Fincastle to Cumberland Gap Turnpike got its turn, but wasn’t a survivor
By Lawrence J. Fleenor Jr.
From the March 30, 1994 edition of the New Castle Record
In the 1830s, transportation and communication was the keys to holding the Commonwealth of Virginia together. Virginia was the height of its economic and industrial position within the United States, with most of this activity centered around Richmond.
As examples of its economic ascendancy, Richmond was the largest wheat exporting port in the world and was the center of a developing iron industry destined to become the largest in the South.
Yet, centrifugal forces were pulling the Commonwealth apart. Great distances and chains of rugged mountains made the transportation of bulk products such as grain and iron difficult and economically burdensome.
Much of Virginia lay within the watershed of the Mississippi River rather than that of the Atlantic, and even before the heyday of the river steam boat, much commerce existed between western Virginia and New Orleans.
People living in the fertile Valleys of the Great Kanawha (the New River), the Holston, the Clinch and the Powell in what is now southwestern Virginia were psychologically and economically drifting away from the Richmond-Norfolk orbit and intense political pressures were at work to stop this process of political and economic disassociation by building better means of transportation between the western and eastern parts of Virginia.
George Washington was among the first to see the problem, and was one of the organizers of the greatest of all of Virginia’s internal improvement projects, the James River and Kanawha Canal and Turnpike. Though a water route all the way from Richmond on the James River to Huntington on the Ohio River was the ultimate goal, the project’s highest attained level of development was a canal from Richmond to Buchanan, river navigational improvements on the Kanawha upstream as far as Charleston, and a turnpike connecting Buchanan and Charleston.
Engineering problems were not the only ones encountered by the James River and Kanawha project. The people of the Holston, Clinch, and Powell watersheds raised political demands for a turnpike connecting the to the East, and funds had to be set aside for this highway in order for the James River and Kanawha Canal bill to pass the General Assembly.
The Town of Fincastle was the logical starting point for such a road. It was the ancient gateway to Western Virginia, and contained the courthouse for Botetourt County, which had included all of Virginia west of the James River, including much of the present states of West Virginia and Kentucky.
Fincastle sat on Catawba Creek, which provided the best passage between the valleys of the James and New Rivers. It also was near the terminus of the James River and Kanawha Canal at Buchanan, and was astride the Valley Pike (or Great Road, now US11) which ran through the Valley of Virginia all the way to Pennsylvania.
Even though the new James River and Kanawha Turnpike was to bypass Fincastle, an older highway called Price’s Turnpike ran from Fincastle through what is now Sweet Springs, W. Va. to the Valley of the Kanawha in the present West Virginia. Price’s Turnpike was also called Sweet Springs Road locally.
Cumberland Gap was the obvious western end of such a highway. Not only was it the western tip of Virginia, but the gateway to Kentucky and points west. It also was an entry point into east Tennessee, whose most convenient route to the Atlantic and the Northeast was through Virginia.
Cumberland Gap has always served as a magnet for travelers between the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest. The main Indian and pioneer trail in the eastern United States passed through here.
The 1807 map of Virginia of Bishop James Madison shows the major trail to the West extending from Fincastle to Cumberland Gap.
And so in 1832 the General Assembly passed “An act directing a survey of a route for a road between Cumberland Gap and Price’s Turnpike,” with the general route specified as coming from west to east:
“From Cumberland Gap, by Wallen’s Ridge, in the County of Lee, near Powell’s mountain; thence, crossing said ridge and mountain, to the valley of Clinch; thence by Tazewell Courthouse, and either down the valley of East River, or Wolf Creek, to Giles courthouse; thence to Chapman or Snider’s Ferry on New River; thence up the valley of Sinking Creek to the head thereof, in a gap of the Alleghany mountains; thence the most practicable route to New Castle; thence down the valley of Craig’s Creek in Price’s turnpike road.”
