Up to this time there had been completed only 23 miles of the road. In 1816, $300,000 was appropriated for its completion; two years later $260,000 was voted; but a proposal to appropriate $600,000 for internal improvements failed in 1817, as did also a bill providing for the extension of the Cumberland Road. But as a result of the labor of Henry Clay, Albert Gallatin, Thomas Jefferson, President James Madison, and other friends of cheap and rapid transit, by 1820 the total of Congressional appropriations for the Cumberland Road amounted to more than $1,500,000; in 1844 the thirty-fourth appropriation made a total of nearly $7,000,000.[41] The growth of the road was slow: the first contract was let in 1811 for 10 miles; contracts for short sections were let from year to year and the road by 1817 had crawled, following approximately the Nemacolin Path, with the Potomac through the Cumberland gateway over the Alleghany range by way of Negro Mountain at an elevation of 2325 feet, down to the Youghiogheny, past the scene of Braddock’s defeat and the cairn which marks his resting place, through the Laurel Hill Range over to Brownsville within reach of Pittsburgh, thence westward slightly north through Washington (Pennsylvania), to Wheeling (West Virginia) on the Ohio River. Thus had the old Indian trail developed into a route for Washington and his band to Fort Necessity; into Braddock’s road to Great Meadows; into a pack train trail trampled by thousands of caravan hoofs; and, finally, into a finished paved highway cleared to 66 feet in width, having no grade above 5 per cent which Washington and Jefferson and Madison had visions would be the means of binding together with the strong bands of commerce the cis- and trans-Alleghanian countries.