The wheels rolled up and down hill along a road as brisk and busy and important as the Mississippi River. Big Conestoga wagons hauling freight, gentlemen on horseback, ladies and gentlemen in stagecoaches, settlers moving out to Ohio and beyond—all followed the National Road. Hopes and dreams and ideas followed it, too, ghosts out of the country's brief past and brave foreshadowings of the future.

Joel Brigham was lucky enough to see all that in the year 1830. He had business of his own to settle, but the Road's business was bigger than his. This book is about Joel and the people he met. But it is about the Road, too, and how it brought him where he most wanted to be.

The National Road comes alive again in William Breyfogle's historical, faithful account, written by a storyteller with a special interest in the American past.

From the dust jacket