Grade and other construction standards were specified. A definition of how the word “turnpike” was understood in that era was given in the act:
“where the ground is not firm enough to make a good road on the aforesaid plan, it shall be turnpiked, by raising it on the center line 18 inches above the horizontal base line, continuing the road the width of 18 feet good carriage way”.
In 1834, the surveying having been completed, the General Assembly passed an act funding the construction of a “road from Price’s Turnpike to Cumberland Gap.” The choice of its location in its middle portion had not been made between the valleys of Wolf Creek or of East River, and a change in the location of the road was specified in the area of Castlewood. The turnpike’s governing board was established. Provisions for toll gates to be set up every 15 miles were made, with the toll specified to be the same as on the “Kanawha road.”
The finished turnpike as it existed during its maturity is shown in the 1833 revision of Bishop James Madison’s 1807 Map of Virginia. As the map contains the specific final route, along with the names of persons living along the road, the map would have to have been published after the act of the General Assembly of 1834 authorizing the turnpike’s construction. In 1840 an act was passed providing for some final construction.
The last documented look at the Fincastle to Cumberland Gap Turnpike is provided by the valedictory of the greatest of all of Virginia’s chief engineers, Claudius Crozet.
Crozet had presided over the most expansive period of Virginia’s internal improvements, including the James River and Kanawha Canal and Turnpike, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the famous railroad tunnel under the Blue Ridge Mountains at Rockfish Gap, and the extensive turnpike system of Virginia of which the Fincastle to Cumberland Gap turnpike was the longest in what is the present Virginia.
Having lost the great debate with Virginia’s establishment over whether it would be best for the state to build canals or railroads (he understood the future of railroads at a time when they were still not competitive with canal transportation). Crozet was resigning. But before he quit, he published a map showing all of the internal improvements in Virginia that had been built under the administration.
To accompany this historic document he wrote a monograph detailing much information on each of these projects. Much of the following comes from this material.
Crozet gives the 1836 as the year of the first site work on the Fincastle to Cumberland Gap Turnpike, and 1841 as the date of its completion. There were four major relocations of the road, Crozet himself laying out the last. These relocations probably account for some of the minor, present-day disagreements over the location of some of the shorter segments of the turnpike, as each alternative may well have been the route at one time.
The length of the road was 248-1/4 miles, with the zero milepost being at Cumberland Gap. The total cost was $115,000 with the state appropriating $72,769.47 and the counties paying the rest.
The turnpike had hardly been completed when the problems began. Tolls were not properly collected, and as the tolls were supposed to pay for its maintenance as well as pay off its bonded debt, upkeep was neglected.
The state got into protracted disagreements with the counties through which the turnpike ran over how to pay for maintenance and debt service in the absence of sufficient revenue. The conflict wound up in court.
Mercer County appropriated the raid that ay within its bounds, and Tazewell County built its own road over the turnpike. Russell County flatly refused to maintain its segment. Funds were misappropriated, records were poorly kept and the superintendents did not function. The turnpike was an improved dirt road, and frequently proved too muddy to travel.
In 1840, Crozet had come to the conclusion that such a dirt road was inadequate, and he recommended that a route to the West (not necessarily the Fincastle to Cumberland Gap Turnpike) be either macadamized or converted to a railroad. The process of macadamization was the state-of-the-art paving process of the time, and consisted of packing down progressively smaller stones into the cracks between larger rocks until an all-weather surface was obtained.
Angered by the conduct of the counties along the route of the Fincastle to Cumberland Gap Turnpike, in 1846 the state turned over the road to the counties and authorized a competing Southwest Turnpike from Salem to the Tennessee line at Bristol utilizing a route first improved as a military road in 1761 by Maj. Andrew Lewis under the command of Col. William Byrd III.
This new turnpike bypassed the offending counties with a macadamized road that survives today as interstate 81, the major route from the James River at Buchanan to Southwest Virginia and Tennessee. The Fincastle to Cumberland Gap Turnpike slowly died under its county administration, and passed into history.
-Prepared by Shelly Koon
