Campsite 20

The tallest ground on this site's horizon stands 4.6° above level, to the northwest.

On the March equinox direct sun reaches the pitch at 7:30 am and leaves it at 7:08 pm: 11 h 40 m of it, against 12 h 12 m of daylight on an open horizon.

US 40 Scenic and MD 144 follow the old National Pike. East of Cumberland it was not the federal National Road, which began at Cumberland and opened in 1818, but a chain of state-chartered turnpikes paid for largely by Baltimore banks, with milestones counting the miles to the Baltimore courthouse. Together they made one road from Baltimore to the Ohio. Through the Cumberland Narrows, the milestone nomination says, passed 'over half of the emigrants and freight' of the early westward migration. Flintstone grew along it. The Flintstone Hotel is said to have been built about 1807 for John Davis, a large landowner, and was an inn by 1850 for road travellers and visitors to the mineral springs; tradition names Lafayette (1824), Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt as guests. A writer in 1882 recalled 'such endless cavalcades of coaches and wagons' and droves of sheep and cattle that 'blocked the way for miles'. Railroads later took much of that traffic. When cars came, the State Roads Commission rebuilt the pike in Allegany County between 1911 and 1915, set a concrete water trough marked 'S.R.C. 1915' by a spring below Town Hill, and replaced wooden bridges with concrete ones, among them a slab bridge over Snib Run (1916) and an open-spandrel arch over Fifteen Mile Creek (1917). Garages, gas pumps, Shipway's Restaurant and the Town Hill Hotel served drivers until later realignments and the National Freeway took the through traffic away.

By the end of the 1920s most of the failed orchard land belonged to the Allegany Orchards Corporation, and the Depression ended any revival. The land was cutover, burned, and planted with failing orchards. In 1931 the state forestry service under State Forester Fred W. Besley took an interest in it, and in August 1932 the deed to the State for 11,616 acres was recorded. DNR's own publications give other figures for the first purchase, about 2,000 acres in 1931 and about 14,400 acres; the 1932 deed is the only figure tied to a record. The first state work on the land was done by the Civilian Conservation Corps from 1933, chiefly fire control. The State kept adding land. By DNR's 2019 plan the forest covers 47,560 acres, the second-largest state forest in Maryland and about 12 percent of all the land DNR manages. Most of it is the even-aged oak that grew up after the clearing.