Cumberland Road at once leaped into a position of leadership,
both in volume of commerce and in popularity, and held its own
for two famous decades. The pulse of the nation beat to the
steady throb of trade along its highway. Maryland at once
stretched out her eager arms, along stone roads, through
Frederick and Hagerstown to Cumberland, and thus formed a single
route from the Ohio to Baltimore. Great stagecoach and freight
lines were soon established, each patronizing its own stage house
or wagon stand in the thriving towns along the road. The
primitive box stage gave way to the oval or football type with
curved top and bottom, and this was displaced in turn by the more
practical Concord coach of national fame. The names of the
important stagecoach companies were quite as well known, a
century ago, as those of our great railways today. Chief among
them were the National, Good Intent, June Bug, and Pioneer lines.
The coaches, drawn by four and sometimes six horses, were usually
painted in brilliant colors and were named after eminent
statesmen. The drivers of these gay chariots were characters
quite as famous locally as the personages whose names were borne
by the coaches. Westover and his record of forty-five minutes for
the twenty miles between Uniontown and Brownsville, and "Red"
Bunting, with his drive of a hundred and thirty-one miles in
twelve hours with the declaration of war against Mexico, will be
long famous on the curving stretches of the Cumberland Road.

Although the freight and express traffic of those days lacked the
picturesqueness of the passenger coaches, nothing illustrates so
conclusively what the great road meant to an awakening West as
the long lines of heavy Conestogas and rattling express wagons
which raced at "unprecedented" speed across hill and vale.