Huntingdon borough, Alexandria borough

1810 Turnpike Route

Did you know? You can still drive a piece of the 1810s turnpike, and it still has the same potholes people complained about two hundred years ago.

The Huntingdon, Cambria and Indiana Turnpike Road Company was incorporated March 20, 1810, after attempts in 1806 and 1807 to get a turnpike from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh had failed. Then nothing happened for years. It took a meeting of citizens in the Huntingdon County Courthouse in January of 1814 to finally raise enough interest, and stock went on sale that April.

By 1821 the road ran complete from Huntingdon to Blairsville, seventy seven miles. It cost more than the subscribers had paid in, so the managers ended up issuing scrip to pay the contractors.

Here is the part worth knowing. A three and a half mile stretch of it still exists, crossing Warrior Ridge between Huntingdon and Alexandria. The state's survey of historic engineering sites calls it "extant and in relatively unaltered condition," mostly unpaved, steep and sharply curved, and "perennially marked by the potholes, ruts, washouts, and dust or mud of which eighteenth-century travelers complained."

East of the ridge it runs past the Pulpit Rocks.

Two centuries on, the road is still bad in exactly the way the people who used it said it was.

Have you driven that stretch over Warrior Ridge? Tell us what it is like now.

What the fact check changed. FIRES IN FOUR DAYS. Caught by the new proof-based triage, which surfaced eight unchecked posts scheduled inside a week. ERROR: "The road was completed by 1819." It was not. The 1991 county survey of historic engineering and industrial sites says "By 1821 the road was complete from Huntingdon to Blairsville, a distance of seventy-seven miles," and gives the construction date range as 1815 to 1821. Two years early. CORRECT IN THE ORIGINAL: the 1810 authorization (the company was incorporated March 20, 1810), the seventy seven miles, and Huntingdon to Blairsville. Those all check out exactly. It is also doing nothing for a county page. Gone. CUT, no source: "replacing colonial Indian trails and dirt roads with the commercial superhighways of the early republic." Rhetoric asserting a causal replacement nobody sourced. WHAT THE ORIGINAL MISSED, and it is far better than what it had: the road is STILL THERE and still unpaved. The survey describes a three and a half mile stretch over Warrior Ridge between Huntingdon and Alexandria as extant and relatively unaltered, and lands the best line in the whole entry, that it is still marked by the same potholes, ruts, washouts and mud that travelers complained about at the time. A history post that ends at a place a reader can drive to today is worth five that end in 1821. Also recovered: the project stalled for four years after incorporation and was only rescued by a citizens' meeting in the county courthouse in January 1814, and the company ran out of money and paid contractors in scrip. Africa 1883 separately indexes a "Huntingdon, Cambria and Indiana turnpike shinplaster," which is that same scrip. NOT USED: Africa's line that "a considerable length of [it] passed through a rugged and sparsely settled region, unable to contribute any substantial aid" is quoted inside the 1991 survey rather than read in Africa directly at that page, so it is left out of the post.

Sources

Checked 2026-08-01 · County history, independently fact checked

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