The Wilderness Road was the principal route used by settlers for more than fifty years to reach Kentucky from the East. In 1775, Daniel Boone blazed a trail for the Transylvania Company from Fort Chiswell in Virginia through the Cumberland Gap into central Kentucky. It was later lengthened, following Native American trails, to reach the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville. The Wilderness Road was steep and rough, and it could only be traversed on foot or horseback. Despite the adverse conditions, thousands of people used it.
In 1792, the new Kentucky legislature provided money to upgrade the road. In 1796, an improved all-weather road was opened for wagon and carriage travel. The road was abandoned around 1840, although modern highways follow much of its route.
Read more about Wilderness Road: Early Exploration, Route, Dangers, Settlement, Commerce and Mail, Civil War and Decline, The Road Today
Famous quotes containing the words wilderness and/or road:
“These were such houses as the lumberers of Maine spend the winter in, in the wilderness ... the camps and the hovels for the cattle, hardly distinguishable, except that the latter had no chimney.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?
The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling
Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?”
—Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)