A GREAT HISTORY Of OUR
ANCESTORS...
Since our ancestors all had to get to TN somehow, I thought
you would all be interested in this speech on the Old Wagon Trail that was
posted on the Rowan Roots list this morning.
I am willing to stand corrected, but I would say a sizeable percentage
used this road, except for those hardy souls that landed on the shores or river
basins of the Chesapeake bay and traipsed gradually across VA and NC.
By: Kevin Cherry
When the crops were in, they started. Early in the
morning-even early For farm people, they'd set out. During the first years,
they walked, Leading five or six pack animals laden with supplies: tools, seed,
fabric. In places, the famous path they trod was only three or four feet wide.
The wilderness literally crept right up to their feet and brushed their faces
as they walked.
In later years they marched alongside oxen as these
oversized beasts pulled two-wheeled carts heaped to overflowing, crossing
rivers that licked high about their animals' flanks and often soaked every
single, individual piece of their worldly possessions.
Finally, when the path had been worn clear by thousands and
thousands of previous travelers, they rode in wagons that, themselves, grew as
the path widened into an honest to goodness road. These
Pennsylvania-German-built wagons (Conestoga-Wagon) at their largest would be
twenty-six feet long, Eleven feet high and some could bear loads up to ten
tons. It took five or six
pairs of horses to pull them. These big vehicles, the
eighteen wheelers of their day, were called "Liners" and
"Tramps." Ships would later gain their nicknames.
No matter if they walked or rode, in the mid afternoon, they
stopped to take care of the animals, prepare food, and put up the defense for
the night.
The cries of wolves in the distance and the pop of twigs
just outside of the firelight sounded danger. Bands of Indians in the early
days, bands of thieves later,, chased away deep sleep-no matter how tiring the
day, how bone-weary the traveler. The fastest loaded wagon could go about five
miles a day. The trip took a minimum of two months.
Wagons broke down, rivers flooded, supplies gave out, and
there was sickness but no doctors. Wagons were repaired, floods ceded, the
wilderness supplied, and the sick were buried or stumbled on.
This is the first great interior migration in our nation's
history. It's the story of a road, the Great Pennsylvania Wagon Road.
The Road
Only a few trails cut through the vast forests, which
covered the continent between the northernmost colonies and Georgia, the
southern tip. The settlers, as they moved inland, usually followed the paths
over which the Indians had hunted and traded. The Indians, in turn, had
followed the pre-historical traces of animals. Who knows why the animals
wandered where they did, but some of those early travelers on that road, the
Scots-Irish Presbyterians, would have assured us it was certainly
predetermined.
Even so, few paths crossed the Appalachians, which formed a
barrier between the Atlantic plateau and the unknown interior. In his 1755 map
of the British Colonies, Lewis Evans labeled the Appalachians, "Endless
Mountains."
And so they must have seemed to the daring few who pierced
the heart of The wooded unknown. But through this unknown, even then, there was
a road.
The Iroquois tribesmen of the North had long used the great
warriors' Path to come south and trade or make war in Virginia and the
Carolinas. This vital link between the native peoples led from the Iroquois
Confederacy around the Great Lakes through what later became Lancaster and
Bethlehem, Pa through York to Gettysburg and into Western Maryland around what
is now Hagerstown. It crossed the Potomac River at Evan Watkins' Ferry,
followed the narrow path across the backcountry to Winchester, through the
Shenandoah Valley of Virginia to Harrisonburg, Staunton, Lexington, and
Roanoke. On it went into Salem, NC, and on to Salisbury, where it was joined by
the east-west Catawba and Cherokee Indian Trading Path at the Trading Ford
across the Yadkin River. On to Charlotte and Rock Hill, SC where it branched to
take two routes, one to Augusta and another to Savannah, Georgia. It was some
road, but it was just a narrow line through the continuous forest. Virginia's
Gov. Col. Alexander Spotswood first discovered this Great Road in 1716 when his
"Knights of the Golden Horseshoe," finally crossed the
mountains, drank a toast to King George's health and buried
a bottle claiming the vast valley for the King of England. His Knights' motto
became "Sic Juvat Transcendere Montes, ~ or "Behold, we cross the
mountains." In 1744, a treaty between the English colonists and the
Indians gave the white men control of the road for the first time. By 1765 the
Great Wagon Road was cleared all along it way enough to hold horse drawn
vehicles and by 1775, the road stretched 700 miles. Boys and dogs, smelling
like barnyards, drove tens of thousands of pigs to market along this road,
which grew gradually worse the farther South you went. Inns and ordinaries,
which spotted the road undoubtedly taught more than a few of them the ways of
the world.
