Kentucky's Frontier Highway

Abstract

Two overland routes provided eighteenth-century migrants from the middle Atlantic coast access to the Ohio River valley's fertile Kentucky country. A southern route, the Wilderness Road, crossed Cumberland Gap to gain access to the Bluegrass plains. A northern route brought migrants down the Ohio River to Maysville. An overland wagon road, the Maysville Road, linked Maysville to Lexington, a frontier fort and trade town some sixty-seven miles southwest. The Maysville Road was America's first highway into the trans-Appalachian West. Roads are compliant, linear places that change, slowly or quickly, and become something different. The historical composite road-roadside landscape becomes palimpsest of structures and land uses. A geographical history perspective develops an evolutionary road typology that begins with organic tracks and proceeds through time and technology changes to modern highways. Once established, roads become formative in that they enable and direct community development and change. A landscape biography documents the road's historical geography through a comprehensive narrative that interprets the road and its attendant roadside landscapes of villages and farms. The historical geography of the Maysville Road is an epic, composed as is no other. The road is the theater of local settlement, an engine of regional economic development, an icon of national political process, and it has served as a significant force in landscape creation and destruction.

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