bottom below. Blainsburg is located alongside but above the climb PA Route 88 makes from the W. Brownsville river flats which bends right entering a shelf where it connects with the northwest streets of Blainsburg before taking a second ascent towards California. The parent and child communities are on the inside curve of a great meander in the Monongahela River in Southwestern Pennsylvania creating a degraded cut bank turned ramp and terrace on the opposite shore where Brownsville is situated. Blainsburg is often misspelled with an "E" in it, to match the spelling of its namesake, James G. Blaine. Blainsburg as of official records was founded in 1906 and is still spelled without the "E".
Redstone Creek is a historically important widemouthed canoe and river boat-navigable brook-sized tributary stream of the Monongahela River in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. The creek is 28.4 miles (45.7 km) long, running from headwaters on Chestnut Ridge north through the city of Uniontown and reaching the Monongahela at Brownsville. Located in a 1/4-mile-wide valley with low streambanks, the site was ideal for ship building in a region geologically most often characterized by steep-plunging relatively inaccessible banks — wide enough to launch and float several large boats, and indeed steamboats after 1811, and slow-moving enough to provide good docks and parking places while craft were outfitting.
Thomas Brown, was an American colonial era husbandman, businessman, and land speculator. Along with his brother Basil, he acquired the bulk of the (Brownsville) lands towards the end of the American Revolution from Thomas Cresap(Cresap's War, Lord Dunmore's War), early enough to sell plots to Jacob Bowman in 1780 and Jacob Yoder who respectively made business firsts in 1780 and 1782; Jacob Bowman founded a trading post and tavern. Yoder got in a crop big enough to ship to New Orleans and invented the flat boat on Redstone Creek, inaugurating the water craft construction businesses which made the town an industrial powerhouse for the next seventy years.
Nemacolin was a hereditary chief of the Delaware Nation who helped Thomas Cresap widen a Native American path across the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River Valley.
Blair Gap, one of the gaps of the Allegheny, is a water gap along the eastern face atop the Allegheny Front escarpment. Like other gaps of the Allegheny, the slopes of Blair Gap were amenable to foot travel, pack mules, and possibly wagons allowing Amerindians, and then, after about 1778-1780 settlers, to travel west into the relatively depopulated Ohio Country decades before the railroads were born and tied the country together with steel.
The gaps of the Allegheny, meaning gaps in the Allegheny Ridge in west-central Pennsylvania, is a series of escarpment eroding water gaps along the saddle between two higher barrier ridge-lines in the eastern face atop the Allegheny Ridge or Allegheny Front escarpment. The front extends south through Western Maryland and forms much of the border between Virginia and West Virginia, in part explaining the difference in cultures between those two post-Civil War states. While not totally impenetrable to daring and energetic travelers on foot, passing the front outside of the water gaps with even sure footed mules was nearly impossible without navigating terrain where climbing was necessary on slopes even burros would find extremely difficult.
