Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 6).djvu/12

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12
PREFACE

stone) and on to Lexington, is known in Kentucky as the Zanesville Pike; from that city in Ohio the road branched off from the old National Road. The "Glade Road" was the important branch of the Pennsylvania or Pittsburg Road which led through the Glades of the Alleghenies to the Youghiogheny. One of the most singular names for a road was that of the "Shun Pike" between Watertown and Erie, in northwestern Pennsylvania. The large traffic over the old "French Road"—Marin's Portage Road—between these points on Lake Erie and French Creek necessitated, early in the nineteenth century, a good road-bed. Accordingly a road company took hold of the route and improved it—placing toll gates on it for recompensation. Those who refused to pay toll broke open a parallel route nearby, which was as free as it was rough. It became known as the "Shun" Pike because those who traversed it shunned the toll road.

Few roads named from their builders, such as Braddock, Forbes, Bouquet, Wayne, Ebenezer Zane, Marin, and Boone preserved the oldtime name. Indeed nearly all our