territory into which they ran, and today you will be told that no railway has benefited that mountainous district so much as this great thoroughfare.
But in a larger sense than any merely local one, Virginia counted on the Northwestern Turnpike to bind the state and connect its eastern metropolis with the great Ohio Valley. Virginia had given up, on demand, her great county of Kentucky when the wisdom of that movement was plain; at the call of the Nation, she had surrendered the title her soldiers had given her to Illinois and the beautifully fertile Scioto Valley in Ohio. But after these great cessions she did not lose the rich Monongahela country. It had been explored by her adventurers, settled by her pioneers—and Virginia held dear to her heart her possessions along the upper Ohio. In the days when the Northwestern Turnpike was created by legislative act, canals were not an assured success, and railways were only being dreamed of. And the promoters of canals and railways were considered insane when they hinted that the mountains could be conquered by
