Our highways 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 Pennsylvania soon lost its earliest name.... Few
roads named from their builders preserved the old-time name.
One roadway--the Wilderness Road to Kentucky from Virginia and
Tennessee, the longest, blackest, hardest road of pioneer days in
America--holds the old-time name with undiminished loyalty and is
true to-day to every gloomy description and wild epithet that was
ever written or spoken of it. It was broken open for white man's use
by Daniel Boone from the Watauga settlement on the Holston River,
Tennessee, to the mouth of Otter Creek, on the Kentucky River, in
the month preceding the outbreak of open revolution at Lexington and
Concord. It was known as "Boone's Trail," the "Kentucky Road," the
"road to Caintuck" or the "Virginia Road," but its common name was
the "Wilderness Road." It seems right that the brave frontiersman who
opened this road to white men should be remembered by this act.
The road itself is of little consequence--it is what the early founding
of the commonwealth of Kentucky meant to the East and to the West.
When the armies of the Revolutionary War are counted, that first army
of twenty-five thousand men, women, and children which hurried over
Boone's little path, through dark Powel's Valley, over the "high-swung
gateway" of Cumberland Gap and down through the laurel wilderness
to Crab Orchard, Danville, Lexington, and Louisville, must not be
forgotten. No army ever meant more to the West.
* * * * *
It was, throughout the eighteenth century, exceedingly dangerous
to travel Boone's Road; and those who journeyed either way joined
together and traveled in "companies." Indeed, there was risk enough
for the most daring, in any case; but a well-armed "company" of tried
pioneers on Boone's Road was a dangerous game on which to prey. It was
customary to advertise the departure of a company either from Virginia
or Kentucky, in local papers, in order that any desiring to make the
journey might know of the intended departure. The principal rendezvous
in Kentucky was the frontier settlement of Crab Orchard. Certain of
these advertisements are extremely interesting; the verbal changes are
significant if closely read: