Napoleon led to Moscow." Preservation A segment of the Wilderness Road was among the first roads in the United States to be paved. The old road from the town of Cumberland Gap, Tennessee to Middlesboro, Kentucky through the mountain pass was paved and completed on October 3, 1908. This was an "object-lesson" road (a new kind of paved macadam construction funded by local communities but with federal governmental supervision) initiated by the U.S. Office of Public Roads. At that time, only about of paved roads existed in the United States. Its name was later changed to U.S. Route 25E. This new road brought a new industry, tourism, to the rural areas filling hotels and restaurants with travelers. Cumberland Gap is a National Historical Park, and portions of the Wilderness Road can be visited at Wilderness Road State Park in Virginia. Additionally, a reconstructed fort at Martin's Station in Virginia on the Wilderness Road can be visited about east of the Cumberland Gap. Since the completion of the Cumberland Gap Tunnel in 1996, a project has been underway to restore the original appearance of the Wilderness Road as it crosses the historic Cumberland Gap. Since 2001, Hwy. 25E has been obliterated over several miles of its length and the original grade restored, including the addition of of elevation to restore the Gap to its original contour, with virtually all modern artifacts, buildings and roads removed. The replanting of thousands of seedlings from original forest stocks in the area is intended, over a period of decades, to recreate a forest that will allow visitors to view the crossing of the Gap on the Wilderness Road as travelers would have experienced it circa 1790. This section of the Wilderness Road is now a hiking trail, including an interpretive center about the road's history located on the Tennessee side. See also Kentucky County, Virginia Ohio Country Overmountain Men Southwest Territory Trans-Appalachia Footnotes References Axelrod, Alan: What Every American Should Know About American History (1992) Holbrook, MA. Adams Media Corp. . Bodett, Tom: America's Historic Trails (1992) San Francisco James Connoly (Small World Productions). Calloway, Brenda: America's First Western Frontier: East Tennessee (1989) Kingsport, Tenn. The Overmountain Press . Cooke, Alistair: Alistair Cooke's America (1973) New York Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Eslinger, Ellen: Running Mad for Kentucky: Frontier Travel Accounts. University Press of Kentucky, (2004). Drake, Richard B. A History of Appalachia. University Press of