The Road Today
A segment of the Wilderness Road was among the first roads in the United States to be paved. The old road from the town of Cumberland Gap, Tennessee to Middlesboro, Kentucky through the mountain pass was paved and completed on October 3, 1908. This was an "object-lesson" road (a new kind of paved macadam construction funded by local communities but with federal governmental supervision) initiated by the U.S. Office of Public Roads. At that time, only about 680 miles (1,090 km) of paved roads existed in the United States. Later, it was linked to the famous Dixie Highway that connected Detroit, Michigan to Miami, Florida by a paved road. Its name was later changed to U.S. Highway 25. This new road brought a new industry, tourism, to the rural areas filling hotels and restaurants with travelers.
Today, Cumberland Gap is a National Park, and portions of the Wilderness Road can be visited at Wilderness Road State Park in Virginia. Additionally, a reconstructed fort at Martin’s Station in Virginia on the Wilderness Road can be visited about 5 miles (8 km) east of the Cumberland Gap. Since the completion of the Cumberland Gap Tunnel in 1996, a project has been underway to restore the original appearance of the Wilderness Road as it crosses the historic Cumberland Gap. Since 2001 Hwy. 25E has been obliterated over several miles of its length and the original grade restored, including the addition of 32 feet (9.8 m) of elevation to restore the Gap to its original contour, with virtually all modern artifacts, buildings and roads removed. The replanting of thousands of seedlings from original forest stocks in the area is intended, over a period of decades, to recreate a forest that will allow visitors to view the crossing of the Gap on the Wilderness Road as travelers would have experienced it circa 1790. This section of the Wilderness Road is now a hiking trail, including an interpretive center about the road's history located on the Tennessee side.
Read more about this topic: Wilderness Road
Famous quotes containing the words road and/or today:
“Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)