and other barriers now across the line a reasonable time being allowed them to secure that portion of their present crops which may lie upon the location of the road.
G. Dutton,
Lieutenant U. S. Engineers Supt.
National Road Office, Springfield, Ohio.
August 2nd 1837."[1]
Indianapolis was the center of Cumberland Road operations in Indiana, and from that city the road was built both eastward and westward. The road entered Indiana through Wayne County but was not completed until taken under a charter from the state by the Wayne County Turnpike Company, and finished in 1850. When Indiana and Illinois received the road from the national Government it was not completed, though graded and bridged as far west as Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois.
The Cumberland Road was not to Indiana and Illinois what it was to Ohio, for somewhat similar reasons that it was less to Ohio than to Pennsylvania, for the further west it was built the older the century
- ↑ Springfield Pioneer, August 1837; also Ohio State Journal, August 8, 1837.