But that was all later. The majority of the folks who by the
thousands would walk over Spotswood's buried bottle would have probably thought
his whole 1716 ceremony a little preposterous and quite a bit pretentious. You
see, they were plain folk trying to get away from Latin, from mottoes, and from
knights with horseshoes no matter their element of manufacture, lead to gold.
They
were as different from Spotswood's cavaliers as a golden
horseshoe is from an ox's hoof.
Who were the Wagon Road's
Travelers?
For 118 years, the English and Dutch settled the New World,
lining the harbors and pointing their cities, their eyes, their hearts to the
east, across the Atlantic. They were on the fringes of a vast continent but,
for the most part, they forever more turned away from it and toward home.
They were certainly colonists, even those stem- faced few
who came to these shores for religious reasons, and most of the other settlers,
you see, had come to expand the business opportunities of home establishments.
Their ties to those establishments were strong.
It took a different kind of settler, someone who had cut his
ties altogether, someone who didn't really have all that much to lose, to look
west at a wilderness and there see something more than raw materials ready for
exploitation. It took folks like the Germans and the Scots Irish to put their
backs to the ocean and see home in front of them.
Escaping devastating wars, religious persecution, economic
disasters, and all of those other things that still cause people to come to
these shores, the Scots Irish and the Germans had no intention of returning to
their native lands. They were here to stay. They didn't look east but to the
south and west-toward land. They didn't see wolves and Indians. They saw
opportunities. And as different as the Germans and the Scots Irish were, they
had what it took to flourish in the backcountry. Not possessions that could be
lost in the fording of a river, not personal contacts and the sponsorship of powerful
men, but rough and tumble ability and a heavy streak of stubbornness. They knew
slash and bum agriculture, they knew pigs, they could hunt and forage, they
knew hard work. They built their cabins the exact same way. And eventually,
they traveled together in that same heavy stream southward along the Great
Pennsylvania Wagon Road.
In 1749, 12,000 Germans reached Pennsylvania. By 1775 ,
there were I 10,000 people of German birth in that colony, one-third of the
population. When
Philadelphia was a cluster of Inns and Ordinaries: the Blue
Anchor, Pewter Platter, Penny-Pot, Seven Stars, Cross Keys, Hornet and Peacock,
Benjamin Franklin, one of that era's most open-minded men asked, "Why
should the Palatinate Boors be suffered to swan-n into our settlement and by
herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours?
Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a
colony of aliens Who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of
our Anglicizing them and will never adopt our language or customs any more than
they can acquire our complexion."
But the Germans kept coming, thinking like their Scots Irish
compatriots Who are recorded as noting that!, "It was against the law of
God and nature That so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted
it to labor
On and raise their bread."
In short,, Pennsylvania was flooded.
There is probably no more beautiful land anywhere than that
part of Pennsylvania now known as the "Amish Country." It must have
appeared to those people fresh off of the boat, truly a land flowing with milk
and honey. But it filled rapidly. Land became expensive. The most important
reason why the Germans and Scots-Irish put what little they owned on their backs
and took the southbound road was the cost of land in Pennsylvania. A fifty-
acre farm in Lancaster County, PA would have cost 7 pounds 10
shillings in 1750. In the Granville District of North
Carolina, which comprised the upper half of the state, five shillings would buy
100 acres.
The crossing of an ocean was move enough for most of the
early immigrants.
The generation, which could still feel the waves beneath
their feet when elderly, often stayed in Pennsylvania, but their children
repeated their parent's adventure. Often, they cast off their lines, raised
whatever anchors they had, and ~'sailed" south right after their
patriarchs had gone to their reward.
As North Carolina's Secretary of State, William L. Saunders
wrote in 1886, "Immigration, in the early days, divested of its glamour
and brought down to solid fact, is the history of a continuous search for good
bottom land."
