The companion to the PBS® documentary
DIVIDED HlGHWAYS
a Florentine/Hott Production,
by Lawrence Hott and Tom Lewis

The photograph shows the National Road in the Blue Ridge Mountains west of Cumberland, Maryland, on a spring day in the early ninetwenties. Leo J. Beachy, a self taught photographer crippled by what we now know was multiple sclerosis, has been transported to the site on Negro Mountain by his sister. She has helped him to set up his camera and capture on glass negatives scenes of the road and its travelers. Beachy flags down the 1919 Chevrolet touring car as it crests the hill. The seven passengers, two families, perhaps, get out, stretch, and pose. The women are dressed in coats and hats, which help to keep the dust off themselves. The men appear to take a proprietary interest in the car. One leans his left foot on the running board, cocking his right arm on his hip, while the other rests his hand on the roof support. The shutter opens and closes; in an instant a glass plate preserves the moment. More than merely capturing a party of travelers, perhaps on a Sunday outing through the Blue Ridge, Beachy's camera has recorded a moment in America's landscape and culture. The automobile is shiny, with just a few traces of mud at the tips of the fenders. Its split windshield is open slightly to let in the breeze. There is no danger that the solid rubber tires will go flat, for blowouts often caused by sharp rocks were then the bane of all motorists. Beachy seems to have been as interested in the road as he was in those who traveled upon it. The photographer preferred to call the National Road the "ocean to ocean highway." Often, he would ask his sister to take him and his equipment there for the day so that he could record the passing scene. At this point on Negro Mountain, the road seems to stretch out forever. One imagines an endless series of hills and dips beyond. The road's surface is compacted stone which at the shoulders has broken into mud, which accounts for the splatters on the child's left leg as well as the lady's shoes. The grades of the roadway are short and steep, enough to tax a team and a wagon or an early automobile. Telephone and electric poles appear to encroach from the sides, and the very woods themselves seem to threaten safe passage. Nevertheless, the road points the way through the wilderness and represents a first step in taming it. In time, as the speed and traffic of automobiles increases, work crews will widen it and level some of the hills and dips. By the nineteen twenties parties like this one in their automobiles were a common site. Their dress tells us that they are neither migrants nor settlers, but are traveling for the pleasure of making an afternoon social call, or the satisfaction of seeing the countryside--as much as they could through the dense woods--or the pure enjoyment of moving. There were nearly 8 million automobiles across the United States in 1920, about one for every 4 families. They could travel on about 369,000 miles of roads, most with surfaces in worse condition than the National Road. To be sure people used their automobile in their work, and to do errands, but they also used them for simple pleasure. More than a horse and wagon or a railroad car of the nineteenth century, the road and the automobile best suited the what Tocqueville called the "restless temper" of Americans. "O to realize space!" Walt Whitman wrote in the nineteenth century. Roads and cars were enabling Americans of the twentieth century to realize the full import of Whitman's thought. "The plenteousness of all--that there are no bounds." The growth of the automobile brought another important change to the National Road. In 1926, it became part of "U. S. Route 40," a major east-west thoroughfare. The route began at Atlantic City in New Jersey and crossed the Atlantic states of Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania; touched the tip of West Virginia at Wheeling; passed into the mid-western states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Kansas; and traversed the western states of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada before stopping at the corner of Harrison and Tenth Streets in downtown San Francisco, California. The change of the road National Road into a federal highway was a simple but profound one. It meant that U.S. Route 40 was now part of a larger web of federal "interstate" routes. The narrow passage through the Blue Ridge in Maryland, was now linked to the nation.