Labeled Haverford and Merion Ave. through the 1920 atlas; connected the Merion (1695) and Haverford (1700) meeting houses. In the early 20th century its course west of Narberth was renamed Wynnewood and Eagle roads.
Maps before 1879 show the road crossing the railroad at grade between Elm and Wynnewood stations. That year the Pennsylvania Railroad completed its "Great Fill" that levelled the trackbed, necessitating the North Wynnewood Road tunnel, truncating the old road, and vacating its path north of the tracks west of the borough.
Research by Ardmore-raised amateur historian Charles Barker (1876–1961) in the 1920s and '30s reveals the street's earliest route east of Merion Meeting led to Levering's Ford on the Schuylkill (approximately at the Belmont Ave./Green Lane bridge), via today's Meeting House Lane and Levering Mill Road. In the 1700s, it was easier to get to Philadelphia by fording the river and connecting to the Ridge Road, before Montgomery Avenue connected to ferries downriver.
In 1777 the Continental Army retreated over this section of the road after the Battle of Brandywine:
On Sunday September 14, 1777, Washington's army crossed from the Roxborough side of the Schuylkill to the Lower Merion side via Levering's ford. Journals of participants describe: "the water being nearly up to the waist" and before dark "(we) reached the great road to Lancaster at Merion Meeting House, and proceeded up that road, when we encamped in an open field…"
Charles R. Barker, The Haverford-And-Merion Road To Philadelphia: A Walk Over an Old Trail, in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 58, No. 3 (The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, July 1934), pages 232-254.
"General Wayne Inn" by Mary M. Wood and James B. Garrison, in The First 300 (Lower Merion Historical Society, 2000), page 47.