In their search for bottom land, English colonists
encroached onto territories claimed by France. This pressure became one of the
reasons the French and Indians went to war against England and her colonists.
The Germans and Scots bore the brunt of the war, a cabin burning,
wife-kidnapping, farm ambushing, bloody, horrible guerrilla war. For eleven
years mayhem reigned on the frontier. In 1756, three years after the war
started, George Washington wrote that the Appalachian frontiersmen
were" in a general motion towards
the southern colonies" and that Virginia's westernmost counties would soon
be emptied. Western North Carolina seemed to those escaping the war to be safer
because the Cherokee were on the British side-at least at the beginning. To
western North Carolina they came. This French and Indian War, which started the
year Rowan County was created, joined the quest for more and better land as a
major factor in sending those Germans and Scots-Irish down the Wagon Road to
safer territory. Not only that but, the peace treaty that ended the war stated
that no English settlers would go over the Appalachians. Thus, the best
unclaimed land In all of the colonies lay along the Yadkin, Catawba and
Savannah Rivers between the years 1763 and 1768.
When the war ended in 1764, the western settlements of
Pennsylvania had suffered a loss of population. Virginia and North Carolina had
grown.
When those Scots Irish and Germans got here "the
country of the upper Yadkin teemed with game. Bears were so numerous it was
said that a hunter could lay by two or three thousand pounds of bear grease in
a season. The tale was told in the forks that nearby Bear Creek took its name
from the season Boone killed 99 bears along its waters. The deer were so
plentiful that an
ordinary hunter could kill four or five a day; the deerskin
trade was an important part of the regional economy. In 1753 more than 30,000
skins were exported from North Carolina, and thousands were used within the
colony for the manufacture of leggings, breeches and moccasins."
In 1755, NC Gov. Arthur Dobbs wrote to England that the
"Yadkin is a large beautiful river. Where there is a ferry it is nearly
300 yards over it, [which] was at this time fordable, scarce coming to the
horse's bellies." At six miles distant, he said, "I arrived at
Salisbury the county seat of Rowan. The town is just laid out, the courthouse
built,, and 7 or 8 log houses built."
Most of Salisbury's householders ran public houses, letting
travelers up at their table-and drink, too. In 1762, there were 16 public
houses. There was also a shoe factory, a prison, a hospital and armory all here
before the Revolution.
Even so, it was still only an outpost in the wilderness.
Salisbury was for twenty-three years the farthest west county seat in the
colonies. And through this outpost the wagon road ran, and on that road the
immigrants continued to travel even after the area was settled. Governor Tryon
wrote to England that more than a thousand wagons passed through Salisbury in
the Fall and Winter of 1765. That works out to about six immigrant wagons per
day.
In the last sixteen years of the colonial era," wrote
historian Carl Bridenbaugh, "Southbound traffic along the Great
Philadelphia Wagon Rowan was numbered in tens of thousands. It was the most
heavily traveled road in all America and must have had more vehicles jolting
along its rough and tortuous way than all the other main roads put
together."
When the British captured Philadelphia, the Continental
Congress escaped down the Pennsylvania Wagon Road. Daniel Boone and Davy
Crockett traveled it. George Washington knew it as an Indian fighter. John
Chisholm knew it as an Indian trader. Countless soldiers-Andrew Jackson, Andrew
Pickens, Andrew Lewis, Francis Marion, Lighthorse Harry Lee, Daniel Morgan, and
George Rogers Clark, among them-fought over it. Both the North and South would
use it during the Civil War.
And down this road, this glorified overgrown footpath
through the middle Of nowhere leading to even greater depths of nowhere, came
those people
Looking for a better life for themselves and their
children,, down it came those settlers, those hardworking stubborn Scots Irish
and Germans: the preachers, the blacksmiths, and farmers. Down it came the
Holshousers and the Barringers, the Alexanders and the Grahams, the Millers and
the Earnhardts, the Catheys and the Knoxes, the Blackwelders and the Halls, and
the Cherrys and the Brauns and the Fishers.
When the crops were in, on a day like today, they started.
Thank you.
Kevin Cherry
Rowan County Library Historian