Trails - Great Wagon Road Folder 2FROM PHILADELPHIA TO THE SOUTH
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■1/ MRKE ROIRSE,JR.
This eleventh volume in the American
Trails Series brings the reader back East
to the area soon to be the focal point
of the nation's bicentennial. The chron-
icle of the Great Philadelphia Wagon
Road is the story of infant America.
Few trails in early America were more
important than the Indian route which
extended east of the Appalachians from
Pennsylvania to Georgia. This ancient
Warriors' Path had long been used by
Iroquois tribesmen of the north to go
south to trade, hunt, or make war. After
a series of treaties with the powerful
Five Nations of the Iroquois, the Eng-
lish acquired the route which was to
become the principal highway of the
colonial back country. By the end of the
colonial era traffic was numbered in
tens of thousands—more traffic than an
other main roads put together.
With the coming of canals, turnpikes,
and railroads, however, the Wagon
Road lost its importance, new waves of
European emigrants no longer came
south, and the once -rustic "back coun-
try" no longer looked to the east for
(continued on back /lap)
(continued from front (lap)
amenities or enlightenment. But the
character of the people along its route
did not change, and it is still known for
Andrew and Stonewall Jackson, Cyrus
McCormick, James Polk, James Bu-
chanan, and their kinsmen. The Great
Wagon Road was the pathway to op-
portunity, and opportunity made Amer-
ica grow.
A descendant of one of the first 104
settlers of Virginia in 1607, Parke
Rouse, Jr., is the Executive Director
of the Jamestown Foundation and at the
same time the Director of the Virginia
Independence Bicentennial Commis-
sion. Previously he was the Sunday edi-
tor of the Richmond Times -Dispatch.
His writing reflects a lifetime of living
in Virginia. In addition to several arti-
cles Mr. Rouse is the author of Virginia:
The English Heritage in America,
Planters and Pioneers: Life in Colonial
Virginia, and Below the James Lies
Dixie,
jacket design by Jeheban & Peace
illustration by Cathy Hull
McGraw-Hill Book Company
1221 Avenue of the Americas
New York, N.Y. 10020
Other volumes in the Prize-winning The American Trails SeriesI �I RousEl
General Editor: A.B. Guthrie. Jr. ��J
THE GOLDEN ROAD
The Story of California's Spanish Mission Trail by Felix Riesenberg, Jr.
Mr. Riesenberg debunks, humanizes, and supplies a great wealth of lively detail. His
knowledge ... is both comprehensive and intimate.... It is as vivid, as immediate in style
and conception as a popular novel."—Virginia Kirkus
THE OLD POST ROAD
The Story of the Boston Past Road by Stewart H. Holbrook.
"Mr. Holbrook writes ... with the crisp, expressive accents of a northern New Englander
... with a zest for exploring the quaint and intriguing, as well as the relevant and the vital.
-
He has taken one of the high roads of history and given it its due."
S
—New York Herald Tribune
t
'
THE CALIFORNIA TRAIL
An Epic with Many Hemp by George Stewart.
'
"Mr. Stewart's story is essentially that of the daring, the venturesome, the few... [the)
swashers and bucklers of the past."—New York Times
•!,
WESTWARD VISION
The Story of the Oregon Trail by David Lavender.
"Tremendously interesting and vital treatment ... gripping in quality."—Thomas D. Clark,
Professor of History, University of Kentucky
DOOMED ROAD OF EMPIRE
I
The Spanish Trail of Conquest by Budding Carter.
I'
"A fascinating cache of little-known material.... Admirable format and maps and illua--,
trations."—Chicago Tribune Magazine of Books
`
THE GATHERING OF ZION
The Story of the Mormon Trail by Wallace Stegner.
'
"The best single volume on the Mormon migration westward."—Book Week
o
THE GREAT NORTH TRAIL
jy
America's Route of the Ages by Dan Cushman.
"Here, then, is a book which will entertain all, and captivate the attention of many scholar;
and laymen alike."—Journal of the West
1+"
•;'
THE EL DORADO TRAIL
j1J�
'
The story of the Gold Rush Routes across Mexico by Ferol Egan.
k
"Mr. Egan combines a novelist's sense of personality and drama with imposing scholarship;
pppp
his twelve pages of bibliography and eleven pages of footnotes being fused with a maw
t�
cent story."—New York Times
THE BLOODY BOZEMAN
The Perilous Trail to Montana's Gold by Dorothy M. Johnson.
"Dorothy Johnson's telling is rich with anecdotes and authentic tales ... some from the
diaries of the pioneers themselves.... For lovers of genuine Western lore, this is rewarding
reading."—Publishets WeeklyA
l..
.0
I'
IN PREPARATION: .•
'� . '�
THE SANTA FE TRAIL by William Brandon
! ~:
PROLOGUE
For nearly 150 years after North America was settled, it remained
a green wilderness. Only a few trails cut through the vast forests
which spread from New Hampshire to Georgia, for the Appalachian
Mountains thrust a stern barrier between the Atlantic plateau and
the unknown interior of the continent.
As settlers moved inland, they usually followed. the paths over
which Indians had hunted and traded. Many of these trails had
been worn down in earlier ages by buffalo, which once had roamed
the eastern uplands in search of grazing lands. These paths usually
followed valleys and river shores.
Few trails in early America were more important than the Indian
route which extended east of the Appalachians from Pennsylvania
to Georgia. This ancient Warriors' Path was long used by Iroquois
tribesmen of the north to come south and trade or make war in
Virginia and the Carolinas. Then, by a series of treaties with the
powerful Five Nations of the Iroquois, the English acquired the use
of the Warriors' Path. After 1744, they took over the land itself.
The growth of the route after 1744 into the principal highway of
the colonial back country is an important chapter in the develop-
ment of a nation. Over this Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, vast
numbers of English, Scotch -Irish, and Germanic settlers entered this
continent and claimed lands.
Conn ht 01973 by Padw Rouse, Jr.
AU
The endless procession of new settlers, Indian traders, soldiers,
"In
rights reserved. Printed in the United States of
and missionaries swelled as the Revolution approached. the last
America. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form
sixteen years of the colonial era," wrote the historian Carl Briden-
"
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
baugh, southbound traffic along the Great Philadelphia Wagon
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written pe:mis-
don of the publisher,
Road was numbered in tens of thousands; it was the most heavily
123458789BP BP79WOM
traveled road in all American '
and must have had more vehicles
jolting along its rough and tortuous way than all other main roads
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
put together."
Rouse, Parke, 1915-
The Great wagon Road: from Philadelphia to the
South.
As the principal highway of the eighteenth -century frontier south='
w ard from Pennsylvania, the Wagon Road also played an important
(American trail series, v. ll)
part in the French and Indian wars and in the American Revolution.
Bibliography: p. 271
1. United States—His period.
Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett traveled it as explorers. George
ryry—Colonial
2. United States --Histo Aevolutton. 3. United
States—History--1783-1885, 1. Title. U. Series:
American
Washington knew it as an Indian fighter. Countless soldiers—
Andrew Jackson, Andrew Pickens, john Sevier, Andrew Lewis,
trail series (New York) v. 11.
E188.1185 973.5 72-8873
ISBN 0-07-054101-9
[iZ]
w
PROLOGUE
Francis Marion, Lighthorse Harry Lee, Daniel Morgan, and George
Rogers Clark among them—fought over it.
When British forces captured Philadelphia early in the Revolu-
tion, the Continental Congress escaped and fled down the Great
Wagon Road to York. Cornwallis and his troops traveled the Wagon
Road in their attempt to neutralize the southern colonies. Many
important battles were fought on or near the Road which became
the War's western front: Kings Mountain, the Cowpens, Guilford
Courthouse, Salisbury, and Camden were some of them.
From the Great Wagon Road, pioneers passed through Cumber-
land Gap and the Holston River settlements into the territories
which became Kentucky and Tennessee. This route, which Daniel
Boone opened in 1775, became an umbilical cord by which the first
sizeable trans -Appalachian settlements were nurtured to statehood.
Over this Wilderness Road went Henry Clay and the forebears of
Abraham Lincoln, among countless others.
The chronicle of the Wagon Road is the chronicle of infant
America, from 1607 until the age of the railway. It is the story of
achievement against great odds. Breaking with the European tradi-
tions which they brought to America with them, the diverse settlers
along the Wagon Road began to create the new American society
which changed the nineteenth-century history of the world.
Parke Rouse, Jr.
Jamestown, Virginia
1_1
Contents
Prologue
BOOK ONE
The Appalachian Warriors' Path
1. The Search for Eldorado
2. War among the Iroquois
BOOK TWO
The Philadelphia Wagon Road
3. Germans in Pennsylvania
4. Enter the Scotch -Irish
S. A Moravian Journey to Carolina
6. Along the Way South
7. Presbyterians in a New Land
8. Mapping the Great Mountains
9. Bethabara and New Salem
10. The Threat from the French
11. Life in the Appalachians
BOOK THREE
The Wilderness Trail
12. The Wagon Road Turns West
13. The Saga of Castle's Woods
14. Apostle of the Frontier
BOOK FOUR
A Frontier in Danger
15. Andrew Jackson of the Waxhaws
16. The Exodus of the Quakers
17. "The Old Wagoner" against the King
18. Conestoga's Gift
19. Hospitality, North and South
lZa
10,
10.
11,
12
15
16
Parke Rouse, Jr.
THE GREAT
AND
Philadelphia
To the
South
McGraw-Hill Book Company
New York St. Louis San Francisco
Diisseldorf London Mexico Sydney Toronto
Al �rr��l�k.
20.
The spirit of Luther
183
21.
In the Cabins along the Road
191
22.
Tuckahoe versus Cohee
201
BOOK FIVE
Division and Reunion
211
23.
Stagecoaches and Turnpikes
213
24.
Great Days of the Horne
225
25.
The Cherokees Go West
233
26.
The Day Doctor Dunkin Drove North
241
27.
Hot Heads and Cold Bodies
249
28.
