The following article combines Harvard professor John Kennedy Lacock's thorough research on Braddock's Road with his photography on the subject. Actually, the photography is that of Ernest K. Weller, however I classify these photographs as Lacock's since he hired Weller to do the work. As far as I know, this is the first time this much of Lacock's work has ever been assembled in one place.
Besides writing the most in-depth article on the route of Braddock's Road, he also published about 100 postcards on the historic thoroughfare in his Braddock Road and Cumberland Road postcard series. There are two different versions of the Lacock postcards - black and white set and a hand tinted color set. For this edition, I am using the color postcards whenever possible.
My collection of Lacock's postcards is considerable, but no means complete - I have all but three of the Braddock Road postcards, 16 from the Cumberland Road series and one diazo print postcard. View my list of Lacock cards. As I acquire other cards I will add them to this web site. Lacock and Weller's photographs also appear in Robert Bruce's book The National Road as well as in Harper's magazine.
In addition to images from the article, I am also including Lacock's postcard images captioned with Lacock's text. I did not include all of the article's photographs for graphical reasons. As soon as I can locate an original of high enough quality, I will add those pictures. In addition to Lacock's photos, I have added a few other illustrations that compliment the text. The one element missing from this piece are detailed maps showing the path of Braddock's Road. I hope to have those included here before too long.
As a man of letters, Lacock's writing is scholarly and his sources of information are painstakingly noted. The footnotes are indicated by numbers in backets [1]. Due to its excessive length, I've take a minor liberty with the first footnote and broken it out as an introduction.
Many placenames have changed since Lacock's day. For example, Lacock uses Pittsburg instead of Pittsburgh. I have left the text in its original form and have not corrected any of the place name spellings.
Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
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