The National Road, or, a Landward Salient for a Potamic People

In our automobile-driven modern society, Americans consider geographical hypermobility a birthright and take government supply of high-quality roads for granted. In a world obsessed with change, a few things do not change much at all. For example, some would claim we have entered the age of postmodernity, and not many would deny the Internet's potential influence on travel demand, but who will predict a speedy end to roads as we know them? It is a commonplace that, in terms of land travel, roads remain our salvation and that automobiles, when it comes to cultural fixations, are our emblems. Celebrating this, the last two decades have witnessed increased traffic in highway- and automobile-fondling popular books, but not often have their authors shown real interest in the origins of highway culture in American life. Now, however, we have a serious study designed to follow every turn of the highway over the long historical and landscape terrain of one very special, symbolic route, acting, just as a windshield frames the view, to concentrate and focus the larger story on one particular case. The National Road does not trip off the tongue with the cultural resonance of Route 66, or even the Lincoln Highway, but it reaches back into history much more deeply than either, and it confronts us with the idiosyncrasies of origin and the intricacies of survival of one of America's most important transportation projects ever. The National Road deserves to be rescued from the obscurity in which it has long languished. Time was when the fastest way to travel long distances in the United States was by water. From Pittsburgh to Saint Louis, there was only one sensible way to go: by boat down the Ohio River. The America colonized by Europeans was by definition a water-based - that is, a potamic - civilization. The Atlantic seaboard long remained the densest zone of settlement, with seaports at river mouths serving as logical foci for urban development. Later, as colonization moved inland, rivers served as conduits to the seaports, especially after Robert Fulton's successful experiments with steamboat power on the Hudson River in 1807 led to feasible travel upstream, and water remained by far the most fluid of transportation arteries. Roads in the colonial and early national period, to the extent they existed, ran on local trajectories, depended on local upkeep, and served overwhelmingly local purposes. They were in general unsurfaced and, except for a few turnpikes, rarely had improved foundations. Rivers were the superhighways of commerce and of personal travel. Produce exported from farms made its way as quickly as possible to the water's edge for loading, and towns sprang up on riverbanks and at confluence sites to coordinate such movements. After the seaport, the river town was the quintessential urban settlement form in early America, and the interior of the United States blossomed with cities that grew large on the strength of their river trade: Albany, Saint Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Memphis. Nature's treelike pattern of drainage basins, however, great as it is for collecting tradable goods along central axes, is tantalizingly incomplete as a system of interconnected circuits. Merchants and politicians stepped in to dig canals where nature had not obliged. Canal towns - Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Akron, Canton, Joliet, LaSalle, and, most spectacular of all, Chicago - took their places as nodes on the commercial water network of the nation. This potamic civilization pulsated laboriously around every river meander and through every lift lock required to distribute the system's beneficence, and it followed rather slavishly the natural architecture of river valleys and watersheds. What the National Road represented in this world of endlessly weaving water was nothing less than a revolution of geometry and geography. It developed as a scheme to construct as straight a road as possible from the Atlantic seaboard to the western extremities of the new nation, more than a thousand miles away

Aesthetics · Art · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · History

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