A Road Is Reunited
2S7
Epilogue 265
Acknowledgments 269
Bibliography 271
Notes 277
Index 285
IZq
-BOOK ONE
The Appalachian
%Urfiors I Paffi
1607-1744
CHAPTER l
The Search for Eldorado
The handful of brave Europeans who explored inland during the
first hundred years of America's English settlement looked upon a
wilderness which dazzled them with its beauty and richness.
Except for scattered Indian tribes, it was an untouched land of
great trees and sparkling rivers. Flocks of wood pigeons, so endless
that they darkened the sky, migrated with the seasons. Great flights
of waterfowl—ducks, geese, and brant flew south from their Cana-
dian lair each fall, following the coastal rivers southward to nest
in the marshes of Chesapeake basin. Woods buffalo and deer made
trails through the dank forests.
But alas, much of this magic was lost on the early explorers in
Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina. They could not rest until they had
found their English Eldorado. Their hearts were set on finding rich
veins of gold and silver, as the Spanish had found in South America.
Next to gold and silver, they sought a watercourse through North
America to the "South Sea" or the "China Sea" ( Pacific Ocean) and
to the riches of the Orient. Time after time, Indian interpreters gave
them cryptic and tantalizing reports of that nearby sea. And time
after time, explorers found themselves balked by the steep moun-
tains of the Appalachians.
The search had been started by john Smith when he reached
Jamestown in 1601. One by one, he followed the Chesapeake Bay
estuaries westward to their fall line, and each time he was halted
The ever hopeful Smith then sent a report to the Dutch explorer,
Henry Hudson, urging him to continue the effort to find "a sea lead-
ing into the western ocean, by the north of the southern English
col,-%ny," but Hudson had no greater success than Smith had enjoyed.
4 . 1546, ambitious young Abraham Wood, who had come to
;a as an indentured servant and grown rich trading with the
led an exploring party westward from the upper James
over the Occonneechee Traders' Path. He hoped to verify
1, ::Idian account that
within five days' journey to the westward and by south, there is a
great high mountain, and at the foot thereof, great rivers that run
[3]
IHE GREAT WAGON ROAD
Into a great sea; and that there are men that come thither in ships
... and have reed caps on their heads, and ride on beasts like horses,
but have much longer ears.'
The explorers did not find this, but the doughty Wood did not gi
up. When he was an old man, he sent four experienced woodsme
west again In 1671, headed by Thomas Batte, "for the finding o
the ebbing and flowing of the waters on the other side of the mo
tains in order to the discovery of the South Sea." After inchi
through the Appalachians for sixteen days, the group was final
forced back, after reaching a tributary of the Mississippi River.
Wood they reported on their return: "We first proclaimed the Ki
in these words: 'Long live Charles the Second, by the grace of
King of England, Scotland, France, Ireland, and Virginia.' " 11
they had fired a salute and carved four trees with marks for Chari
II, Governor Berkeley of Virginia, Wood, and their Indian quid
Perecute.
John Lederer, a German physician who had come to Virginia
explore the west, was no more successful. Sent out by Govern
Berkeley three times in 1689-1670, he reached the top of the Bl
Ridge Mountains but mistook the haze of the valley beyond it f
an ocean's surface. "I had a beautiful prospect of the Atlantic
Ocean washing the Virginia -shore," he reported to Berkeley
Jamestown, "but to the north and west, my sight was sudden]
bounded by mountains higher than that I stood upon."
Slowly, through countless disappointing probes, the coast
settlers learned the immensity of the mountain range which para
leled the Atlantic Coast, several hundred miles inland, which t
Indians called the Appalachians. Extending southwesterly fro
Canada to the Gulf Coast Plain in the South in a succession
rocky ranges, they impeded the large-scale westward movement
the English colonists until after the American Revolution.
Few passes cut through the Appalachians, and these were o
scured by the dense growth of pines and hardwoods which cover
the face of colonial America. And though they were known to th
Indians, who found them by observing the course which eagle
followed across the mountains, the white men were slow to fin
these gaps. .
Just beyond the coastal plain, which Chesapeake settlers cal
"Tidewater" and Carolinians called "the low country," a hilly mi
land called "piedmont" ( foot of the mountains) led upward to th
[4]
THE SEARCH FOR ELDORADO
Appalachians. This was the fertile area which was destined to be-
come the American frontier in the crucial years from 1761 to 1783,
when the Appalachian settlers first fought the French and then the
ve English. It was the piedmont which became the main -artery of
n eighteenth -century settlement. To coastal settlers, this "upcountry"
ut or "back country" had developed by the eighteenth century into
�_ a convenient buffer against threat of Indians and French invaders
ng from the west.
ly The story of the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road is the story of
To the rise of this region, which became the first western frontier of the
Kir American nation created in 1789.
God Like the Wagon Road itself, the eastern foothills of the Ap-
t
en palachians became a bridge by which poor but hopeful immigrants
IS from Europe reached the Appalachians and the Deep South. In this
e, picturesque region, which reminded some Germanic pioneers of
the snowcapped terrain of Switzerland, are the mountain -stream
to headwaters of the rivers which flow eastward—Susquehanna, Poto-
Govern( mac, James—foaming over rocks to the fall line to form estuaries of
ue the Atlantic Ocean. Unlike the gentler undulations of the coastal
or plain, the land has a vigor which from its beginning encouraged
k individualism.
at Of all the mountain ranges of Appalachia, the Blue Ridge is the
y oldest and most serene. Formed 200 million years ago, it has been
weathered and softened by time. So gently does the piedmont
al ascend to it that it hardly seems to justify the heroic name "moun-
tain." Beyond, in the blue haze to the west, lie newer and more
he rugged chains like the Alleghanies and the Cumberlands. Between
m these ranges --called "Old Appalachia" and "New Appalachia"—
of lies the Great Appalachian Valley, whose northern end is called the
of Shenandoah and whose southwestern end becomes the Tennessee.
The green Eden thus encompassed is called the Valley of Virginia.
b. Not only did this upcountry of early America differ in its shape
but in its climate and its plant and animal life. Longleaf pines domi-
e na'. '' . P low -country landscape, but as the land rises toward the Ap-
s pas ills, these are intermixed with and finally replaced by hard -
WO we f pruce, and white pine. The flowing hillsides and mountains
of = ►. ppalachians produce a verdant growth of oak, maple, chest -
led nut .:..d hickory, whose bright red leafage in fall have dazzled settlers
d- from the time of Abraham Wood.
e Pb the chestnut which proved the upcountry's best wood.
NGmoi; svMe, ��
TSE GREAT WAGON ROAD
Easily split into logs for cabins and rails for fences, it was sought
for every settler's clearing along the western frontier. From its split
timbers, shingles were rived with mallet and froe to cover houses
and barns. From its bark, pioneers extracted tannic acid for tanning,
dyeing, and for medicine. And from the chestnuts it produced in
fall, the lean razorback hogs of the pioneers derived a fattening diet.
Almost equally valued was the hemlock, which grew in the damp
glens of the mountains, surrounded by great mazes of pink rhodo-
dendron.
The shrubs and flowers of the Appalachians also differed from
those of the lowlands farther east. The forest cover of the rocky
mountaintops resembled the colder regions to the north, where
spruce and white pine overlay a smaller growth of hardwoods. Many
years later, the Appalachians were to be called "The Trail of the
Lonesome Pine," for the slim, brave trees which thrust their trunks
a hundred feet above the rocky heights of the mountain peaks.
The wilderness of the Appalachians abounded in animals and
birds, whose night cries were as frightening as the Indians' and
sometimes were imitated by them. Wolves rent the darkness with
howls, and screech owls and hoot owls curdled it with terror. Pan-
thers and wildcats preyed on poultry and small livestock, while
rattlesnakes and copperheads offered a menace to both man and
beast.
The most impressive of the Appalachians' animals was the woods
buffalo, which had no counterpart in Europe. A peaceful "mammoth"
which browsed among canebrakes and nibbled spruce and balsam
buds, it was hunted to extinction in Virginia after 1794 and in
Kentucky by 1810. Smaller than the plains buffalo of the western
barrens, this shaggy mammoth roamed in groups of two or three—
usually a cow and her calves. White settlers came to value its neat
and hide as highly as the Indians did. Buffalo skins covered ; . t : wf
beams of pioneer settlers' lean-tos and cabins.
Though primitive man had lived in eastern America for n: +
10,000 years before Europeans settled in the Appalachians, e -
of Indian life were few there. The mountainous terrain wh.
rounded the Great Warriors' Path was a common hunting ra l .
Siouan- and Algonquian -speaking tribes living to the ea..
Iroquois to the west.
The tribes which bounded the Great Warriors' Path were almost
THE SEARCH FOR ELDORADO
as diverse as the English farmers, French tradesmen, German
protestants, and Scottish lowlanders who were to settle this portion
of the New World. Each of the tribes belonged to one of four major
language groups or "nations" which Europeans found living in the
woodlands of eastern America in the early years of American
colonization:
Iroquoian dependencies of the Five Nations spread over most of
the territory which came to be Pennsylvania. Other Iroquoian
tribes --chiefly the Cherokees and Tuscaroras --dominated the War-
riors' Path area in western Virginia and the Carolinas.
Algonquian lived along the coast from Canada southward
through the Carolinas, extending inland over the valley of the
Potomac River into what later became West Virginia.
Siouan dominated the piedmont plateau southward from Mary-
land through South -Carolina, wedged uncomfortably between the
Algonquians of the Atlantic Coast and the Iroquoian of the Ap-
palachian uplands.
Muskhogean filled the Gulf coastal region from Georgia west-
ward beyond the Mississippi River.
Among these tribesmen, it was the Cherokees of the Iroquoian
group who chiefly controlled the upland region of the Great War-
riors' Path. A large and widespread culture, the Cherokees lived in
villages on the eastern and western slopes of the Appalachians,
farming and hunting. Of all the southeastern Indian tribes, they
were the most numerous and powerful, dominating the fur trade of
the mountain South throughout the colonial years. As a result of
effective English diplomacy among the Cherokee chiefs, the tribes-
men were to fight with the English against the French in the 17Ws
and against the American colonists in the Revolution.
