Whether this be true or not, it is certain that he and many other statesmen traveled over the National Road. They could not have private cars, nor did they go in drawing-room coaches, as we can if we choose. Anybody might chance to sit beside these men of national fame, as day after day they rode through the valleys and over the mountains, stopping at the wayside hotels for food and rest. Some of the old hotels, tollhouses, and bridges, as they look to-day, are shown in the illustrations in this chapter. The road itself was long ago given up to the different states and counties through which it runs, but it still tells to the traveler who goes over it many a story of the life of a hundred years ago. CHAPTER IX THE BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD Even after the Erie canal was built and long lines of boats were carrying the grain and other products of the West to New York, the men of Virginia and Maryland did not give up the notion of still making the trade of the western country come their way. They planned the Chesapeake and Ohio canal, to reach the Ohio river, and thought that other canals across the state of Ohio would let them into lake Erie. By the Ohio river they would connect with New Orleans and the upper Mississippi river, and through lake Erie they could reach the towns and farms that border lake Huron, lake Michigan, and lake Superior. A canal along the Potomac valley had been talked of several years before the Revolution, when Richard Henry Lee laid a plan for it before the Assembly of Virginia. Doubtless others thought of it too, as of the Erie canal, long before it was made. At the end of the War of the Revolution Washington made a long journey into the wild woods of New York. He went to the source of the Susquehanna at Otsego lake, visited the portage between the Mohawk and Wood creek, and saw for himself that New York had a great chance for navigation and trade. But he had a natural love for his own Virginia, and he did not intend to let New York go ahead of his native state. His journeys across the mountains as a surveyor and as a soldier gave him a knowledge of the Ohio country, and as he had himself taken up much good land there, he wished to have an easy way, by land or water, from the sea to the rich Ohio valley. So he thought much about a canal to run by the side of the Potomac, and he joined with others who felt as he did to form the Potomac Company. They started a canal, but they found so much in the way that they were not able to go far with it. [Illustration: FIG. 38. MOUNT ROYAL STATION, BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD, BALTIMORE]