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line of the Alleghenies. For fifty years, in the infancy of engineering, American promoters had been struggling with this problem; it is a far cry—measured by the hosts of futile plans and dreams—from Washington, pushing his horse through the dripping laurels along "McCullough's Path," to Sylvester Welch who spanned Blair's Gap by a railway; then, and not until then, was a passage-way from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi Basin open for freight and passengers on which neither freighter nor coach played any part. The building of the Allegheny Portage Railway, 1830–33, was as epoch-making an event as the opening of the Cumberland Road in 1818 or the opening of the great trans-Allegheny railways at the middle of the century. In many ways it was more significant than the opening of the Erie Canal, which was merely a lengthy application of a principle already perfectly understood. Considering the coach and wagon to have been natural means of communication, we can then say that the Portage Railway was the first artificial means of communication between the East and