National Road Festival unites Southwest Pennsylvania

May 15th, 2009

Guest Blogger Ben Moyer, National Road Heritage Corridor

Envision the image of two railroads meeting on the high plains of Utah, where workers drove “The Golden Spike” to bind West to East. The 36th annual National Road Festival, May 15-17, will be like that, but will recall an even earlier time in our nation’s history when popular conceptions of “The West” included lands as far east as the “Ohio country.”

As they’ve done to highlight the festival since the bicentennial celebration of 1976, two wagon trains will trundle toward one another — one headed west, the other east — along Route 40, The National Road. Their journey will commemorate the travels of pioneers and adventurers across the Alleghenies when the nation was new, and link roadside towns of today where the public is invited to share the history and the fun. More than 40 covered wagons, carriages, buckboards and other horse-drawn conveyances will join the processions, along with riders on horseback and “camp-following” hikers.

To commemorate the travels of pioneers and adventurers across the Alleghenies centuries ago, two wagon trains will trundle toward one another, one headed west, the other east, along Route 40. Visitors can meet costumed wagoneers and their horses at these encampments:

Westbound Train
May 14 Addison
May 15 Nemacolin Woodlands
May 16 Mt. Macrina

Eastbound Train
May 15 Washington
May 16 Scenery Hill
May 17 Waleski Horse Farm, Fredericktown


Donna Holdorf, executive director of the National Road Heritage Corridor said a new feature of the festival is distribution of collectible “wooden nickels” inscribed with symbols representing various historic sites along the Road. “Visitors can collect the ‘nickels’ at the tollhouses, Mt. Washington Tavern, Scenery Hill, Brownsville, Mt. Macrina and others,” Holdorf said. “But they have to get them from costumed folks reenacting some aspect of life here around 1830. The ‘living history’ folks remind us of the reason for this celebration. They’re recreating the way people traveled on the National Road when the move west enabled the nation to become all that it is.”

The National Road Festival’s uniqueness goes beyond flesh-and-blood horsepower on a heavily traveled highway. There is no central planning authority for the event. Instead, National Road communities like Addison, Hopwood, Uniontown, Brownsville, Fredericktown, Scenery Hill, Claysville and West Alexander coordinate their own simultaneous celebrations throughout the weekend, sparked by a wagon train’s arrival. Festival-goers will find a wide choice of offerings, from fireworks in Scenery Hill, to ghost tours in Brownsville, kids’ trout fishing in Hopwood, and more.

A sampling of other activities along the road and the schedule for all communities is available at the National Road Heritage Corridor Web site.

National Road History
Following his inauguration in 1801, President Thomas Jefferson championed building a “national road” into the west to facilitate American expansion. Congress approved the project in 1806 and by 1818 the National Road (known also as the National Pike and Cumberland Road) wound and climbed from Cumberland, Md., across Southwest Pennsylvania’s mountains and the Monongahela Valley to the Ohio River town of Wheeling, W.Va. (then a part of Virginia), where travelers could continue west by water route. The road was to have continued all the way to Jefferson City, Missouri, but funding dried up and the road stopped Vandalia, Ill., in 1839. Until the 1850s, when railroads offered faster travel and cheaper freight, the National Road was America’s most important transportation corridor.

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