Kentucky’s Frontier Highway: Historical Landscapes along the Maysville Road by Karl Raitz, Nancy O’Malley (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SUMMER 2013 97 Kentucky’s Frontier Highway: Historical Landscapes along the Maysville Road Karl Raitz and Nancy O’Malley During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries , roads and waterways played a critical role in the political and economic development of the vast wilderness of the American interior by facilitating the free movement of people, goods, resources, and troops. Yet the significance of travel ways often falls into the background of American memory, replaced by the deeds of the men and women who traveled the roads and rivers or the locations at the end of the trail. Americans value freedom of mobility but often forget about the physical pathways that afford them that mobility. In Kentucky’s Frontier Highway, Karl Raitz and Nancy O’Malley seek to bring the Maysville Road, the sixtyseven mile roadway connecting Maysville and Lexington, to the forefront. Their enjoyable and informative biography of the road resides at the intersections of history, geography, and anthropology . Raitz, a professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, and O’Malley, assistant director of the William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology at the same institution, strive to highlight the historical and cultural significance of the Maysville Road as a place rather than merely a means of travel between Maysville and Lexington. The authors argue that the Maysville Road was one of the most important roads in postcolonial America, making their account more than a regional study of limited scope. Raitz and O’Malley divide their work into four parts. The first two sections offer a general history of the Maysville Road and the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. The authors focus on the evolution of the road from a path used by Kentucky’s first human inhabitants to hunt and forage, to a pioneer road traveled by settlers after disembarking from their voyage down the Ohio River, to a modern highway littered with gas stations, fast food restaurants, and motels. In these sections, the authors work to demonstrate the national importance of the road. They argue that the Maysville Road connected the fertile farm land of the Bluegrass to markets along the Atlantic coast and Europe via the Ohio River, bringing manufactured goods into the region and taking the agricultural surplus out. But Raitz and O’Malley fail to illustrate clearly the colonial and postcolonial triangular trade relationship between the Karl Raitz and Nancy O’Malley. Kentucky’s Frontier Highway: Historical Landscapes along the Maysville Road. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2012. 424 pp. ISBN: 9780813136646 (cloth), $40.00. BOOK REVIEWS 98 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Ohio Valley, the Atlantic coast, and Europe, or how the agricultural produce of the Bluegrass contributed to European manufacturing, often to the detriment of the development of a system of manufactures at home. They also discuss President Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Maysville Road veto, but primarily to show the challenge it posed to the construction of the Maysville,Washington, Paris, and Lexington Turnpike. The authors fail to convey the central role the Maysville Road and Kentucky played in the national debate over internal improvements in large part because they allocate too few pages to make a strong argument for the road’s national significance. The first two sections amount to roughly one-fourth of the book’s length and no chapter in part two exceeds ten pages, allowing little room for analysis. The authors raise many important issues in the first two sections of the study, but neglect to explain their significance. In parts three and four, in contrast, Raitz and O’Malley shine and their study comes alive. The authors take the reader on a mile-by-mile journey along the Maysville Road, stopping to explain the history of numerous places along the way. They discuss who first inhabited particular locations and how the use of these sites evolved from nineteenth century farm, tavern, inn, stagecoach , or slave quarters to twentieth and twentyfirst century Wal-Mart, burger stand, car dealership , or drugstore. Raitz and O’Malley also circle back to an earlier theme, stressing that roads are “dynamic, even formative landscape elements in their own right that often enable and direct community development and change” (49). They note how the Maysville Road and...