Kentucky's Frontier Highway: Historical Landscapes along the Maysville Road

2. Traveling the Road

17 2 Traveling the Road Purposeful travelers have a common goal: to depart a starting point and reach safely a destination. But what of the experience that links a journey’s beginning and end? Travel is a multidimensional process that blends predictable and unpredictable events. The transport mode (stagecoach or automobile), trip length, and date or season of travel are largely predictable. Weather, traveling companions (chosen or voluntary), and road quality are marginally predictable. And many of the trip’s events and perhaps much of its scenery are wholly unanticipated, and therein, for some travelers at least, resides the pleasure of the journey, the joy of experiencing the new, the unexpected.1 Other travelers find the unpredictable aspects of a journey discomforting and seek to increase their comfort by increasing predictability. They do this by maintaining their conveyance, traveling in good weather, and staying overnight at inns or hotels where they have stayed before or they know by reputation to offer peerless accommodation. The earliest historic travelers on the Limestone Trace walked or rode on horseback along a trail that was muddy and slick in wet weather, dusty in dry weather, and rutted all year round. And mud is a rather one-dimensional term for a variety of conditions, depending on location. Where the road crossed river floodplains, for example, the silty soils turned into a carbon-colored ooze when wet, creating a seemingly bottomless mire the consistency of thick porridge. The sickly yellow-blue-green mud on an Eden Shale hillside might be slick, even slimy, and a gangue of rock and clay. The Bluegrass limestone lands entrained high levels of organic material yet drained rapidly; the reddish-brown muds here were often thickly viscous. In the early years of historic settlement, the Limestone Trace was the last leg of a long journey that had already tallied weeks of anxious and exhausting travel aboard a wagon or on a flatboat or keelboat drifting with the current down the Ohio River. When a group of settlers finally tied up at the Limestone landing (now Maysville), they may have been relieved that they no longer had to worry about capsizing and drowning, but hazards of a different kind remained and the trials of travel were far from over. Few early travelers stayed at the Limestone landing because of its exposed position and lack of amenities. Joel Watkins did have a salutary experience when he passed through Limestone in 1789, largely because he was fortunate to stay with his former tutor, Thomas Brooks. Brooks entertained him “with the greatest civility,” John Filson’s Kentucke—Cumberland Gap to Boonesborough. John Filson, a schoolteacher, surveyor, cartographer, and land speculator from Pennsylvania, came to the Kentucky frontier in 1783. The following year he published a book entitled The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke, with an accompanying map simply entitled Kentucke. Filson used fine dashed lines to depict generalized trail routes, and this map segment portrays southeastern Kentucky, including Cumberland Mountain, and the Warrior’s Path, Daniel Boone’s Trace, and the Wilderness Road. Filson’s cartography uses “mole hills” to represent topography, but these symbols only hint at the rugged mountain land that these narrow paths traversed. At Flat Lick, just north of the Cumberland River, Boone’s Trace—labeled “Virginia to Kentucke ”—angles north- northwest to Boonsburg (Boonesborough) on the Kentucky River. The Wilderness Traveling the Road  19 insisted on his “tarrying some time with him in town,” and gave him a “very agreeable breakfast” and the opportunity to shave, take a nap, and explore the settlement. Watkins then spent the night where he had the satisfaction of being able to sleep in a bed “with my Breeches off” for the second night in a row.2 Needham Parry, traveling to Limestone five years later, in 1794, was unimpressed with the people he encountered . He saw the potential for a “flourishing little place” at Limestone, but only if “it was but settled with people of any principle: which I think they are the clearest of, of any set I ever saw.”3 Most settlers who traveled to the region via Limestone headed inland from the river toward the Inner Bluegrass, where settlement was denser, quality land could be found, and, because of strength in numbers, conditions were safer, although the threat of Indian attack persisted until the close of the Revolutionary War. Along the corridor into Kentucky’s Bluegrass country...