Next to the Cherokees, the Shawnees of the Ohio Valley—later
Tennessee and Kentucky—were to offer the greatest resistance to
colonization along the Great Warriors' Path. Belonging to the
Algonquian language group, the Shawnees came east frequently to
war against eastern tribes and later to devastate the western Virginia
settlements. Living in numerous separated groups, they combed the
Appalachian valleys in their wanderings. Many of the bloodiest
massacres in colonial history were Shawnee reprisals against the
westward movement of the English-speaking peoples.
The presence of the Indians in prehistoric America is one of the
THE GREAT WAGON IROAD
misty chapters of man's past. It is believed that they were products
of the Ice Age emigration of small groups of Mongolian hunters, who
crossed the Bering Straits as long as 50,000 years ago. Trekking
southward and eastward through Alaska and Canada, successive
generations of these hunters had followed herds of game onto the
Atlantic shelf.
In the dim ages before Europeans discovered America, these
nomads began to settle down and live as tribes. A thousand years or
more before the birth of Christ, prehistoric Indian hunters were
farming in small villages and building burial mounds in the region
which the English settlers of 1607 had claimed as their own. Living
In harmony with nature, these scattered tribes made but slight im-
pact on the forests and streams of the region. Their wigwams and
longhouses, covered with bark, hides, or reed mats and enclosed by
stockades, were a rare interruption in the endless pine forests of
the Appalachians and the undulating lands stretching eastward to
the Atlantic.
The Indian's Stone Age civilization destroyed relatively little of
the rich natural bounty of the land. True, they burned the vegeta-
tion from mountaintops and valleys, creating "balds" to attract
game. However, except for buffalo and sturgeon, most species of
animals, birds, and fish still abounded throughout the colonial years.
In the Appalachians, from Pennsylvania southward to Georgia, bald
and golden eagles nested in great numbers in the tall pines of the
upland peaks. Wild turkeys were plentiful in forest deeps, and
millions of beavers and martens were trapped for their fine furs.
Through years of living in nature, the Indans developed their
senses of sight and smell and hearing to the keenness of animals.
Watching the eagle soar over the mountains, they discovered passes
through the rocks, like Swift Run Gap and Rockfish Gap. Following
the buffaloes' trails, they had learned where lay the springs and salt
licks. Unlike the white man, who later notched or "blazed" tree
trunks to mark his route through the wilderness, the red man could
easily follow a once used path.
In their wigwams and longhouses, the Indians lived on nature's
uncertain bounty. In summer they cooked maize, squash, and beans,
which raised in scattered clearings outside their rustic palisade.
They knew also the succulent roots and berries of woods and
swamp. In October and November, shouting and shrilling, they
181
THE SEARCH FOR ELWRADO
routed the new -foaled buffalo from the forest and pursued it with
arrows and spears into a burning clearing and its death. The best
hunting came in fall, when animals were fat; after frost came, animal
flesh too often tasted of spruce and balsam buds on which the
hungry predators fed.
The Appalachian Indians' dress was as simple as their shelter.
They made clothing from skins and decorated it with bits of shell
and feathers. Men wore breechcloths and moccasins, to which they
added shirts and leggings in winter. Women dressed in fur skirts
or loose skin robes, ornamented with porcupine quills and bright
bird wings. A mantle of turkey feathers denoted a chieftain's dig-
nity. Wrote john Smith of the Indians of early Virginia:
They are some time covered with the skinnes of wilde beasts,
which in winter are dressed with the hayre, but in sommer without.
The better sort use large mantels of deare skins, not much differing
in fashion with the Irish mantels. Some imbrodered with white
beads, some with copper, other painted after their manner. But the
common sort have scarce to cover their nakednesse, but with grasse,
the leaves of trees, or such like. We have seene some use mantels of
Turky feathers, so prettily wrought and woven with threads that
nothing could be discerned but the feathers. That was exceeding
warm and very handsome. But the women are always covered about
their middles with a sldn, and very shaniefast to be Beene bare.=
Such was the upland empire of North America when Governor
Alexander Spotswood led his Knights of the Golden Horseshoe to
the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1716 and anticipated
England's colonization westward. It was a paradise which was to
exceed even the expectations of the prophet Sir Walter Raleigh,
whose vision of "a new English nation" had encouraged the settle.
ment of Virginia in the first place.
Here, in the empire to the west, Alexander Spotswood believed
that England had found her Eldorado.
[91
CHAPTER B
War among the Iroquois
By the year 1716, the mighty power of Great Britain was firmly
planted in North America. From New Hampshire to South Car-
olina, twelve colonies were spread along the Atlantic seaboard,
flying the Union jack from courthouse flagstaffs and busily send-
ing raw materials by sailing ships to England, 3,500 miles across
the Atlantic.
Except for Pennsylvania, all the colonies hugged the shore. Lying
along the coastal plain, most of their land was flat. Their largest
towns—Boston, Annapolis, Williamsburg, and Charleston in South
Carolina—had grown up close to the ocean, to serve as ports as well
as capitals. Settlers looked eastward to the sea, which was the high-
way linking them to mother England. From London came most of
the news to fill the columns of their weekly newssheets. London was
Life: the source of new fashions, knowledge, and protection against
the everlasting menace of France.
Toward the west, the colonies ran up against the Appalachian
Mountain range, which slanted diagonally from New England
toward the Gulf Coast. What lay behind it remained a dark mystery
to the settlers for a hundred years. Beyond the Appalachians few
Englishmen had ventured by 1715, for the peaks were high and
awesome, covered by heavy growths of dense pine. Indians called
the unknown territory "the dark and bloody land," and hinted that
It w;;s peopled by savage tribesmen, but few white men had seen
it heir own eyes.
:-ginia, the oldest and largest of the colonies, a few talked
.-.)ring and even settling in the mountains. For nearly a cen-
icople had been content to stay below the fall line of Virginia's
.zen major rivers, so that they could easily ship their tobacco
..,,an -going ships to England. Once they had gone beyond the
le, however, the taming of the mountains seemed only a matter
:yrs. By 1715, a handful of hardy settlers already lived within
r sight of the easternmost range of the mountains.
Virginia's Governor, Colonel Alexander Spotswood, was not a man
to ignore the challenge. A far-sighted man who shared Sir Walter
Ili]
TSB GREAT WAGON ROAD
Raleigh's vision of "a new English nation" in North America, he
proposed to the Virginia Council in 1716 that the colony send an
exploring party to the peak of the easternmost Appalachians and
discover what lay beyond. Accordingly, when the sixty-three horse.
men rode out of Williamsburg two months later, the Governor him-
self rode at their head, determined that Virginia should claim the
mountains in the name of King George I of England.
The mission of Spotswood and of his Knights of the Golden
Horseshoe was more important for its assertion of Great Britain's
claim to inland America than for any discovery. Struggling upward
to the peak of the Blue Ridge range on September 5, the Governor
and the Virginians for the first time looked upon the great Valley
and to the Alleghanies beyond. It was indeed a breathtaking sight.
To the east lay English America, descending to the sea. To the west,
as far as they could see, lay the unsettled heart of North America,
still a mystery to all except Indians and a few daring Europeans.
But Spotswood knew that other antagonists besides Indians lay
beyond the Blue Ridge. France was moving settlers into the Mis-
sissippi region and laying claim to the interior. In the name of King
Louis XIV, La Salle had reached the mouth of the Mississi pi and
aries.
had claimed all the land drained by that river and its t
French traders and missionaries were busy in the area, and a military
post had been established at Natchitoches, near the Gulf of Mexico.
If England did not possess the west before French traders did, she
might ultimately lose the race for empire.
For this reason, plus their hope of finding an inland lake which
they believed to be the source of the James, Spotswood and his men
had braved the heat and mosquitoes of Virginia's August.
Halting the caravan on the Blue Ridge, the lordly Governor called
for a toast. Horsemen, soldiers, and servants all lifted their cups and,
in the words of John Fontaine, one of their number, "drank King
George's health, and the Royal Family's, at the very top of the...
mountains." Then, remounting their new -shod horses, they de-
scended into the Valley of Virginia for seven miles, until they
reached the banks of a narrow river, named by Indians Shenandoah
for the Daughter of the Stars. There Spotswood ceremoniously
buried a bottle enclosing Virginia's claim to the land in the name
of King George, who had ascended to the throne two years earlier.
This, too, he said, was part of the new English nation.
WAR AMONG TM IROQUOIS
That night—the night of September 5, 1716—was the climactic
celebration of the journey.
We had a good dinner [Ensign John Fontaine confided to his diary],
and after it we got the men together, and loaded all their arms, and
we drank the King's health in champagne, and fired a volley—the
Princess's health in Burgundy, and fired a volley, and all the rest
of the Royal Family in claret, and a volley. We drank the Gov-
ernor's health and fired another volley. We had several sorts of
liquors, viz., Virginia red wine and white wine, Irish usquebaugh,
brandy, shrub, two sorts of rum, champagne, canary, cherry, punch,
water, cider, &c.'
Having done what he set out to do, Alexander Spotswood next day
turned homeward toward Williamsburg, taking most of his horse-
men with him. However, he left a small group of rangers behind to
explore the Great Valley.
Hacking their way through thick growths of mountain laurel,
these rangers at length found themselves near the banks of a narrow
river. Spotswood from afar had called it the "Euphrates," but
Virginians would soon know it by its Indian name, Shenandoah.
Close to the river were the signs of a trail, for trees had been
notched with hatchet marks. This was the southern trading path
of the powerful Great Lakes Indian tribes, the so-called Great
Warriors' Path to Carolina.
Spotswood's handful of rangers, hacking their way through the
summer leafage, were almost enveloped in forest gloom. High
above them, eagles soared in the summer sky. In the huge trees,
squirrels and woodpeckers kept up a din. The explorers kept a sharp
lookout for rattlesnakes and copperheads underfoot.
