I have never been especially drawn to landmarks. Battlefield plaques, preserved taverns, roadside markers — I understand the appeal, and I have stopped for a few. But they have always seemed less like history than tombstones: fragments of a past life that meant far more to those who erected them than to those who pause to read them decades later.What an idiot I was. 

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Brady J. Crytzer’s The National Road: George Washington and America’s First Highway West forced me to see our nation’s landmarks differently. More than once, I found myself stopping mid-chapter to look up a river crossing, a cast-iron bridge, or an old stretch of road that still traces the spine of the early republic. The National Road was America’s first federally funded highway, authorized by Congress in 1806 and begun at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811. It eventually pushed west through the Appalachians and across much of what was then the American frontier.

Crytzer brings the National Road to life. You see surveyors pushing through forests, workers laying stone, travelers in stagecoaches heading west with everything they own. The book makes a simple case, and it makes it well: The republic needed this road — and more importantly, the idea that led to the road’s creation — if it was going to hold together. “It was the first example of interstate cooperation, the first interstate highway, the first project to unite the East and West,” Crytzer writes. “It was the original connection between the........

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