The Great Wagon Road

by Randell Jones, December 2021

The “Great Wagon Road” is essential to the history of our becoming America. It is the backbone to a story—one of many that can be told, of course—about the backcountry of America’s southern colonies. This one is a story about some of those who were there before and during the American Revolution and how and when they arrived.

The Great Wagon Road ran south from Pennsylvania through the Shenandoah Valley, the broad and long valley viewed by Virginia’s Royal Governor Spotswood and the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe in 1716.
(See “A Pleasure To Cross the Mountains” under “1771.”)

But, despite the promise of Spotswood’s discovery, the mountains remained the preeminent barrier to westward movement from the coastal settlements. Instead, the inviting Shenandoah Valley was settled from the north with European-American immigrant families moving south from the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, area during the middle decades of the 18th century. It was this settlement pattern into the backcountry of the mid-Atlantic colonies which gave rise to the notation “Great Philadelphia Wagon Road” appearing on the 1751 Fry-Jefferson map of Virginia. It was created by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, father of Thomas Jefferson. This perhaps grandiosely—perhaps promotionally—named pathway extended through Virginia into the piedmont of North Carolina and into the piedmont of South Carolina and then on to Augusta on the Georgia side of the Savannah River. The farther south along it one was, the less relevant was the reference to an increasingly distant “Philadelphia.”

The Great Wagon Road was a wide transportation corridor, not a single path, although in most places the dominant route was well worn. In places along the corridor, alternate routes were favored for one reason or another, such as using an upstream river ford instead of another during times of spring flood. Many communities today lay claim to being on the Great Wagon Road, and they were, but, in fact, were on one of many such paths used in the area and across the decades to move people and animals and goods in that general, north-south direction along that corridor.

**Freight wagons were the principal means of moving cargo along the Great Wagon Road. The teamster could use a saddle to ride the “wheel horse” or walk alongside.**

The “road” in all its routes was hardly great infrastructure. It was bare ground, a dirt track worn by use. In places, it had rocks and wagon-shaking ruts. For that reason and others, people walked or rode horseback. The image of the “buckboard” wagon of the late 1800’s with the driver sitting in the wagon was not the case along the Great Wagon Road. The wagon was for carrying goods, cargo. Conestoga wagons were a specific design of freight wagon and made in Conestoga Township of the Lancaster valley, Pennsylvania. They had curved bottoms to keep the jostled contents pitching toward the center of the wagon-bed, so that less of the cargo got bounced out. They were the most popular wagon used along the Great Wagon Road.

Regardless of what it was not, the Great Wagon Road was a known route. People talked about it and where it led. It was a path settlers could reliably follow moving southward toward new opportunity. And wagons could use it heading north to haul produce. Drovers herded cattle, hogs, and turkeys to markets. And it was on this path and its ancillary routes out of Virginia into the Carolina backcountry that settlers of Scots-Irish, German, English, French Huguenot and others moved in the 1750s and 1760s.

Daniel Boone on the Great Wagon Road, 1752
Indeed, a young Daniel Boone, who would become America’s pioneer hero, moved south from Pennsylvania along the Great Wagon Road in the early 1750s. He arrived with this parents, Squire and Sarah, and siblings into North Carolina by following that route from their home in today’s Berks County, Pennsylvania. They started south on May 1, 1750, and stopped at Linville Creek near today’s Harrisburg, Virginia, for two years. During that time, the 17-year-old Daniel and his good friend Henry Miller, an apprentice moving south with the family, went on their first long hunt. The two lads followed the Great Wagon Road down the Shenandoah Valley to where the road broke east out of the valley and through the Blue Ridge Mountains at Big Lick, today’s Roanoke. Daniel and Henry hunted deer for several weeks in the southern piedmont of Virginia, returning home to Boone’s parents at Linville Creek laden with skins. The two successful, young hunters then rode with their pack horses carrying the deer skins back to Philadelphia to sell their hides. The distances were great, but this is how early settlers made use of the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road reaching out from the settled parts of Colonial Pennsylvania into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and beyond, enabling them to connect back to established markets. (Linville Creek in Virginia is named for the same William Linville as is Linville Creek in North Carolina.)

Forks of the Yadkin
In 1752, Squire Boone moved his family from Linville Creek, Virginia, into the North Carolina piedmont. They arrived along the Great Wagon Road, knowing of the route by word of mouth and Daniel’s scouting, if not also by Squire’s own investigation of available lands in North Carolina. Squire acquired two tracts of land, each 640 acres, in the Forks of the Yadkin region (today’s Davie and Yadkin counties).

One of the earliest settlers into this backcountry region of the North Carolina piedmont arrived in 1748, just ahead of Squire Boone. He was Morgan Bryan, grandfather of Rebecca Bryan, the eventual wife of Daniel Boone. Bryan owned so much land along the Yadkin River that some other would-be land purchasers had to look long and hard to find a place to buy.

A Moravian Mission
In 1752, Moravian Bishop Augustus Gottlieb Spangenberg came to North Carolina to purchase land on which to establish a Moravian mission. Lord Granville, the one of the eight Lords Proprietors who did not sell this land grant back to the Crown in 1729, had invited the bishop to look in his district. The Granville District included about the northern third of North Carolina, reaching from the coast to the mountains and beyond at a width of about 65 miles south from the Virginia border. Spangenberg left Edenton, North Carolina, and headed west. Once in the mountains, he and his guide moved back east along the Yadkin River and had to keep moving ever farther east until he found something Bryan did not own. Finding promising land in Dobb’s Parish, Spangenberg acquired 99,000 acres in today’s Forsyth County. Named Wachau, or Wachovia, it was initially settled by Moravians moving south from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. They established Bethabara in 1753 and Bethania in 1759, adding Salem in 1766. These Moravian settlements were accessible along spur routes from the Great Wagon Road which continued south to Salisbury. That town was founded in 1753 on the Yadkin River at the Trading Ford where the Great Wagon Road crossed. As later settlements spread out across the Carolina piedmont, late in the 1760’s, land was set aside for what soon became Charlotte Town, named in honor of the wife of King George III. By then, settlers had already spilled into the Upcountry of South Carolina where The Great Wagon Road favored a couple of routes through the piedmont and led to the Savannah River at Augusta, passing through Camden on one route.

Along this Great Wagon Road corridor and from the settlements spawned by its access to lands previously occupied by indigenous people, one part of the broad history of the backcountry of the Southern colonies was written during the colonial era. It is a story—but only one story—of our becoming America. •