The naming of our highways is an interesting study. Like roads the world over they are usually known by two names—the destinations to which they lead. The famous highway through New York state is known as the Genesee Road in the eastern half of the state and as the Albany Road in the western portion. In a number of cities through which it passes—Utica, Syracuse, etc.—it is Genesee Street. This path in the olden time was the great road to the famed Genesee country. The old Forbes Road across Penn

It is impossible to come upon this road without pausing, or to write of it without a tribute. — James Lane Allen....

No English colony in America looked upon the central West with such jealous eye as Virginia. The beautiful valley of the Oyo —the Indian exclamation for “Beautiful”—which ran southwesterly through the great forests of the continent’s interior was early claimed as the sole possession of the Virginians. The other colonies were hemmed in by prescribed boundary lines, definitely outlined in their royal charters. New York was bounded by Lake Erie and the Allegheny and thought little of the West. The

The first real explorations of the great territory secured by Virginia at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix were made by Dr. Thomas Walker, who later so skilfully managed Virginia’s part of that treaty, and Christopher Gist, in the early years of the second half of the eighteenth century, 1750 and 1751. The brief journals [1] written by these men are the sources of our first information concerning the vast territory west of the Appalachian mountain system—the eastern half of the Mississippi basin south

With the close of Pontiac’s Rebellion and the passing away of the war clouds which had hung so long over the West, ten thousand eyes turned longingly across the Alleghenies and Blue Ridge. War with all its horrors had yet brought something of good, for never before had the belief that a splendidly fertile empire lay to the westward taken such a hold upon the people of Virginia. Nothing more was needed but the positive assurance of large areas of good land, and a way to reach it. It was ten years

History was fast being made in Kentucky when the Revolutionary struggle reached the crisis in 1775 at Concord and Lexington. South of the Ohio River Virginia’s new empire was filling with the conquerors of the West. The Mississippi Valley counted a population of thirteen thousand, three thousand being the population of New Orleans. St. Louis, in Spanish possession, was carrying on a brisk trade with the Indians on the Missouri. Vincennes, the British port on the Wabash, had a population of four

On the nineteenth of April, 1775, the rumble of the running fire at Lexington and Concord told that the farmers of New England had at last precipitated the struggle which had been impending for a full generation. It was a roar that, truly, was “heard round the world.” One day later, April 20, 1775, Colonel Henderson and his fellow-pioneers of the Transylvania Company reached Boonesborough; there they were joyfully received by a running fire of five and twenty muskets discharged by Boone’s vangua