Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West

Before the National Road and the Erie Canal, another transportation revolution was underway in the United States. Beginning in the 1770s, the Maysville Road—a sixty-five-mile dirt trail that stretched from the Ohio River to the Bluegrass region of Kentucky—served as a stage upon which people wrestled with issues of power, identities, and worldviews. For six decades, the road provided a conduit through which political, economic, social, and cultural ideas circulated into and within the early...