where, if there was a lack of "bear and cyder" there was an abundance of dried deer meat and Indian meal and a warm fireplace before which to spread one's blankets.[1]
The first cabins on the old route from the Potomac to the Ohio were at the Wills Creek settlement (Cumberland) and Gist's clearing, where Washington stopped on his Le Bœuf trip on the buffalo trace not far from the summit of Laurel Hill. After Braddock's Road was built, and the first roads were opened between Uniontown and Brownsville, Washington and Wheeling, during the Revolutionary period, a score of taverns sprang up—the first of the kind west of the Allegheny Mountains.
The oldest tavern on Braddock's Road was Tomlinson's Tavern near "Little Meadows," eight miles west of the present village of Frostburg, Maryland.
At this point the lines of Braddock's Road and the Cumberland Road coincide.
- ↑ It may be found upon investigation that the portions of our country most noted for hospitality are those where taverns gained the least hold as a social institution. Cf. Allen's The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky, p. 38.