Spotswood's rangers had been instructed to do no harm to the
Indians. The Governor was anxious to revive Virginias once pro-
ductive fur trade and to bring peace between the powerful Iroquois
tribes in Pennsylvania and New York and the Cherokees and
Catawbas of His Majesty's colony of Carolina. He had urged the
Virfi .,•sembly to recognize the Indians' continued right to
tra I 1 :olested over their Great Warriors' Path, but he also
sol. discourage the Indians' coming east into the settled por-
tio. : ; ginia.
N;,. :..::yard from Virginia, the Great Warriors' Path led across
the Potomac River into western Maryland and thence through
[12] Davie County Public Library
Mooksviile, NC
[13]
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
central Pennsylvania, through what later became Lancaster and
Bethlehem, to the settlements of the Iroquois Confederacy around
the Great Lakes. Southward, the path skirted the headwaters of the
Roanoke River in Southern Virginia and led to the lands of the
Cherokees and Catawbas in the Carolina uplands. •
Warfare had Bared along the Warriors" Path for years before
English settlers began to colonize the Atlantic coastal region. Its
intensity had increased around the year 1570, when the five major
Iroquois tribes created the League of the Five Nations, Of all the
tribesmen along the Atlantic headlands, the Five Nations were the
most advanced. Numbering about 5,500 people, they lived in
palisaded villages from the Hudson River north to the St. Lawrence.
Before their combined might, the scattered Sioux and Algonquian
tribes of the east Bed in terror.
When the prophet Deganawidah and his disciple Hiawatha had
founded the confederacy in 1570, they succeeded in ending canni-
balism and warfare among five dominant tribes: Mohawks, Oneidas,
Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. Like the Romans of ancient
Europe, these Iroquois tribesmen were the ablest warrior -statesmen
of their time. By the year 1700, they had raised their strength by
conquest to 16,000.
In their forays to the south, the Five Nations conquered and ex-
acted tribute from many tribes, but they met savage resistance from
two large Siouan groups: the Catawbas of South Carolina and the
Cherokees, scattered throughout Carolina and the territory which
became Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. Yet all of these tribes-
men were friendly to the English, and Spotswood as Governor of
Virginia looked for means to further befriend them and to encour-
age their peaceful use of the Warriors' Path as a buffer against the
French.
As the Governor and his horsemen rode homeward from the
mountains in the autumn of 1716, he realized more than ever the
need for a concerted policy among the English colonies to ally the
frontier Indians with the English and oppose French progress from
the Mississippi toward the east.
The small and peaceful tribes living in eastern Virginia must be
protected by the colony against threats from the larger tribes, but
trade with the Five Nations using the Warriors' Path should be
encouraged.
[14]
WAR AMONG THE IROQUOIS
Warmed by the prospect of Britain's spread, Spotswood in Wil-
liamsburg dubbed his horsemen "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe"
and gave each a golden emblem inscribed "Sic juvat Transcendere
Montes" ( Behold, We Cross the Mountains). For the remaining
years of his governorship, he devoted himself chiefly to allying the
Indians with the English colonists and strengthening the Appala-
chian frontier against the French.
To achieve these ends, the imperious Spotswood in 1722 met with
the Five Nations and the governors of New York and Pennsylvania
at Albany, near the Iroquois settlements. The object was to brighten
the covenant chain which the Iroquois had made with the colonies
at Albany in 1685.
"Sachems and warriors of the Five Nations," Spotswood began,
you often say that your covenant chain with Virginia is grown
rusty and have urged of late years that some commissioners from
that colony should be sent to this place to brighten the same."'
After many courtesies, each translated while the chiefs nodded
and smiled, Spotswood accused the Iroquois of coming south over
the Warriors' Path and molesting Virginians and Carolinians. De-
scribing these bloody attacks on southern Indians and frontiersmen,
the Governor offered to renew the treaty. Holding up two gift belts
of wampum, he was greeted with approving cries of "O -hal 0 -hat'
Then Assaragoa, as the Iroquois called Virginia's Governor, pro-
posed a new treaty: Virginia would permit their continued use of
the Warriors' Path if they would sign a treaty not to come east of
the Blue Ridge or south of the Potomac.
Without awaiting a decision from the chiefs, Spotswood then
relinquished the platform to Governor Sir William Kith of Penn-
sylvania and Governor William Burnet of New York, who made
further proposals. Thus for nineteen days the negotiators met, the
governors paving each step with compliments and gifts for our
brothers," the Five Nations.
At length the wily English brought forth the long-awaited casks
of rum and brandy. With gurgles of sheer joy, the chiefs downed
the welcome liquor. The stiff formality of the conference table was
forgotten amid the camaraderie of the bottle.
When the conference resumed, it was the Indians' turn to speak.
The Indianspokesman began by describing the arrival of the first
i
lute men n New York 109 years earlier. In those carefree days, he
[13]
7= GREAT WAGON ROAD
said, his ancestors had carried off the ship's anchor to show the
Indians' welcome. The covenant of friendship which they made then
had been lengthened to a chain of friendship with Pennsylvania and
Virginia as the years passed.
To Assaragoa the spokesmen promised his tribesmen would con-
fine their southern journeys to the Great Warriors' Path, staying
west of the Blue Ridge and north of the Potomac. They would also
end their warfare with the Virginia tribes—mostly Sioux and Al-
gonquins—who lived among the white men. To commemorate this
agreement, the Indians gave Spotswood a belt of wampum for him-
self and another for the Virginia Indians. Then the Indians shouted
in unison: "O -hal 0 -hal 0 -hal 0 -hal 0 -hal 0-hal't—for the Five
Nations and their fellow Iroquois, the Tuscaroras, who had come
northward from Virginia to live with them.
Spotswood smiled and thanked them. Then he repeated the terms
of the treaty, warning that any who violated it would be put to
death or enslaved To dramatize his act, he had his equerry lay
down ten guns, each representing a tributary tribe of Virginia. To
their great pleasure, he handed the guns to the chiefs.
The Governor also offered a reward to any Indian who returned
Negro slaves escaped from their masters and fled to the frontier.
( Having lost field hands from his own plantation, Spotswood spoke
feelingly):
Now I make a general proposition to you on account of runaways
and slaves belonging to Virginia, viz., that if any such Negro or
slave shall hereafter fall in your hands, you shall straightway con-
duct them to Col. George Mason's house on Potomac River, and I
do ... engage that you shall there receive immediately upon de-
livery ... one good gun and two blankets, or the value thereof, and
in token of this proposition and engagement I lay down five guns
and five hundred flints'
The Governor admonished them finally never to let the chain
rust again, for Assaragoa would not come again. As they kept no
written records, he would imprint the treaty on their minds with
gifts so that every Iroquois would remember it. They agry � :. :J-
mitting to "a great many bad actions" and producing a bu. , * • of
furs and deerskins to recompense settler Robert Hix for his v -A
packhorse train.
One by one, the nineteen sachems made their mark on the Vir-
WAR AMONG T= IROQUOIS
ginia treaty and its map denoting the Warriors' Path. Each mark
was the symbol of a tribe: a turtle, stag, beaver, salmon, elk, and
other animals. Spotswood in return gave them a golden horseshoe
from his lapel to serve as a passport for any Iroquois who in emer-
gency needed to come eastward over the Blue Ridge. Thus the
treaty ended.
Happily, the governors and their staffs turned homeward Soon
they had boarded Spotswood's ship, H.M.S. FAtwp*e, and were
on their way down the Hudson.
Spotswood, thinking of England's strengthened alliance with the
Five Nations, was exultant. He had accomplished his Assembly's
object: to "lay a lasting foundation for the peace and tranqu' 'ty"
of the frontier. For the moment, he was right. Peace reigned for
many years thereafter along the Appalachian Warriors' Path, allow-
ing young America a fortunate opportunity -to grow strong. Increas-
ingly after 1722, white men began to use the Warriors' Path.
D
alh Cc�a :�� Public Library
MO&S llle, NG
[16] 117]
-BOOK TWO•
The Philadelphia
Road
Wagon
1744=1774
CHAPTER 3
Germans in Pennsylvania
When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, he caused an
outpouring of Protestants from France which was felt in the far-
away English colonies of North America for fifty years to come.
Many Alsatians fled across the French borders into the German
Palatinate, lying along the Rhine River, and received shelter from
the Great Elector, Frederick William. Angered, the Sun King sent
General Frangois Michel Louvois with 100,000 soldiers in 1689 to
destroy the Palatinate. French soldiers laid waste to farms and
destroyed towns and villages. In the War of the Spanish Succession
which followed in 1702-1713, many more families living along the
Rhine lost lives or property.
Then, in 1708 or 1709, an agent of William Penn visited the
Palatines and encouraged them to emigrate, describing the religious
freedom offered by William Penn's colony in the New World. By
June 1709, the first shiploads of emigrants had succeeded in reach-
ing England, seeking religious freedom. By October 1709, nearly
14,000 had come.
Queen Anne's Protestant government provided food and tem-
porary housing for the homeless Germans. By order of the Queen,
1,000 tents from the Tower of London were erected in an open field.
Other emigrants were housed in barns and warehouses.
A Germanic colony had already been established at German-
town, Pennsylvania, under Francis Daniel Pastorius in 1683. Now,
after 1709, many other Germans and Swiss came. By 1717, so many
had arrived that Pennsylvania's Governor, Sir William Keith, rec-
ommended that shipmasters bringing in foreign passengers should
furnish the colony with their names. Within the neat fifty-six years,
a tnt:71 of 68,872 had come in.
