The Valley Turnpike: From Warriors’ Path to U.S. Route 11 in the Shenandoah Valley

“Ninety miles and more it stretches
Up the Valley, towards the south:
Firm it is to wheel and hoof beat,
Firm it holds in flood and drouth.”
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— Scenic and Historical Guide to the Shenandoah Valley, 1923

The Valley Turnpike shaped the development of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, when travel across the young country was being transformed, it grew from a crude wagon road into a paved artery linking the Valley to distant states and cities. Today it is part of U.S. Route 11.

Looking south along the Valley Turnpike, today’s Route 11, through the Cedar Creek battlefield. NPS photo.

From trail to wagon road

Colonists arriving in the Valley found an old network of Native American trails, which they called the Great Warrior Path; the Shawnee, Seneca and Tuscarora had used it for trade, hunting and raids. As settlers multiplied, the main route became the Great Wagon Road, running from Philadelphia to Winchester, Virginia, and on south to Georgia.

Its surface changed with the seasons — frozen in winter, rutted mud in the spring rains and thaws, dust and flying stones in summer. One early traveler, jolted over rocks in a stagecoach, was amazed the “miserable vehicle was not broken into pieces.” Another called it “the worst road in the universe.”

A turnpike company

The Revolutionary War left local governments hard pressed to build and maintain roads, and turnpikes — toll roads — offered a new way to pay for them; America’s first good roads came out of the turnpike movement. Virginia passed a law in 1817 to incorporate turnpike companies, with rules for building roads and collecting tolls.

Valley boosters wanted a link to Kentucky, Tennessee and the growing West. On March 3, 1834, the legislature authorized the Valley Turnpike Company to build a 68-mile hard-surfaced road from Winchester to Harrisonburg, along the old warriors’ path — smoothing the roadbed, straightening sharp curves and bridging rivers. The company expected it to cost $250,000 and sold shares at $25 each: 60% to the public, 40% to the state. A second company, chartered in 1837 to improve 25 more miles from Harrisonburg to Staunton, later merged with the first. Between 1838 and 1857 the company sold 16,000 shares, and the full 93-mile road cost $425,000.

A macadamized road

The turnpike used the advanced “macadam” method: three layers of stone sloping to drainage ditches — two of angular 2.5-inch stones about eight inches deep, and a top layer about four inches thick of one-inch stones — packed tight by a heavy roller. The road was to be 60 feet wide, with 18 feet paved at least 12 inches deep, and no grade steeper than 3.5 degrees.

Workers quarried limestone along the route in clouds of dust, and lined the ditches and culverts with it. The hard surface was rough on cattle hooves, so farmers often drove animals on other roads, and rain, snow and ice made it slippery and quick to wear, needing constant repair.

Reality fell short of the plan. Builders had to blast far more limestone than expected, and in rocky stretches ignored the rule of 40 feet of width at stream crossings; the road narrowed to 20 feet in places, too tight for two-way traffic. Shareholders accepted steep grades if the road ran straight, so between New Market and Middletown slopes topped four degrees. The state engineer, Claudius Crozet, wanted scenic roads winding around hills; merchants and farmers wanted straight ones to get goods to market faster. Where the old wagon road had sought the easiest fords, the turnpike crossed streams where bridges were easiest to build — high enough to escape floods, and many of them covered. The timber cut for bridges, fences and fuel left long stretches without shade.

A road of commerce

By 1850 almost every Valley farmer grew wheat. Four-horse teams hauled up to three tons of flour, meat, tobacco and furs to market and returned with fish, salt, coffee and imported goods; teamsters camped by the road or stayed at “wagon stands” along it. The turnpike sustained hundreds of mills and made many farmers and millers wealthy, alongside iron furnaces, forges, harness and carriage shops, inns, distilleries and cattle yards.

Scales weighed wagons to set when they could travel, how wide their wheels had to be, and what they paid. The law fixed tolls by vehicle type and allowed a tollgate every five miles, with stone walls on both sides to stop drivers slipping around them. In 1840 a trip down the whole turnpike cost an average of $4.38.

War and after

In the Civil War the turnpike was the Valley’s only improved road, and both armies used it for communication, supply and retreat. Stonewall Jackson moved his outnumbered Confederates along it in 1862; Union general Philip Sheridan used it in 1864 to invade the Valley and burn many of its farms. With armies “destroying bridges, injuring toll houses,” the company reported, “we are getting very little tolls.” The Confederate government paid only a quarter of its tolls, and the company’s $20,000 in Confederate bonds ended the war worthless. Afterward, falling wheat prices left poorer farmers unable to pay tolls, and railroads took more of the freight.

By the early twentieth century automobiles were tearing up the macadam, and hazards like the sharp turn onto the narrow bridge over Cedar Creek forced repairs. The turnpike collected its last toll in 1918, when it became a free road in Virginia’s new state highway system, paid for by taxes, especially on gasoline. In 1928 it became part of U.S. Route 11 — though people still call it the Valley Turnpike.

Sources

Based on "Valley Turnpike," Cedar Creek & Belle Grove National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Its references include Warren R. Hofstra, ed., The Great Valley Road (2010), and Parke Rouse Jr., The Great Wagon Road.