Most Virginia turnpikes ran east to west, carrying traffic between the Tidewater and the trans-Appalachian frontier. The Weston and Gauley Bridge Turnpike, chartered in the 1840s and built starting in 1847, was different: it was meant to run north and south through the mountains, connecting the Northwestern Turnpike (the east-west road from Winchester to Parkersburg) to the Parkersburg-to-Staunton turnpike further south. The idea was to give farmers, millers, and salt makers in Lewis, Braxton, and Nicholas counties a reliable wagon road by which to ship their products to market. The route would also link grist mills and sawmills at Sutton and Burnsville, and the salt works and timber operations at Bulltown, to a larger commercial network. The construction was funded partly by selling stock in the turnpike company - a common nineteenth-century arrangement that often ended in trouble.

Trouble found this turnpike. Construction was delayed by repeated instances of mismanagement and conflicts of interest among the directors of the joint-stock company. Work proceeded in fits and starts through the late 1840s and into the 1850s. The largest single engineering feature of the road - a cable suspension bridge spanning 460 feet across the Elk River at Sutton - was finished before 1857. That bridge was a substantial piece of engineering for its day and place, comparable in technology if not scale to the much larger Roebling bridges then being built over the Niagara and the Ohio. It has not survived, but the alignment it carried still climbs the ridge above Sutton in the form of the preserved trail.

The turnpike was barely complete when the Civil War transformed it from a commercial road into a military one. In 1861, Union troops used it to move into western Virginia and seize control of the loyalist counties that would shortly become West Virginia. Two years later, on October 13, 1863, the road carried the federal supply trains and the Confederate raiders who fought the daylong skirmish at Bulltown, a few miles up the line. Whoever held the turnpike could move artillery, infantry, and dispatches between the Greenbrier and Kanawha valleys. Whoever lost it lost the ability to coordinate forces across the central West Virginia mountains. The Battle of Bulltown was, in essence, a struggle over a stretch of this road and the river crossing it served.

The turnpike soldiered on after the war as a working road, but the twentieth century pushed it aside. When US Route 19 was laid out across central West Virginia in the 1920s, planners followed the easier grades in the valley bottoms wherever possible. Long sections of the old turnpike were incorporated into the new highway; longer sections were simply bypassed. Those bypassed sections, lifted out of the flow of traffic, were left alone. They never received pavement, never received guardrails, never received the widenings and re-alignments that modern road maintenance demands. By the late twentieth century, ten miles of original turnpike survived along the ridges near Burnsville in essentially their 1850s condition - twenty feet wide, unpaved, with the wheel ruts of nineteenth-century wagons still faintly visible in places. The Army Corps of Engineers acquired this stretch as part of the Burnsville Lake project and reopened it as a marked hiking trail. The 1995 National Register listing protects it as a working example of an antebellum turnpike, complete with the ridge-running alignment that modern highway engineers would never choose today.