The story of the third name, which still persists, is interesting. When, during Jefferson's administration, certain farsighted statesmen advocated the building of a National Highway which should connect Washington with Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, Colonel Shepherd became one of the earnest and influential advocates of the road. He was a friend of Henry Clay, to whose indefatigable advocacy of the road was due much of the success of the venture. Clay was frequently a guest of the Shepherds, and in the stately stone house he talked with them about the difficulties, progress, and final triumph.
When the road was an accomplished fact Colonel and Mrs. Shepherd caused to be built on the lawn a stone monument dedicated to their friend, in appreciation of his service. The monument, whose inscriptions have become illegible, is in plain sight from the Cumberland Road, or, as it came to be called, the National Road, just before it makes a sharp turn to cross the sturdy stone bridge over Little Wheeling Creek. Possibly this was one of the bridges Colonel Shepherd constructed. At any rate he was a contractor for a section of the road, and several bridges were erected by him.
Along the Cumberland Road, which was the great highway between the East and the West, travelled home-seekers outward bound and business men and politicians to whom Washington beckoned irresistibly. Among the regular travellers at this and later periods were Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, General Houston, James K. Polk, and others who made it a point never to pass the Shepherd Mansion without stopping. One of the early politicians who frequented the house, attracted there by Mrs. Shepherd, said: "She had a powerful intellect in her younger days. Many of our caucuses were held in her drawing-room. She could keep a secret better than most women, but her love of sarcasm and intrigue kept her from being very effective."
Mrs. Shepherd, in fun, had criticisms to offer of some of her visitors. Once she spoke of Burton, Clay, and Webster as "those young men, promising, but crude, crude."
She was accustomed to go every winter with her husband to Washington, where she would spend a few months during the season. They always travelled in a coach and four and they lived in great style at the Capital. There she was sought for her beauty, for her eccentricities, and her familiarity with private political life.
Colonel Shepherd died in 1832. In 1833 Mrs. Shepherd married General Daniel Cruger, a New York Congressman, who spent the last years of his life in West Virginia.
After the General's death in 1843 Mrs. Cruger lived at Monument Place, receiving visitors as of old, and increasing in the eccentricities that kept any one from being her warm admirer. Always she proved herself an unusual woman. "If fate had placed her in the compressed centre of a court, instead of in the inconsequent hurly-burly of a republic, she would have made for herself a great place in history," Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis once wrote of her.
She was still managing a large plantation during the Civil War, when a visitor dropped in to see her who has left the following picture of what she saw:
"We saw a well-built house of dressed stone, very large and solid, with the usual detached kitchen and long row of 'negro quarters.' ...
"Mrs. Cruger's age was told by the skin of face and hands, which were like crumpled parchment, but the lips were firm and the eyes, deep set in wrinkled lids, were still dark and keen. She was then one hundred years old.