These glimpses of colonial journeys will help us to understand why the National Road came to be built. About one hundred years ago the government began to take a great interest in opening roads, especially across the Appalachian mountains, to Ohio, Kentucky, and other parts of the Mississippi valley. Washington, who died in 1799, had said much about this work, for he not only wanted western trade to come to Virginia instead of going to New Orleans, but he also felt that so long as the mountains kept the East and the West apart we should never have one common country, held together by friendly feelings. The people of Baltimore, like those of New York and Philadelphia, were eager to have the best road to the West, that their business might be benefited. Not far from Baltimore is an old place called Joppa, and several roads are still known as “Joppa roads.” The town is older than Baltimore and was once the chief trading town in the northern part of Maryland; but Baltimore was well situated on an arm of the great bay, and by this time had gone far ahead of its old rival. A number of good roads had been built in Maryland, among them a famous one leading out westward to Frederick. This was in the direction of Hagerstown, and still farther west was Cumberland. The United States government decided to build a great road to Ohio, beginning at Cumberland. To get the benefit of this, the men of Baltimore went to work to push the Frederick pike westward to the beginning of the National Road. So it came about in 1811 that the first contracts were let for building parts of the National Road. We remember that the Erie canal was not started until six years later. The act of Congress which ordered the making of the road provided that a strip four rods wide should be cleared of trees, that it should be built up in the middle with broken stone, gravel, or other material good for roads, and that all steep slopes should be avoided. The road was opened to the public in 1818, one year after the Erie canal was begun. The original plan was to make it seven hundred miles long, reaching from Cumberland to the Mississippi river, but it was never carried out. The Maryland roads, as we have seen, ran west from Baltimore and Washington to Frederick, east of the Blue Ridge; to Hagerstown, in the Great Valley; and to Cumberland, in the mountains. Cumberland is a stirring town of about twenty thousand people, and with its great business in coal, iron, and railroads it seems like a larger city. Thence the National Road runs through the gap in Wills mountain (Fig. 36) to Frostburg, a dozen miles west and fifteen hundred feet higher. The road soon bears northward into Pennsylvania and crosses the Monongahela river at Brownsville, about forty miles south of Pittsburg. Coal is mined here, and boats were running in those early days, as coal barges and steamboats run to-day, down to the great iron city.