West Virginia Route 480 (known then as WV 48) was established in the early 1920s and paved a few years later, but it wasn't until the 1970s that it was renamed WV 480.
WV 480 was originally established in the early 1920s as West Virginia Route 48. In its original 1922 state route system, the West Virginia State Road Commission established WV 48 along the Smithfield and Shepherdstown Road from WV 49 (later WV 9, now WV 115) at Kearneysville through Shepherdstown to the Potomac River. The Shepherdstown routing was paved as 18-foot-wide (5.5 m) concrete streets in 1924 and 1925, and the road from the town south to Kearneysville was constructed as a 16-foot-wide (4.9 m) bituminous macadam road in 1925. The state renumbered WV 48 as WV 480 between 1975 and 1977 after US 48 was assigned to the fMorgantownCumberland freeway that later became part of Interstate 68. Macadam is a type of road construction, pioneered by Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam around 1820, in which single-sized crushed stone layers of small angular stones are placed in shallow lifts and compacted thoroughly. He moved to Bristol, England, in 1802 and became a Commissioner for Paving in 1806. 
