Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 5).djvu/194

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CHAPTER VII

THE PENNSYLVANIA ROAD

SUCH had become the importance of the Pennsylvania Road that, soon after the Revolutionary struggle, Pennsylvania took active steps to improve it. On the twenty-first day of September an act of the Assembly of Pennsylvania gave birth to the great thoroughfare at first called "The Western Road to Pittsburg," and familiarly known since as the Pittsburg or the Chambersburg-Pittsburg Pike.[1] This state road was, as heretofore recorded, one hundred and ninety-seven miles in length from Carlisle to Pittsburg. The road built in 1785–87 follows practically the course of the present highway between the same points. Here and there the traveler may

  1. Colonial Records, vol. xv, pp. 13, 121, 273, 274, 322, 326–327, 330, 331–337, 346, 359, 431, 519, 594, 599, 635; vol. xvi, pp. 466–477.