Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 6).djvu/13

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PREFACE
13

roads have lost the ancient name, a fact that should be sincerely mourned. The Black Swamp has been drained, therefore there can be now no "Black Swamp Road." There are now no refugees and the "Refugees Road" is lost not only to sight but to the memory of most. Perhaps there is but one road in the central West which is commonly known and called by the old Indian name; this is the "Tuscarawas Path," a modern highway in Eastern Ohio which was widened and made a white man's road by the first white army that ever crossed the Ohio River into what is now the State of Ohio.

One roadway—the Wilderness Road to Kentucky from Virginia and Tennessee, the longest, blackest, hardest road of pioneer days in America—holds the oldtime name with undiminished loyalty and is true today to every gloomy description and vile 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