Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 11).djvu/169

This page has been validated.
ZANE'S TRACE
165

ville Turnpike was constructed between Zanesville and the Ohio River. At Zanesville the road today is familiarly known as the Maysville Pike while in Kentucky it is commonly called the Zanesville Pike.

"When the Indian trail gets widened, graded and bridged to a good road," wrote Emerson, "there is a benefactor, there is a missionary, a pacificator, a wealth-bringer, a maker of markets, a vent for industry."[1] The little road here under consideration is unique among American highways in its origin and in its history. It was demanded, not by war, but by civilization, not for exploration and settlement but by settlements that were already made and in need of communion and commerce. It was created by an act of Congress as truly as the Cumberland Road, which soon should, in part, supersede it. And finally it was on the subject of the Maysville Turnpike that the question of internal improvement by the national government was at last decided when, in 1830, President Jackson signed that veto which

  1. Society and Solitude, essay on "Civilization," pp. 25–26.