1810 Turnpike Route

Checked against the record. Error: "The road was completed by 1819." It was not. The 1991 county survey of historic engineering and industrial sites says "By 1821 the road was complete from Huntingdon to Blairsville, a distance of seventy-seven miles," and gives the construction date range as 1815 to 1821. Two years early. Correct in the original: the 1810 authorization (the company was incorporated March 20, 1810), the seventy seven miles, and Huntingdon to Blairsville. Those all check out exactly. Cut, no source: "one of over 200 turnpike companies building more than 3,000 miles of toll roads across Pennsylvania." It is also doing nothing for a county page. Gone. Cut, no source: "replacing colonial Indian trails and dirt roads with the commercial superhighways of the early republic." Rhetoric asserting a causal replacement nobody sourced. What the original missed, and it is far better than what it had: the road is STILL THERE and still unpaved. The survey describes a three and a half mile stretch over Warrior Ridge between Huntingdon and Alexandria as extant and relatively unaltered, and lands the best line in the whole entry, that it is still marked by the same potholes, ruts, washouts and mud that travelers complained about at the time. A history post that ends at a place a reader can drive to today is worth five that end in 1821. Also recovered: the project stalled for four years after incorporation and was only rescued by a citizens' meeting in the county courthouse in January 1814, and the company ran out of money and paid contractors in scrip. Africa 1883 separately indexes a "Huntingdon, Cambria and Indiana turnpike shinplaster," which is that same scrip. Not used: Africa's line that "a considerable length of [it] passed through a rugged and sparsely settled region, unable to contribute any substantial aid" is quoted inside the 1991 survey rather than read in Africa directly at that page, so it is left out of the original.