uncovered and nearby, where the path leaves the lane to go to the barn, some old brick were dug up. The late Samuel Norris, who died in 1933 at the age of eighty-four, said that at this point there once was a cottage where, as he had heard when a boy from older people, there had lived a man whose duty it was to care for the extra horses which were attached to the stage coaches before they began the abrupt rise of the road at that point in following the hollow northwesterly. From Clark's Gap the early road followed the present sandclay road to what is now known as Ely's Corner, past the present Paeonian Springs and Warner's Cross Roads and Wheatland and Hillsboro to the depression in the Blue Ridge known as Vestal's or Key's Gap--Gershom Keys having owned land at that point as early as 1748 and the Vestal family having operated a ferry across the Shenandoah nearby at least as early as 1754 and perhaps in 1736; for we know it was in operation at that time and that one G. Vestal was living in the immediate neighbourhood then. Washington followed this road on his mission to Fort du Quesne in 1753 and once again in 1754 as major of that expedition against the French on the Alleghany (to the command of which he later succeeded on the illness and death of Colonel Fry), which resulted in the building and surrender by him of Fort Necessity.[40] In the following year it was trodden by that brigade of Braddock's army which, under the command of Sir Peter Halkett, left the main body of the troops when that main body crossed the Potomac over into Maryland at the present Georgetown as is related in a later chapter. [40] _Landmarks of Old Prince William_, 481, 511. In an effort to attract the increasing traffic to and from the west, Leesburg citizens incorporated in 1831 the Leesburg and Snickers' Gap Turnpike Company which built an improved road north from Clark's Gap to Snickers' Gap, as the old Williams' Gap had then come to be called; and this new road (which is the present Alexandria-Winchester Highway) took the traffic theretofore going through Vestal's Gap and has since been the northerly main route across the Blue Ridge. To carry the old Ridge Road over Broad Run, we know that there was built, before 1755, one of the earliest highway bridges in Loudoun's territory of which record has been preserved; for on the 1755 edition of the Fry & Jefferson map a wooden bridge is shewn at that point. The picturesque stone bridge that now spans the stream, venerable as it appears, may not have been constructed before 1820, at about which time that part of the road was being improved by the Leesburg Turnpike Company; nevertheless in eastern Loudoun it is a popular legend that it was built by George Washington as a young man and the inhabitants of the neighbourhood firmly believe that to be true.