Westfield–Mayville corridor The
Westfield–
Mayville corridor was originally connected by way of a long
Native American trail. French explorers, led by
Étienne Brûlé, apparently discovered the trail in 1615 and used it periodically thereafter; since Brûlé did not write about his journeys and the only evidence of them comes from secondhand sources, the tribes who originally occupied the territory at the time of Brûlé's pass-through remain unknown (in contrast,
Joseph de La Roche Daillon, who conducted a missionary journey further east in 1626, kept meticulous notes that to this day are the only surviving accounts of pre-
Beaver Wars native activity in Western New York). In 1749, an expedition under the command of
Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville landed at the mouth of
Chautauqua Creek on
Lake Erie with the intent of claiming the Ohio Valley for the French. They hacked out a road to
Chautauqua Lake through the forests that lined the trail on their way to the
Allegheny River and thus to the
Ohio River. Another French expedition in 1753 converted the
portage road into a military road. The road was still in evidence in 1802 when settlers first moved into the area. They called it the "Old French Road" and the
Holland Land Company used it as the western end of Chautauqua Road, the first road cut through the Southern Tier of Western New York.
Designations commemorating the Old Portage Road. When the first set of posted routes in
New York were assigned in 1924, what is now NY 394 from
Westfield to
Mayville, as well as from
Jamestown to Steamburg, was designated as part of
NY 17, a cross-state highway extending across the
Southern Tier from Westfield to
New Jersey. In the
1930 renumbering of state highways in New York, an alternate route of NY 17 from Mayville to
Jamestown was designated as NY 17J from Mayville to Ashville and part of
NY 74 from Ashville to Jamestown. In the mid-1930s, NY 17J was extended eastward to rejoin NY 17 at Washington Street in Jamestown, creating an
overlap with NY 74. This overlap was eliminated in the mid-1940s when NY 74 was truncated to Ashville. NY 17, meanwhile, was extended to Barcelona to meet
NY 5 by 1946. Construction began on a new
limited-access highway through
Cattaraugus and
Chautauqua counties (part of the modern
Southern Tier Expressway) in the mid-1960s. The initial section of the highway, extending from Kennedy (exit 14) to
Randolph (exit 16), opened to traffic by 1967 By November 1973, the expressway had been extended west to Fluvanna (exit 11) and east to Steamburg (exit 17). NY 17 was then realigned to follow the expressway while its former routing from Jamestown to Steamburg, as well as all of NY 17J, was redesignated as NY 394. In the late 1970s, NY 394 was extended northwestward to Barcelona, overlapping NY 17. The concurrency was only temporary as NY 17 was realigned to follow the Southern Tier Expressway from Bemus Point to
Mina once that segment was completed in the early 1980s. On April 1, 1980, ownership and maintenance of NY 394 from Westfield to Barcelona was transferred from Chautauqua County to New York State as part of a highway maintenance swap between the two levels of government. ==Major intersections==