The Challenge of Sideling Hill

The Challenge of Sideling Hill. . ,

“Our pleasure trips usually stopped at the top of the mountain because of the hairpin turn to the right that dropped into a severely sharp curve.”

, This route is an ancient one. Our traveling ancestors pushed across, around and finally through this mountain. Sideling Hill, always a steep and dangerous climb, first showed up on a 1755 map as “Side Long Hill.”, When frontiersman Thomas Cresap moved up the Potomac Valley, he hired local Indians to widen the trail over the mountain for his wagons., During the heyday of the National Road, stagecoaches crashed and passengers were killed on the slope near Hancock., Throughout the 1930s, the 40 miles to Cumberland on US 40 was still considered a long hard trip. “There were five mountains to go over - from east to west - Sideling Hill, Town Hill Mountain, Green Ridge, Polish and Martins Mountain.”, With construction of I-68, engineers finally tamed this 350 million-year-old ridge in the 1980s. They blasted out a 4½ mile long, 380 foot deep and 200 foot wide cut in Sideling Hill. After two years and $20 million worth of modern blasting, the first motorists drove through the cut in August, 1985., [Sidebars:] , As evidenced by this early 20th century advertisement, automobile trips on narrow, steep roads without guardrails, could be a dangerous business. Local historian Emily Leatherman recalled, “Rainy days were disastrous. We could watch the cars go to the doctor’s office across the street. They had slid off the road into the ditches or trees.”, The deepest road cut in Maryland history moved 4.5 million cubic yards of rock and dirt.