N : : 1; mass of ill -clothed Germans soon felt the hostility of the
En+j ; . d Welsh Quakers who had earlier sought religious free-
doni :: nn's Woods. Secretary James Logan on March 25, 1727,
wrot t: : `dliam Penn's son in England to complain:
We have many thousands of foreigners, most Palatines, so-called,
already in ye Countrey, of whom near 1500 came in this last sum -
[21]
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
mer; many of them are a surly people, divers Papists amongst them,
and ye men generally well arm'd.l
About the same time, many former Scottish families who had
moved from their homeland earlier to establish the linen trade in
Ireland, now found themselves forced from their new homeland b
English taxes and also joined in the exodus to Pennsylvania and
other colonies. "We have from the North of Ireland great numbers
yearly," Secretary Logan wrote john Penn in 1727:
8 or 9' Ships this last fall discharged at Newcastle. Both of these
sorts [Germans and Scotsmen] sitz frequently down on any spott of
vacant Land they can find, without asking questions; the last Pala-
tines say there win be twice the number next year, & ye Irish say ye
same of their People?
Even the tolerant Benjamin Franklin was disturbed by the new-
comers. "Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into
our settlement," he wrote in 1751:
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 Anglicifying them, and win never
adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our
complexion?"
(Franklin later explained rather lamely that by
farmer." "boor" be meant
Settling at first around Philadelphia, the German and Scotch -Irish
Slowly spread west and south. Soon many spread westward to the
villages of Lancaster, which was laid out in 1721, and Conestoga
and York, settled a few years later, g
Resentment against the newcomers grew, and they increasingly
chose to go southward from Lancaster along the Great Warriors
path, which led into Maryland and Virginia.
Pennsylvania increasingly discouraged the newcomers and urged
them to move southward, beyond their boundaries. The Philadel-
phian, Casper Wistar, painted this dismal picture torospective
settlers of Pennsylvania in 1732: p
Some years ago this was a very fruitful country, and, like all new
countries, but sparsely inhabited. Since the wilderness required
[22]
IL
GERMANS W PENNSYLVANIA
much labor, and the inhabitants were few
German emigrants were cordialships that arrived with
ly welcomed. They were immedi-
ately discharged, and by their labor very easily earned enough to
buy some land. Pennsylvania is but a small part of America, and has
been open now for some years, so that not only many thousand Ger-
mans, but English and Irish have settled there, and filled all parts
of the country; so that all who now seek land must go far into the
wilderness, and purchase it at a higher price
circumstances, and the tedious, expensive and perilous voyage, a e, thoe
should not advise any one for whom you wish well to come hither.
All I can say is that those who think of coming should weigh well
what has been above stated, and should count the cost, and, above
all, should go to God for counsel and inquire whether it be His will,
lest they may undertake that whereof they will afterward repent
Learning of cheaper lands southward in Maryland, Virginia, and
Carolina, the Germans and Scotch -Irish began venturingdown the
Great Warriors' Path. Led by a few explorers and land speculators,
the Germanic and Scotch -Irish migrations were to continue f
nearly a century, or
Having seen the rapid growth of Germanic and Scottish settle-
ment in Pennsylvania, Maryland's proprietor, Lord Baltimore, in
1732, sent a proclamation northward to lure others south. His
colony, "being Desireous to Increase the Number of Honest le"
in Maryland, offered any family 200 acres free between the Potomac
and Susquehanna, to be exempt from the payment of quit rents for
three Years after settlement and then at a rate of onlyfour shillings
sterling per hundred acres. Single persons were offea hundred
acres on the same terms.
His Lordship assured settlers that "they shall be as well Secured
in their Liberty & property in Maryland as any of his Majesty's
Subjects in any part of the British Plantations in America wthot
Exception..." Many Germans and Scots were thus lured south
-
wa i . ' :"to Maryland, and a strong rivalry developed between the
--rietary colonies.
Maryland had a population of only 31,470 males above
Of fifteen, but by 1756 the population had grown to 130,000.
the same time, Virginia began to receive the first of the
ajans and Scotch -Irish. Jacob Stover led the first Germanic
5,,Atlers down the Warriors' Path into Virginia i 1726. Man more
n
came in 1732 when joist Hite, an Alsatian who had first settled in
[23]
TSE GREAT WAGON ROAD
Pennsylvania, led a group of Alsatians to settle on 40,000 acres in
upland Virginia which the Governor had granted to john and Isaac
Van Meter, also of Pennsylvania.
Fear of attack by the Iroquois to the north also forced many
Germans south. A number of Germanic settlers in the Colebrook
Valley in 1728 petitioned the Governor for better protection against
the savages. The accusation was made—to be heard often in colo-
nial times—that English who had settled along the Atlantic coastal
plain were using the Germans and Scotch -Irish as buffers against
the frontier Indians.
Cheaper lands in Maryland and in the Valley of Virginia increas-
ingly attracted Scots and Germans. In the stony uplands of the
Valley of Virginia, land could be had for ten to twenty shillings an
acre, so widespread was Virginia's frontier.
Before descending into Anglican Virginia, however, the Scotch -
Irish assured themselves that they could worship there as they
pleased, free of Church of England control. The Presbyterian Synod
of Philadelphia wrote Virginia's Governor William Gooch in May
1738 to inquire about the "civil and religious liberties" in the col-
ony. To this, Gooch replied that he had
always been inclined to favour the people who have lately removed
from other provinces, to settle on the western side of our great
mountains... no interruption shall be given to any minister of your
profession [denomination] who shall come among them, so long as
they conform themselves to the rules prescribed by the act of tolera-
tion in England, by taking the oaths enjoined thereby, and register-
ing the places of their meeting, and behave themselves peaceably
towards the government .. a
Most of the Germans chose fertile farmlands, clustering close
together to help each other with their sowing and reaping, their
house -raisings, and their hog -killing. Reared as farmers, they
quickly converted their small holdings into verdant fields of grain,
tobacco, and truck crops. From the Palatinate, they brought with
them a practical knowledge of the use of manure in fertilizing new
or worn-out fields. They thriftily used the limestone and fieldstone
which they cleared from their acres to build their houses and fences.
One prominent Marylander, Daniel Dulany, wrote Governor
Samuel Ogle in 1745 to report the transformation which the Ger-
manic settlers were making in western Maryland. "You would be
[24l
GERMANS IN PENNMVAM
surprised to see how much the country is improved beyond the
mountains," he wrote, "especially by the Germansie
who are the best
people that can be to settle a wilderness; and the ' 'ty of the soil .
makes them ample amends for their industry."
A later governor, Charles Eden, sent a similarly enthusiastic re-
port home to England. "They are generally an industrious laborious
people," he wrote Britain's colonial secretary.
Many of them have acquired a considerable share of property. Their
improvement of a Wilderness into well -stocked plantations, the
example and beneficent Effects of their extraordinary industry have
raised in no small degree it spirit of emulation among the other
inhabitants. That they are a most useful people and merit the public
regard is acknowledged by all who are acquainted with them .,$
Some Germanic settlers were skilled craftsmen, settling in Phila-
delphia, Lancaster, or further south along the Warriors' Path. Some
were descendants of skilled French artisans who had emigrated to
the Palatinate to escape persecution of Louis XIV. Among them
were mechanics, gunsmiths, shoemakers, papermakers, butchers,
watchmakers, blacksmiths, and ironworkers. They were soon sup-
plying the neighboring English and Scotch -Irish with articles for-
merly imported from England and Scotland.
Germanic settlers formed much of the early population of Lan-
caster and York in Pennsylvania and Gettyburg and Hagerstown
(originally Hagers Town), which slowly developed farther south
on the Warriors' Path. Another German stronghold was Frederick
Town, which developed near the Path in central Maryland. Within
a few years of the Germanic influx it had become the third largest
town in Maryland, next to Baltimore and Annapolis.
The richness of the soil, and the salubriety of the air, operated
[explained William Eddis] very powerfully to promote population;
but what chiefly tended to the advancement of settlements in this
remote district, was the arrival of many emigrants from the palati-
nate, and other Germanic states.... Provisions are cheap and plenti-
ful, and excellent. In a word, here are to be found all conveniences,
and many superfluities.T
The early Scots and Germans built rough-hewn log or wooden
houses at first, sometimes replaced later by more permanent ones
of stone or brick. Where limestone abounded, it was a favored
[25]
T- GREAT WAGON ROAD
material. A house -raising was an occasion for fun as well as hard
work, the men gathering early in the morning worked day after
day until the building had been covered over. Meanwhile, the
owner spurred on his neighbors with hearty meals, washed down
with ale or stronger spirits.
The kitchen was the most important room, and often it was the
largest. At one end a large open fireplace was built up with stone
and mortar. German farmers often attached a stable and a cow barn
to the house, for farm animals were valued and well cared for. A base-
ment dug from the earth and sometimes entered by a trap door
provided food storage and emergency escape in case of Indian
attack. Sometimes a dairy house was dug deeply into the earth, to
keep milk and butter cool throughout the summer. Hams, shoulders,
and bacon cut from hogs killed each winter were cured over a
constant hickory -wood fire in a smokehouse, built of stone over a
brick and earthen floor.
The earliest frontier settlers traveled on foot or packhorse, for in
many places the Warriors' Path was a clearing no more than three or
four feet wide in the deep forest. From Europe they brought only
a mere handful of possessions, and only the bare essentials of life
could be carried on packhorses over this narrow defile. The settler
and his wife had to make their own furniture, farm implements, and
clothing. Crude iron utensils were traded or purchased from the
nearest blacksmith. In broad fireplaces, often with a Dutch oven
built into the brick or mortar, the frontier dweller cooked in iron
pots and pans, resting on three-legged iron "spiders" or suspended
by chains from a beam or iron bar built into the chimney.
The German emigrant built his tables from a split slab of wood,
the top surface smoothed with an adz and four rounded legs set in
auger holes. For lack of chairs he made three-legged stools or back-
less benches. Wooden pins driven into the inner walls of the house
served as coat racks or shelf supports. Tallow candles or a fat -lamp
produced light. Bear grease and hog fat were saved for this pur-
pose, filling the house with the strong odor of burning lard as the
light flickered. Platters were often of wood and plates and spoons
usually of pewter.
