[16] The Honorable Augustus Keppel, commodore of the fleet, had furnished Braddock with a detachment of thirty sailors and some half-dozen officers to assist in the rigging, cordages, etc. These seamen proved of valuable aid to the expedition in getting the wagons and the artillery down the mountain.
[17] Orme Journal, 324.
[18] Orme Journal, 324; also Seaman Journal, 381-382. For reasons not easy to understand, the Cumberland Road was laid out along the more westerly deflection over Wills Mountain by the way of Sandy Gap, instead of by the natural and more favorable route through the Narrows of Wills Creek. In 1834, however, it was changed to the latter location, and remains the line of the present National turnpike.
[19] The writer has interviewed many of the reliable and trustworthy citizens of Cumberland on this point. To Robert Shriver and J. L. Griffith, respectively president and cashier of the First National Bank of Cumberland, and to the late Robert H. Gordon, one of the leading attorneys of the town, he owes special thanks for their painstaking interest, given at the expense of much valuable time, in aiding him in his attempt to discover the route of the army out of Cumberland. Mr. Shriver, who has made an extensive study of the course of the road from Fort Cumberland to the Narrows, thinks that the weight of evidence favors a route from Fort Cumberland along the gradually sloping ground northwestward to a point on Wills Creek about where the cement mill now stands. From here the road would have been easy, comparatively short, and almost level for the greater part of the distance to the eastern end of the gap, where there would evidently have been a favorable opportunity to ford Wills Creek near the mouth of one of its tributaries. Much might be said in favor of this contention; but, unfortunately, it has thus far failed to yield any results that look toward a definite and authoritative identification of Braddock’s line of march.
[20] It is worthy of note that the bridge was in course of construction at least twelve days before the road through the Narrows was completed (Seaman Journal, 379).
[21] See Shippen’s manuscript draft of 1759, in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; map in Orme’s Journal, op. 282; and a map in Hulbert, Historic Highways, IV. op. 20. These maps, though necessarily drawn on a small scale, give color to the theory of this route.
[22] See Washington’s manuscript sketch of Fort Cumberland made in 1758, in E. M. Avery, History of the United States, IV. 207.
[23] In 1863 Mr. Robert Shriver made a most excellent photograph of this point, which shows the stratum in its primitive condition.
[24] See Lowdermilk, History of Cumberland, 137; also Searight, The Old Pike, 64, 71 ff. G. G. Townsend of Frostburg, road engineer for Alleghany County, Maryland, has an old blue print, made before the railroads were built, which shows on the left, or eastern, bank of Wills Creek a wagon road running through the Narrows and crossing the creek near the mouth of Braddock Run.
[25] The three engineers who accompanied Braddock’s expedition (Seaman Journal, 364) made striking use of a series of absolutely straight lines in laying out the road, except where the fording of a river required a tortuous route, or where the topography of the country was such as to render their plan utterly impracticable. This device, which impressed itself upon the writer and his party as they were crossing Wills Mountain, afterwards proved of great value to them in their efforts to pick up the road where traces of it were completely obliterated for rods at a time in cultivated fields.