Virginia Assembly in 1779 appointed commissioners to view this
route and to report on the advisability of making it a wagon road
all the way to Kentucky. In 1795, efforts were made in Kentucky
to turn the Wilderness Trail into a wagon road, and in this same
year the Kentucky Legislature passed an act making the route from
Crab Orchard to Cumberland Gap a wagon road thirty feet in width.

>From Pennsylvania and from Virginia commerce westward bound
followed in the main the army roads hewn out by Braddock and
Forbes in their campaigns against Fort Duquesne. In 1755,
Braddock, marching from Alexandria by way of Fort Cumberland, had
opened a passage for his artillery and wagons to Laurel Hill,
near Uniontown, Pennsylvania. His force included a corps of
seamen equipped with block and tackle to raise and lower his
wagons in the steep inclines of the Alleghanies. Three years
later, Forbes, in his careful, dogged campaign, followed a more
northerly route. Advancing from Philadelphia and Carlisle, he
established Fort Bedford and Fort Ligonier as bases of supply and
broke a new road through the interminable forest which clothed
the rugged mountain ranges. From the first there was bitter
rivalry between these two routes, and the young Colonel
Washington was roundly criticized by both Forbes and Bouquet, his
second in command, for his partisan effort to "drive me down," as
Forbes phrased it, into the Virginia or Braddock's Road. This
rivalry between the two routes continued when the destruction of
the French power over the roads in the interior threw open to
Pennsylvania and her southern neighbors alike the lucrative
trade of the Ohio country.

>From the journals of the time may be caught faint glimpses of