The Germans brought from the Old World skill in making
sausage, scrapple, and other smoked or pickled meats. Their pigs
ran loose in the woods, eating acorns and roots, and in nine months
Il
[28]
GERMANS IN PENNSYLVM"
were big enough to be slaughtered. Hog -killing day in December's
first cold spell brought German neighbors together, working with
sharp knives to kill, clean, and butcher their porkers for the winter
ahead.
Hams and shoulders were immersed in brine before being hung
in the smokehouse. From the hogs' entrails, casings were cleaned
for yards of smoked sausage. Other meat was cut up with liver and
kidneys and cooked into leberwurst or liver pudding. Water in
which meat had been boiled was mixed with cornmeal to make
phannhase or "pan -rabbit," a mush that was hardened in the pan and
then sliced and fried.
Cattle, being slower growing and larger than pigs, were not as
popular for meat. Venison, bear, and pork remained the preferred
meats. William Byrd II declared "pork and pone"—a type of corn
bread—to be the favorite fare of the Virginia and North Carolina
frontier.
On Shrove Tuesday, the German housewife cooked fastnochta-
kuchen, made of dough and fried in fat. Germanic families also had
such favorites as sauerkraut ural speck, schnitz and knop f, noodles,
dumplings, and other hearty fare.
Clothes were made by the German housewife. Sitting at night
over her spinning wheel, she spun wool or flax and then wove it
into homespun. A mixture of flax and wool known as linsey-woolsey
was popular for clothes because of its warmth. Hunting shirts,
worn with breeches, stockings, and moccasins, were usually made
of it and fringed with brightly colored cloth of raveled edges.
The crafts of the Germans soon became evident. In Philadelphia
and along the route of the Warriors' Path, German artisans began
to acquire a good trade. They flourished especially as cabinetmak-
ers,
abinetmakers, and Philadelphia by the 1740s had become the site of many
small furniture makers. Besides using native pine and maple and
walnut, they imported mahogany and followed the fashions of
Europeans, like Thomas Chippendale and George Hepplewhite.
The Germans were also expert wagon makers, and at Conestoga
awl where in Pennsylvania built and sold sturdy vehicles to
fair, migrated from the seacoast to the frontier. The first Ger-
mam.:. ;► :tgons were crude affairs, their wheels being disks sawed
from buttonwood or gum trees. As 1 and wheelwrights
increased, better wagons were built. German tanners were esteemed
[$'n
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
for their leather, and many a colonist sported a German -made
saddle.
A German tanner named Matthias Nead posted this lament on
the wall of his tannery near Clear Spring, Maryland:
Ye shoemakers, Cobblers, and others attend,
just look at this Notice, it is from your friend;
My Purse is so empty, tis light as a feather,
You have worn out your Shoes, and not paid for the Leather.
Now take my Advice and pay off the old score,
Before you get trusted for any skins more;
I have Sheep Skins, & Calf Skins, & Upper, and Soal,
I have all kinds of Leather, from an Ox, to a Foal;
I have leather that's green, and leather that's dry,
But pay down the Rhino if any you d buy;
A hint to the wise is sufficient tis said,
Payl and take a Receipt from your good old Friend
Nead a
Much as the Germans contributed to the frontier's growth, how-
ever, many other settlers continued to resent .them. William Penn's
sons wrote to Secretary James Logan in Pennsylvania in 1729, rec-
ommending that the Pennsylvania Assembly pass a law prohibiting
further immigration by the Palatines. They promised to have King
George II uphold it. However, the Germanic people had become too
enmeshed in the growing fabric of colonial life to be halted.
Throughout the 1730s, transplanted Swiss and Germans continued
to pour into Philadelphia, spreading thence along the growing
Appalachian frontier.
0,
CHAPTER 4
Enter the Scotch -Irish
Close behind the wave of Germanic people which began to sweep
over the Warriors' Path came the bold, adventurous Scotch -Irish.
From the port of Belfast, in northern Ireland, many a shipload of
hopeful Scottish Protestants sailed after 1725 for the Great Oppor-
tunity which beckoned from Philadelphia.
Like the Germans who emigrated from the Palatinate, the Scots'
who poured into America from Ulster were hardy middle-class
farmers and craftsmen who suffered in the Old World from their
industriousness and their religious beliefs. They came from the
poor, rural countries of northern Ireland --Antrim, Armagh, Cavan,
Donegal, Down, Firmanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone, where Eng-
lish rule had grown increasingly severe.
The Scottish emigrants were offspring of lowland Presbyterians
who had moved out of their ancient homeland after 1607, in re-
sponse to English inducement to colonize Ireland and grab up cheap
farmlands.
For nearly a hundred years before 1700, Scotsmen had emigrated
from their country to Ireland, building up profitable linen and
woolen manufactures there. Then, in 1698, English wool producers
persuaded Parliament to suppress the exportation of Irish woolens.
The subservient Irish Parliament agreed, and Scotch -Irish wool
growers were forbidden to sell their product to any buyers except
the English.
Besides this, Church of England bishops who sat in the Irish
Parliament persuaded the government in 1692 to require all Irish
officeholders to partake of the Lord's Supper three times a year in
the Established Church. Penalties were imposed on any Scottish
Presbyterian minister who preached against the rule by bishops.
01,a joted by Irish landholders, who generally upheld the Church
of : land, the Ulster Scots were persecuted both in politics and
Not even the tolerant King William and Queen Mary, who
hau achieved official toleration of England's dissenters on their
accession in 1689, were able to moderate the militant zeal of Ire-
land's Anglican conformists. In countless ways, they made life dd-
ficult for the followers of John Knox.
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
Discouraged by the treatment they received from the English
and Irish, the younger sons and daughters of transplanted Ulster
Scots began to move in small numbers to America. The exodus
began about 1718. Ten years later, a bishop of the Church of Eng-
land
ngland noticed that "above 4200 men, women, and children have been
shipped off from hence for the West Indies, within three years." By
this time, many of the 200,000 Presbyterians in the Synod of Ulster
were on their way to America. So were many of their 130 ministers.
When famine struck Ulster in 1740, the stream of emigrants
reached 12,000 yearly. "Thus was Ulster drained of the young, the
enterprising, and the most energetic and desirable classes of its
population," moaned a Scottish chronicler. "They left the land
which had been saved to England by the swords of their fathers,
and crossed the sea to escape from the galling tyranny of the
bishops whom England had made rulers of that land."
Touring Ireland in these same years, Arthur Young painted a
gloomy picture:
The spirit of emigrating in Ireland appeared to be confined to
two circumstances, the Presbyterian religion and the linen manu-
facture. I heard of very few emigrants except among manufacturers
of that persuasion. The Catholics never went; they seem not only
tied to the country, but almost to the parish in which their ancestors
lived. As to emigrating in the North, it was in error in England to
suppose it a novelty, which arose with the increase in rents. The
contrary was the fact; it had subsisted perhaps forty years, insomuch
that at the ports of Belfast, Derry, etc. the passage trade, as they
called it, had long been a regular branch of commerce, which em-
ployed several ships, and consisted in carrying people to America.
The increasing population of the country made it an increasing
trade; but when the linen trade was low, the passenger trade was
always high...,
Boarding ship at Belfast or Derry, the Ulster families brought
with them to America only the few clothes, tools, kitchen imple-
ments, and books which they could pack in their wooden sea chests.
Huddled below deck in the dark and stinking ship's hold, they en-
dured a rough voyage which lasted eight weeks and often more.
Last year one of the ships was driven about the ocean for twenty-
four weeks [noted a Pennsylvanian in 17321, and of its one hundred
ENTER THE SCOTC 14MISH
and fifty passengers, more than one hundred starved to death. To
satisfy their hunger, they caught mice, and rats; and a mouse
brought half a gulden. When the survivors at last reached land,
their sufferings were aggravated by their arrest, and the exaction
from them of the entire fare for both living and dead.'
Few vessels in these early years were of more than 150 tons, and
passenger space was limited. The Ulstermen huddled below deck
on straw mattresses or hammocks at night, avoiding the rheumy
night air. By day they were permitted abovedeck, crowding the
rails to watch the gray seas while the square-rigger beat her way at
eight . or ten knots across the 3,000 miles of sea which separated
Ireland from the American coast.
Many emigrant vessels were stormbound or lost at sea, even
though they avoided the tempestuous equinoctial storm months. A
Philadelphian in 1732 described this ordeal:
One of the vessels was seventeen weeks on the way and about
sixty of its passengers died at sea. All the survivors are sick and
feeble, and what is worst, poor and without means; hence, in a com-
munity like this where money is scarce, they are a burden, and every
day there are deaths among them... When one is without the
money, his only resource is to sell himself for a term from three to
eight years or more, and to serve as a slave. Nothing but a poor
suit of clothes is received when his time has expired. Families en-
dure
ndure a great trial when they see the father purchased by one master,
the mother by another, and each of the children by another. All this
for the money only that they owe the Captain.
And yet they are only too glad, when after waiting long, they at
last find some one willing to buy them; for the money of the country
is well nigh exhausted.... If ready to hazard their lives and to en-
dure patiently all the trials of the voyage, they must further think
whether over and above the cost they will have enough to purchase
cattle, and to provide for other necessities ...
Young and able-bodied persons, who can do efficient work, can,
nevertheless, always find some one who will purchase them for two,
three or four years; but they must be unmarried. For young married
persons, particularly when the wife is with child, no one cares to
have. Of mechanics there are a considerable number already here;
but a good mechanic who can bring with him sufficient capital to
avoid beginning with debt, may do well, although of almost all
classes and occupations, there are already more than too many...
[30] [31]
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
The mad rush of Scotsmen to leave Ulster at length disturbed the
Irish landowners, and they introduced a bill in the Irish Parliament
in 1735 to restrict emigration. As a result, hundreds of families
rushed to board ships the next spring before the threatened cutoff
occurred. A thousand migrant families crowded into dockside
Belfast early in 1738, pleading for passage to America.
