There’s only one place in the world where a river, a canal, a railroad, a highway and an airplane route cross each other.
All those modes of transportation intersect in Cumberland.
Allegany County, where Cumberland is located, was also the home to seven different railroads and some short lines, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the Kelly-Springfield Tire Co. plant and major railyards for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
It is the place where the National Road, the first major public works project in the United States, began.
In other words, Allegany County is steeped in transportation in all its many forms.
Its location is what helped the city become a transportation hub.
Like many towns and cities, Cumberland is located on a river.
While there are other creeks and streams in the area, the North Branch Potomac River became Cumberland’s first transportation route. It was navigable, but unreliable as during dry times, only the lightest of boats might be able to use it.
And even those boats required portage around Great Falls near Washington, D.C.
However, while eastward travel was useful to get goods to larger markets, the land beyond the mountains to the Mississippi River beckoned. It represented an untapped source for food, lumber and fur, and with barely 1 million Americans living on the frontier in the late 1700s, it was ripe with opportunities.
And while the river continued toward the west, passage in that direction was even less reliable and required moving against the current.
So in May 1811, construction began on America’s first federal public works project, a national road that would make it easier for settlers to move into the western United States.
“The road opened up the U.S., west of the Ohio (River), which allowed the federal government to sell property it owned. There was no income tax, so a revenue source was important,” Steve Colby said in an Allegany Magazine interview.
Colby was with the Cumberland Road Alliance, a collaborative effort among many of the communities and businesses along the National Road to reintroduce it to the public.
The National Road began in Cumberland at “a stone at the corner of lot Number One in Cumberland, near the confluence of Will’s Creek and the north branch of the Potomac River,” according to historical records. The road reached Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1818 and Vandalia, Ohio, in 1839.
Colby said the reason for choosing Cumberland was because, “It was a somewhat central location, which both the north and south could agree on. Philadelphia was the primary port for shipping goods and the south worried about Pennsylvania’s dominance as the port for shipment of western goods. Maryland was in the process of building turnpikes to Cumberland, which would complete the road to the coast.”
Cumberland also sat next to a natural break in the mountains that made the first part of the journey a little easier.
However, as transportation methods improved, the city became the goal for both the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. As George Washington had said when he dreamed of making the Potomac River a navigable commerce route, a dependable trade route would “apply the cement of interest to bind all parts of the union together by indissoluble bonds, especially that part of it, which lies immediately west of us, with the middle states.”
Although both ventures broke ground on July 4, 1828, the railroad reached Cumberland in 1842 and the canal in 1850.
The C&O Canal was a construction and engineering challenge for its time. It involved more than simply digging a trench across level land and making it watertight. Boats traveling from Georgetown to Cumberland had to be lifted more than 600 feet on their westward journey.
The laborers were mainly imported Irishmen, who jumped at the chance to come to America, though they quickly found the work unsatisfying. It was hard, and the tools were picks, shovels, horses and black powder.
The canal and railroad competed for the city’s coal trade, which became a major stream of revenue for both ventures.
The canal finally closed in 1924, having never been truly profitable. For a time, the U.S. government considered paving over the canal and creating a parkway from Cumberland to Georgetown, which would cater to yet another improvement in transportation — the automobile.
Cumberland certainly has many roads, but it was also home to the Kelly-Springfield Tire Co. until the 1990s. When it was first announced in 1916 that the tire company was relocating its manufacturing facilities from Ohio to Maryland, it was a major event for Cumberland.
To win the company, the county government and Chamber of Commerce provided for a free site for the factory, a bonus of $750,000 and the extension of the city limits to include the factory site on the Potomac River with police and fire protection and improved streets. It was a generous offer, but besides bringing another major industry to the county, it created 3,000 new jobs, which was about 12% of the city’s population at the time. It also led to new businesses opening that serviced the tire plant and its employees.
The county also had a growing connection to the aviation industry.
The idea of Cumberland having an airfield was first discussed in the early 1920s — the early days of aviation. The Mexico Farms Airfield was created in late 1923. Its main use was to provide a landing site for planes flying west of Washington, D.C., since early planes could not remain in the air as long as modern planes do. It was used by both private pilots and the U.S. Army.
The Cumberland Municipal Airport, built in 1944, took over most of the duties of the Mexico Farms Airfield. However, the airfield, which is the second-longest operating airfield in Maryland, is still used, although it is privately owned.
Although Allegany County is predominantly rural, it whas stayed connected to the world through its adoption of advances in transportation.