Reviewed by Marion Nelson Winship | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by Marion Nelson Winship | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Marion Nelson Winship, Virginia Commonwealth University

Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West. By Craig Thompson Friend. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005. 390 pages. $42.00 (cloth).
This "biography" of an American road is offered as "a microhistory of social and cultural change in the Early American Republic" (4). Craig Thompson Friend is not pressing a case for the significance of the trans-Appalachian West in the early Republic. Rather, the Maysville Road was the "spine of the most dynamic region of the American West" (2), and, from buffalo trace to turnpike, this volume shows the early Republic embodied in the road.	1
From the start of this study, illustrations and vivid prose draw readers into the world of the Maysville Road. One is reminded of first opening Rhys Isaac's Transformation of Virginia.¹ Colonial Virginia, with its rich historical literature, perhaps did not need that dramatically informative visual presentation, but the trans-Appalachian West does. The images alone in this beautifully produced volume do much to replace frontier stereotypes and portray the early American Republic along the Maysville Road. The road stretched sixty-five miles southward and inland from the point (in what became Kentucky) where Limestone Creek and an ancient buffalo trace met the Ohio River. In 1784 early settler Simon Kenton built a blockhouse at the port soon called Maysville. It was never much of a town, cramped between the river and a high bluff and crowded with transients and river-town roughs. Up the hill and a few miles south, travelers found the better-situated village of Washington. Here began Kentucky's much-touted "Fine Cane Land" (50). Next was the New Jersey–settled hamlet of Mayslick (undistinguished except as site of the glowing nineteenth-century pioneer memoirs of Daniel Drake.² Beyond lay the Blue Licks, physically barren and, for Kentucky settlers, haunted since a disastrous 1782 conflict with Shawnee. Past backcountry Pennsylvanians' Millersburg, travelers entered a "vast plain of gently rolling, fertile hills" (52), the Bluegrass. After leaving prosperous Paris, they crossed another twenty miles of pleasing landscape to Lexington, the chief metropolis of early Kentucky.	2
Friend begins with a subtle discussion of the pioneering generation, yet this study is not about the frontier, a word that lacks an index entry and most often appears in the text corralled by quotation marks. Even in its earliest days, the Maysville Road was a "nascent urban corridor" (55); the region was a "village West" (43).³	3
The 1790s brought genteel migrants, mostly Virginian, who cultivated not only the (best) land but also republicanism, refinement, markets, and nationalism. Friend sees this arrival (and each subsequent chapter in his story) in terms of contested cultures. The gentry must, for example, stamp "a genteel architectural imprint" (74) on a landscape marked by the pioneer culture of log stations, cabins, and churches with unruly sociability. This elegant discussion, though, is surely too dichotomous. One wonders what interpretations would result if less were made of the exceptional transplanted tidewater planter David Meade with his "knee breeches and white silk stockings" (237), and more of, say, the ambitious young Henry Clay, of indeterminate Virginia roots, who arrived in Kentucky just a year later.	. . .

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