The Way I See It: Getting here was half the battle
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Getting around today is as easy as getting in your car and hitting a button that says start.
With a nationwide network of roads and a robust series of airports you can get to every corner of our nation in under a day. Remarkable when you consider we have around 3.8 million square miles in the United States stretching west to Hawaii, north to Alaska, east to Maine and south to Key West, Fla.
It was not always so easy to get there, or to get here for that matter.
Our area was once considered the frontier, meaning one did not casually pass by. When George Washington canoed by the mouth of the Muskingum River on Oct. 27, 1770, he was on a business trip to view property he owned along the Ohio River. The round trip from his Virginia home took him nine weeks and took him only as far as the Kanawha River.
When the members of The Ohio Company left New England in 1788 to establish Marietta at the mouth of the Muskingum, they departed around New Year knowing that they had to get here early enough to clear land and plant crops. Fighting deep snow and bad roads they journeyed overland until they got to what is now West Newton, Pa. where they constructed the boats that would take them the rest of the way. The overland journey was by all accounts extremely difficult with many of the men walking most of the way. The journey down the Youghiogheny, Monongahela, and Ohio must have seemed easy by comparison.
The flatboats built to carry goods were the typical river transportation of the day. Those in the new city of Marietta made note of the ever-increasing traffic of people moving west in the flatbottom crafts. Flatboats were meant to be one-way vessels; they were taken apart when they got to their destination with the boards being used to build new land-based housing.
As the Ohio Company began splitting up the land, it was normally close enough to a river that the landowner would be able to use the waterway to move goods in and out of the area.
The depth of the Ohio River was not controlled until the first series of dams were built in 1929. Until then, the river was most useful only during periods of high water. This created a problem for boats trying to use it, including the Lewis and Cark Expedition that had to manually drag their boat down the river when they came past on Sept. 13, 1803.
Until the first steamboats began using the river in 1811, upstream travelers were manually pushed up the river by means of a person walking on the roofs of keelboats with long push poles.
Railroads opened up the area somewhat when they connected the area to larger cities. The Cincinnati and Marietta Railroad first provided rail service west on April 9, 1857. The Belpre-Parkersburg rail bridge opened in 1871.
The paths taken by early residents of the area slowly became trails and then roads. Most would have been dirt until the harder surfaces needed for cars and trucks were constructed in the early part of the 1900s. Some roads, such as Ohio 676, remained gravel until they were finally paved in the late 1940s. Many county roads remained gravel until the 1960s. Many township roads are still gravel.
When the Interstate 77 bridge opened on Dec. 16, 1967, it immensely improved the ability of people to get here, with travel time to cities like Cleveland being cut in half.
After nearly two centuries, getting here was finally less of a battle.
Art Smith is online manager of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel and The Marietta Times, he can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com.