Road Versus Rails
The Rivalry Begins
Ellicott City’s Main Street is the National
Pike, part of the road system that moved
Americans west. Only two decades after the
road was constructed, a new transportation
rival appeared. In 1831, America’s first
railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio, introduced
steam engines to the Patapsco River Valley.
The rivalry between the road and the
railroad came together here.
Noisy, dirty, and at first, unreliable, the
railroad soon gained the upper hand. By 1840,
a stage coach trip to Cumberland on the
National Pike cost $9 and took twenty hours.
The same trip on the B & O cost $7 and took
ten. John H. B. Latrobe summed it up best
when he wrote, “That solitary horseman who
comes down [the National Road] at a trot that
dislocates half the bones in his body, and
sends his saddle bags with grievous
flapping is one of the few who still prefers
its glow and dust to the shade and velocity
of travel on the iron avenue to the west.”
While it was so important for the first
decades of the 1800s, the National Road
was doomed.
(photo caption) An 1832 traveler observed that “Ellicott’s Mills is at the intersection of rail and
turnpike roads; the two great thoroughfares to the west. We have the pleasure of
observing the slow paced vehicles passing below us and the rapid easy movement
of the railcars.”
Marker can be reached from the intersection of Maryland Avenue and Main Street (Maryland Route 144).
Courtesy hmdb.org
