Searight, the local historian of the road, describes these large,
broad-wheeled wagons covered with white canvas as

"visible all the day long, at every point, making the highway
look more like a leading avenue of a great city than a road
through rural districts.... I have staid over night with
William Cheets on Nigger [Negro] Mountain when there were about
thirty six-horse teams in the wagon yard, a hundred Kentucky
mules in an adjoining lot, a thousand hogs in their enclosures,
and as many fat cattle in adjoining fields. The music made by
this large number of hogs eating corn on a frosty night I shall
never forget. After supper and attention to the teams, the
wagoners would gather in the bar-room and listen to the music on
the violin furnished by one of their fellows, have a Virginia
hoe-down, sing songs, tell anecdotes, and hear the experiences of
drivers and drovers from all points of the road, and, when it was
all over, unroll their beds, lay them down on the floor before
the bar-room fire side by side, and sleep with their feet near
the blaze as soundly as under the parental roof."

Meanwhile New York, the other great rival for Western trade, was
intent on its own darling project, the Erie Canal. In 1808, three
years before the building of the Cumberland Road, Joshua Forman
offered a bill in favor of the canal in the Legislature of New
York. In plain but dignified language this document stated that
New York possessed "the best route of communication between the
Atlantic and western waters," and that it held "the first
commercial rank in the United States." The bill also noted that,
while "several of our sister States" were seeking to secure "the
trade of that wide extended country," their natural advantages