When the landlords learned this, they tried to intimidate ship-
masters into canceling their advertised voyages. A Dublin ship
captain, John Stewart, wrote a letter of complaint to Thomas Penn,
son of Pennsylvania's founder, whom he addressed as "Knight Pro-
prietor of Pensilvania, now in London." Stewart reported on May 3,
1738, that ten ships lay at anchor in Belfast harbor because Irish
landlords had issued warrants against any captain who attempted
to load and sail.
Stewart appealed to Penn's cupidity with a postscript, pointing
out the financial benefit of this emigration to Pennsylvania's pro-
prietors:
Of those ten Ships there is eight bound for Dalour [Delaware] 1�
verry counciderable with them ... there will be in a vessall that I
bought last year in Margos Hucke [Marcus Hook] near Chister in
or about seven hund. pounds Sterl. mostly in Speece [specie], if
this [Irish action] does not prevent them from getting over
alitogether.*
Fortunately, Ireland's courts denied to permit landlords to halt
their tenants' emigration, and the Great Exodus continued.
Because of Pennsylvania's• reputation for religious toleration,
most of the Ulster Scots made their way to ports along the Delaware
River. Besides Philadelphia, these were principally Lewes and New -
Castle, which stood on the western bank of the Delaware in the
southern part of Pennsylvania which later became Delaware. All
three towns had Presbyterian congregations, and they received the
emigrants with open arms, offering them help and a friendly roof
until they could begin their trek westward.
Philadelphia in these years shone as a beacon of hope to many of
the 200,000 Scotch-Irish—a third of all the Scotsmen then in Ire-
land—who came to the American colonies before the American
Revolution. Along the wharfs at Market Street docked an endless
procession of merchant vessels, bringing settlers from Europe. There
the emigrant Benjamin Franklin had arrived from Boston on a
[321
ENTER THE SCOTCH -IRISH
Sunday morning in 1723, while most of the town was at church.
There the produce boats brought crates of fruit and vegetables from
the Jersey farms across the river, and there the fishermen sold their
catch, on a hill between the wharf and the present Water Street.
So many emigrants entered the American colonies at this point
that Market Street has been called "the most historic highway in
America." From it, the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road eventually
led southward into the American heartland. By the time of the
Scotch -Irish emigration, Philadelphia had become a town of some
20,000 people, the largest in the American colonies. Gabriel 'Thomas
had lauded it in a 1898 account as "This Magnificent City" and
noted that:
It hath in it Three Fairs every Year, and Two Markets every Week.
They kill about Twenty Fat Bullocks every Week, in the hottest
time in Summer, for their present spending in that City, besides
many Sheep, Calves, and Hogs.5
Laid out in orderly squares, unlike earlier Jamestown in Virginia
or Boston in Massachusetts, Philadelphia was well on its way to
becoming the "green country town" to which William Penn had
aspired when he designed it. Early frame houses were being re-
placed by handsomer brick ones, "all Inhabitated," Gabriel Thomas
observed, "and most of the Stately ... after the Mode in London."
Not far away to the northeast stood William Penn's ambitious coun-
try house, largely abandoned since the great Quaker had returned
to England in 1701 and died there in 1718. This "Great and Stately
Pile," as Gabriel Thomas termed it, "he [William Penn] calla
Pennsbury-House."
Emigrants coming off their ships at Philadelphia found a cluster
of inns and ordinaries near the dockside, ready to refresh any who
had money enough to afford it. These rough-hewn structures were
proclaimed by colorful hanging -signs: Blue Anchor, Crooked Billet,
Peu r Platter, and Penny -Pot. Built a little later and more tidily
wt ven Stars, Cross Keys, Hornet and Peacock, and others of
bi-longer span.
ashore, the Scottish emigrant faced bewildering choices:
V%, P.ould he turn to? Where must he settle? Who had the best
au. :{pest land? For help, they turned to those who had come
beit;, ,: , Presbyterian congregations in the favored regions to the
west and south were helpful. In the growing Philadelphia hinter -
[331
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
land, a healthy single man or woman had no trouble finding work
with a household or a craftsman. A family that had a little money
in the purse would probably do best to buy a packhorse to haul
their few household goods and start westward toward cheaper lands.
Typical of the Scots was the family of Andrew Pickens, who came
into Philadelphia before 1720 from Ulster. Encouraged by fellow
emigrants, they first went westward to Paxton Township, near the
later town of Harrisburg. There was born the second Andrew Pick-
ens,
ickens, one of several members of the family to become famous, who
was to command South Carolina forces in the Revolution. Like
many emigrants, however, they continued to be attracted by lands
to the south, which were farther removed from the ominous threat
of the Iroquois tribesmen north of Pennsylvania.
Accordingly, the family pulled up stakes in the 1730s, loaded
their horses with the family goods, and started south over the War-
riors' Path toward the cheaper lands in Virginia. Crossing the Poto-
mac River by Williams' or Watkins' Ferry, near the later site of
Williamsport, they followed the narrow footpath along the Shenan-
doah River. Past occasional clearings in the forest of the Valley of
Virginia, they came after' many days' journey to a gap in an earlier
trail, named Buffalo Gap. There, seventeen miles southwest of the
valley way station which grew into the town of Staunton, the
Pickens family cleared land and farmed for nearly twenty years.
When the colony of Virginia introduced government in the
Valley in 1745 and created Augusta County, the elder Andrew
Pickens became the first justice of the peace. But the lure of the
wilderness still called these and other pioneers. About 1750 Andrew
Pickens led his family southward again, following the Warriors' Path
into the land of the Waxhaw Indians, in western South Carolina.
Ten years later they moved to Abbeville, where the younger
Andrew grew to fame.
The story of the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road is the story
of German and Scotch -Irish settlement in America. By 1720, the
Scotch -Irish had spread their settlements westward to the mouth
of the Susquehanna River. They had formed Presbyterian churches
at Octarora, Nottingham, and Head. of Elk.
The feisty Scotch -Irish continued to excite Quaker indignation,
even though Pennsylvanians recognized them as a comfortable
buffer against the western Indians. Secretary James Logan, himself
[34l
ENTER THE SCOTCH -IRISH
a Scotsman, fumed in 1724 against these "bold and indigent strang-
ers,
trangers, saying as their excuse, when challenged for [land] titles, that
we had solicited for colonists and they had come accordingly." He
complained that they had settled uninvited on the 15,000 -acre
Conestoga Manor in an "audacious and disorderly manner," claim-
ing prime farm lands which the Penn family had reserved for them-
selves. Their defense was 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 to raise their bread."
For a brief time in 1729, Logan and other anti-Uhterites believed
that the British Parliament would adopt measures to retard Scotch -
Irish emigration. He wrote:
It looks as if Ireland is to send all its inhabitants hither, for last
week not less than six ships arrived, and every day, two or three
arrive also. The common fear is that if they thus continueto come
they will make themselves proprietors of the Province. It is strange
that they thus crowd where they are not wanted.P
Logan, who was himself acquiring a fortune in land in these
years, objected to the Scotsmen's forwardness in claiming the best
farmlands.
I must own [he fumed] from my experience in the land-office, that
the settlement of five families from Ireland gives me more trouble
than fifty of any other people. Before we were broke in upon,
ancient Friends and first settlers hived happily; but now the case is
quite altered.T
Pennsylvania's growth drove up land prices and this, too,
prompted many newcomers to move south. A Pennsylvania Quaker,
Robert Parke, described the boom to his sister in Ireland in 1725:
Land is of all Prices Even from ten Pounds, to one hundred
V. pis a hundred, according to the goodness or else the situation
t! 4, & Grows dearer every year by Reason of Vast Quantities
�pie that come here yearly from Several Parts of the world,
ore thee & thy family or any that I wish well I wod desire to
what Speed you can to come here the Sooner the better. We
traveled over a Pretty deal of this country to seek the Land, &
:gh] we met with many fine Tracts of Land here & there in the
cuIantry, yet my father being curious & somewhat hard to Please
Did not buy any land until the Second day of 10th mo.
[35]
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
This country yieldes Extraordinary Increase of all sorts of Grain
Likewis"or nicholas hooper had of 3 Acres of Land & at mos 3
bushels of Seed above SO bushels Increase so that it is as Plentifull
a Country as any Can be if people will be Industrious. Wheat is 4
Shills. a bushel, Rye 2s 9d., oats 2.3 pence, barley 3 Shills., Indian
Corn 2 Shills., all Strike measure. Beef is 2% pence a pound; Some-
times more Sometimes less, mutton 2%, pork 2% pound. Turnips 12
pence a bushell heap'd measure & so Plenty that an acre Produceth
20 bushells. All sorts of Provisions are Extraordinarily Plenty in
Philadelphia market where Country people bring in their com-
modities. Their markets are on 4th day and 7th day.
This country abounds in fruit, Scarce an house but has an Apple,
Peach & cherry orchard. As for chestnuts, Wallnuts, & hazel nuts,
Strawberries, Billberys & Mulberrys they grow wild in the woods
and fields in Vast Quantities ...
There is 2 fairs, yearly & 2 markets weekly in Philadelphia also 2
fairs yearly in Chester & Likewise in new castle, but they sell no
Cattle nor horses, no living Creatures, but altogether Merchants's
Goods, as hatts, Linnen & woolen Cloth, handkerchiefs, knives,
Scizars, tapes & treds buckels, Ribonds & all Sorts of necessarys fit
for our wooden Country & here all young men and women that
want wives or husbands may be Supplyed ...
Thus the Great Exodus from Ireland and Germany continued
through many decades of the eighteenth century. Turning their
backs on the ancient tribal and religious hatreds of Europe, thou-
sands crossed the Atlantic in search of the opportunity that the Old
World had denied them.
[Wl
CHAPTER 5
A Moravian Journey
to Carolina
The Germans who flooded into Pennsylvania in the 1700s wore the
somber clothes of Protestant pilgrims: Amishmen, Mennonites
( often called "Mennonists" in early documents), Lutherans, and
Anabaptists.
