Kentucky's Frontier Highway: Historical Landscapes Along the Maysville Road. By Karl Raitz and Nancy O'Malley. ix and 411 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780813136646.

KENTUCKY'S FRONTIER HIGHWAY: Historical Landscapes Along the Maysville Road. By KARL RAITZ and NANCY O'MALLEY. ix and 411 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780813136646. Karl Raitz and Nancy O'Malley's ambitious and detail-filled book examines Kentucky's historic Maysville Road, which was the nation's first highway into the trans-Appalachian West. Beginning from the Ohio River town of Maysville south to Lexington, the authors trace the 200-year evolution of this nearly seventy-mile stretch of road, and document the ever-changing landscape along the route. Against the backdrop of local and regional economies, transportation innovations' and politics, this volume illustrates the importance of roads as mechanisms of social and cultural change. The authors urge the readers to "seek out those remaining markers of past geographies, of lost landscapes, and appreciate them as primary historical documents" (p. 340). Raitz and O'Malley stress that roads in America are not static; instead, they are constantly being realigned both physically and materially, and result in a "complex palimpsest of structures and land uses that represent a host of incommensurable yet intersecting engineering technologies, legal edicts, political imbroglios, societal milieus, and economic conditions" (p. 3). In the case of the Maysville Road, Raitz and O'Malley suggest that what is no longer visible on the roadside can raise more questions and tell a more fascinating story than what visually remains on the landscape. The book is organized into four parts. Part I includes chapters 1 and 2, and serves as the introduction to the Maysville Road by examining the placement of that route within the wider political, social, and historical circumstances in which it was situated. In chapter 1, the book touches on how road-building technology transformed the Maysville Road from a precolonial' grassy buffalo path to an asphalt roadway. Specific attention is paid to the engineering efforts that strengthened and straightened the road during the late-19th and early 20th centuries. Technological advances in turn helped shorten the Maysville-to-Lexington journey from four days during the pioneer era, to eight-and-one-half hours by the first part of the 19th century. These advances, along with the political regulation of roadways, helped create a national network of highways, of which the Maysville Road became a part. The second chapter does an excellent job documenting what travel was like on the Maysville Road from the 1700s to the present. Raitz and O'Malley maintain that continued realignment of the road, improvements in road-building construction, and shifts in transportation modes impacted not only the personal experience of the traveler, but also roadside land use. The "landscape biography" (p. 14) provided in this chapter is a superior account of the regional vernacular culture, and effectively describes what the traveler encountered along the road regarding taverns, tippling houses, tolls, and topography. The authors end this chapter by encouraging present-day travelers to observe the road with a more critical eye by going beyond the roadside historic markers and instead seek out and understand the everyday history along the path. Part II--comprising chapters 3 through 10--contains brief, yet fact-filled chapters that are sometimes repetitive, but overall do an excellent job discussing immigrant history into the trans-Appalachian West, describing the topography of northern and central Kentucky, and proving that roads are not static nor do they develop in economic, social, or political isolation. More importantly, this section provides a comprehensive look at how a single buffalo trace was transformed into the first significant highway west of the Appalachians and later into a full-fledged federal transregional highway. Chapter 5 is particularly enlightening, and asks important questions about road evolution and the creation and re-creation of roadside landscapes. …