The Maysville Road and Jackson’s veto, 1830

Long before it was a road, the way from the Ohio River at Limestone, now Maysville (opens in a new tab), to the Bluegrass was a buffalo trace that Native hunters used between the salt licks. Settlers followed it inland through Washington, the Blue Licks and Paris to Lexington, and by the 1820s it carried the region’s hemp, tobacco and livestock to the river. It was also, travelers complained, a ribbon of mud and ruts.

Kentucky set out to fix it with a turnpike, a toll road built by a private company and paid for with tolls. The state marker atop Maysville Hill (opens in a new tab) says the Maysville and Washington Turnpike Company was incorporated on January 29, 1829. Grokipedia’s account of the veto (opens in a new tab) names the larger Maysville, Washington, Paris, and Lexington Turnpike Road Company, chartered that year to build a macadamized road, surfaced with packed layers of broken stone, about 67 miles long.

The company asked Washington for help. Kentucky congressman Robert Letcher introduced a bill for the U.S. Treasury to buy $150,000 of its stock, about a third of the cost. It passed the House 102 to 86 on April 29, 1830, and the Senate on May 15, Grokipedia says, backed by supporters of Henry Clay’s American System (opens in a new tab) of federally aided roads and canals.

On May 27, 1830, President Andrew Jackson vetoed it. Because the road lay entirely inside one state, he argued, it was a local project, not a national one, and federal money for it would open the door to endless spending. Secretary of State Martin Van Buren drafted the first version of the message. Clay’s supporters saw a direct blow at his program in his own state, and the veto became a dividing line between Jacksonians and their opponents.

Kentucky built the road anyway. The marker says the first four miles, from Maysville to Washington, were finished on November 7, 1830, the earliest macadamized road in Kentucky and west of the Alleghenies. The full road to Lexington opened to travel in 1835 with thirteen tollhouses and six covered bridges. In the same years Lexington was building the Lexington and Ohio Railroad toward Frankfort.

Kentucky today

US 68 follows much of the old turnpike between Maysville and Lexington, passing Old Washington, Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park and Paris. State historical marker #144, “Maysville Road,” stands at the top of Maysville Hill on US 68.