The larger endeavor, one also championed by Benjamin Franklin and other founding fathers, of connecting the coastal communities with the newly blossoming trans-Allegheny settlements — a pet project of Washington given his holdings of vast lands in West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania from his days as frontier surveyor and militia officer — eventually failed due to a combination of factors affecting ability to attain sufficient capitalization such as an unstable American economy, a lack of overall population to provide investors, lack of government aid from a poor government, and conflicts between states. Although the company charter was surrendered to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company in 1828, its curtailment has overall minor significance only as in that it serves as an example of how a deficient amount of support from the responsible leadership balancing the federal government can seem to undermine a large, desirable infrastructure project that is a conceptual overreach, or could attract sufficient private funding. Its apparent failure, on the other hand, can be understood as a project which gave way to a superior technology, as railways came along and grew up before the slow subscription system of stocks common to the day attracted sufficient funding. In the day, men of means and many such officials of the early Federalist U.S. government were very conscious of the desirable effects of building transportation infrastructure to link the near west and tie it to the eastern seaboard. As settlers poured west over the mountains after the Revolutionary War, serious concerns arose that newly settled lands would become financially tied better to and so make arrangements with Spanish, French, or British colonies to the west, south, and Canada, and given a look at water communication, the risk was very real. Hence, from the start, the fledgling Constitutional Republic was conscience of benefits that could accrue from its involvement in developing infrastructure in the fledgling republic but was unable to generate revenues to boost such efforts. The rare exception in the era receiving federal public works monies was over a decade later and deemed far less risky, the Cumberland Turnpike conversion into a migration wagon road and the first National Highway, later to become US 40.