None of these sects played a more active role than the followers
of john Huss, who called themselves the Fnatres Unitas, but who
were known to the world as Moravian. Though the denomination
later declined in numbers and in influence, its kindly and hardwork-
ing
ardworking adherents exemplified Christian humility perhaps more than
did any other frontier sect. They sought to retain some of the values
of monastic life while living in a familial society.
Originating in 1457 near Kunwald, in Bohemia, after Huss had
been martyred for his religious beliefs, the Frotres soon broke with
the powerful Church of Rome. Hounded out of their homeland,
they went into hiding. By 1722, most descendants of these pilgrims
had perished, but those who kept the faith gathered on the estate
of Count Nikolaus von 5nzendorf, in Saxony, where they built a town
named Herrnhut. There in 1727 they began to spread their peculiar
faith by mission to the West Indies, North and South America,
Africa, and Asia.
In 1735, the Moravian entered North America through Phila-
delphia. Within the next five years, they had industriously planted
small colonies at Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Lititz, Pennsylvania.
From these settlements, they sent out missionaries to the Indians.
In November 1743, two Moravian began a joumey down the
Great Warriors' Path which brought them five months later to
Georgia. They were Leonhard Schnell, a German, and Robert
Hussey, an English convert. Schnell's diary gives a faithful picture
of the difficulties of traversing the Path.
Leaving Bethlehem on November 6, they journeyed together to
Philadelphia "in love and in the strength of the lamb." Two. days
after leaving Philadelphia they arrived at Lancaster, sixty-six miles
away, and two days thereafter reached York, "where all the inhab-
[37]
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
itants are High Germans." At York an innkeeper asked Schnell to
preach a sermon, which he soon did to an assemblage of villagers,
rounded up by the innkeeper. Schnell preached on the text "The
Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost," and was
urged to come again often.
Leaving York, the two pilgrims crossed the Conewago River in
Adams County, Pennsylvania, and then descended into Maryland
and forded in succession three shallow rivers. Schnell had to cavy
his companion across the third, the Monocacy, because the two men
had walked forty miles since sunup and were very tired. In the
vicinity of Frederick, Maryland, they found many Lutherans and
Reformed members, who insisted on a sermon. "I felt very happy
among them," Schnell wrote. "They are very plain people."
Between Frederick and the Potomac River, the travelers en-
countered only two houses. In this twenty -mile stretch they could
get nothing to eat because the householders themselves had no
bread. After crossing the river near the later Harper's Ferry, Schnell
and Hussey spent the night in an English tavern, where the local
people complained about their minister. "On account of his dis-
orderly life, he had no influence among the people," Schnell
reported. "At this place I handed to the landlady the Swedish cate-
chism, which Bro. Bryzelius of Philadelphia gave me for his country-
men, who live three miles from here."
In upland Virginia, near the village of Winchester, the two men
came to the inn of joist Hite, a pioneer Germanic settler who en-
couraged countless others to come south from Philadelphia into
upper Virginia. "He was very courteous when he heard that I was a
minister," Schnell wrote.
I asked him for the way to Carolina. He told me of one, which runs
for 150 miles through Irish settlements, the district being known as
the Irish tract. [An area of the Valley of Virginia which later be-
came Rockingham, Augusta, Rockbridge, and Botetourt counties.]
I had no desire to take this way, and as no one could tell me the
right way, I felt somewhat depressed. I asked the Lord to show me
the right way, but slept little that night.'
Arising next day, Schnell learned from a settler of another route
which would avoid the dreaded Scotch -Irish settlements. "His name
is Stephan Schmidt, a Catholic, but anxious to hear the word of the
[38]
A MORAVIAN JOURNEY TO CAROLINA
cross," Schnell recorded. "Many spiritually hungry people, of Ger-
man nationality, live there, who have no minister."
Reaching the Shenandoah River, Schnell and Hussey found the
ferryman unwilling to take them across until he learned that they
had the fare. Reluctant to venture further because the next house
was twenty-four miles away, they spent the night with an English
family, who gave them shelter, after much urging.
At first they said they could neither give us a meal nor a bed [but]
we might sleep at the fire. But after a while they changed their
minds and gave us something to eat and a good bed. We paid, and
left the following day.'
The Moravian minister used an Indian hatchet to clear the path-
way, - which was often overgrown. Once he felled a tree across
Goose Creek to serve as a footbridge.
While detouring around the Scotch -Irish, Schnell and Hussey en-
countered a German family near Warrenton, Virginia One man
told him that on his voyage to America, 150 passengers were
drowned. "This gave me an opportunity to remind them how neces-
sary it is to be ready at all times to leave this world," Pastor Schnell
noted. "They at once took me to be a minister, and, as a result,
showed us much love. They asked us to stay with them and preach
for them on Sunday, as they had a church, but had not heard a
sermon for six months ..."
So moved were Schnell's listeners that they invited him to remain
as their pastor, but he declined. They told him of the settlement of
Moravian missionaries in Georgia in 1735, later abandoned when
the group came up the Warriors' Path and joined another Moravian
colony at Zinzendorf, in Pennsylvania. Without betraying his
knowledge, Schnell asked what they had thought of the Reverend
August Gottlieb Spangenberg, their pastor. One listener admired
him because he had not tried to proselyte other believers. "He
preached the word pure and undefiled to all who wanted to hear,"
he >: ►H of the Moravian.
` November rains, the two Moravian started southward
'hey found creeks swollen with muddy rainwater. When
t ached the Rappahannock, they crossed in a canoe and
stk. , -o at an inn kept by a German emigrant named Christopher
Kueic:r. For several days they plodded through Virginia's highlands
in the rain. Near Orange County Courthouse they were stopped by
[39l
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
an English settler who demanded to see their passport. When
Schnell demurred, several farmers conducted him with rifles to a
justice of the peace of Orange County. But the German produced
his passport there, and he and Hussey were permitted to proceed.
On December 2, the two pilgrims reached the Roanoke River, on
the boundary between Virginia and Carolina. Here they found the
rich farmlands which Colonel William Byrd II had purchased
twenty years earlier and promoted to European emigrants as his
New-found Eden. Schnell may have seen a copy of Byrd's Neu-
Getundnes Eden in Virginia, which had been printed (by Wilhelm
Vogel, or William Byrd), in Switzerland in 1738 to induce Swiss and
German immigrants to come south into Virginia and North Carolina.
In Craven County, North Carolina, the two Moravians met Jacob
Schuetz, an elder of the German Reformed settlers living near the
Trent River. "He and the people living in that district were very
glad to see a German preacher and were eager to hear a sermon, as
they had not heard a German sermon for several years," Schnell
recorded. On December 8, "all the Germans assembled, about forty
of them. The Saviour gave me grace to speak to their hearts and
blessed my words visibly. After the next day's sermon, one
German, Abraham Bossert,
made a great feast to all the persons present, at which many blessed
discourses were held.... They also related to me that three days
ago two men from Philadelphia had ... told them that there was
again a new religion in Pennsylvania, in which the people were
given a certain potion to drink, after which they would adhere to
them [the denominationalists]. Not long ago a ship -load of people
from Switzerland had arrived, who had been rich and respectable
people, but as soon as they had taken this potion, they had gone
over with all their possessions to the new religion s
Packing food given them by Bossert, Schnell and Hussey set out
again on their long walk. At night they heard the howls of wolves
and other wild animals.
Winter had now fallen, and in mid-December a white pall en-
veloped the uplands. "During the night and the whole of the next
day, so much snow fell that none in Carolina could remember the
like," Schnell noted. "It compelled us to remain in doors all day."
Abandoning the back country, the Moravian turned eastward
and at last reached Charles Town, South Carolina, on Christmas eve.
Their host, a Huguenot named Brunet, told them of the "pitiable
rsm
A MORAVIAN JOURNEY TO CAROLINA
circumstances" of the Germanic ministers and people there and of
evil reports which had been circulated of Count Zinzendorf and
the Moravian. Schnell attributed this to a book by the Presbyterian
minister, Gilbert Tennent, who had preached three sermons in New
York the year before on "The Necessity of Holding Fast the Truth
... Relating to Errors lately vented by some Moravian in those
parts."
Schnell was also distressed to learn that some German settlers in
South Carolina had been turned against the Moravian by a letter
which the Reverend Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, an early Lu-
theran in Pennsylvania, had written to South Carolina. Schnell was
indignant. "In it many lies were told about our Brethren and many
wicked things were falsely reported about them," he wrote. "This
has stirred up the people against us."
At the village of Purysburg on the bank of the Savannah River,
twenty miles from Savannah, Pastor Schnell on January 21 called on
a German Reformed minister, the Reverend Henry Chiffelle, who
had also been ordained by the Church of England to minister to the
English colonies. Chiffelle greeted Schnell and showed him his
garden and plantation, but he balked at letting Schnell preach in
his church. "He said, personally he had no objection," Schnell wrote,
"but explicit orders had been received from Charlestown according
to which none should have permission to preach, except he had
been ordained or licensed by the Bishop of London."
Chiffelle also expressed his opposition to Moravian doctrine,
which accepted the Scriptures as a literal rule of faith and behav-
ior. The Moravian' concept of themselves as a "congregation of
saints," emphasizing conduct rather than doctrine as the road to
salvation, was unacceptable to him as an Anglican. Chiffelle also
told Schnell he had not been able to convert many German emi-
grants "because their hearts were very hard," but he wished Schnell
more success with them.
ng concluded their missionary tour, extending more than 500
1 • : rom Pennsylvania to Savannah, the two Moravian prepared
n to their mission. On January 15, they bade farewell to their
Carolina friends and boarded the sloop John Penrose, docked
is _ -innaWs harbor. Soon they were at sea, bound for Pennsylvania
by way of New York. They arrived at Bethlehem at last on April
10, 1744.
The Moravian mission was typical of many which that sect un-
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
dertook during the years of the German settlements of the eight-
eenth century. Soon they would plant new settlements at Bethabara,
Bethania, and Salem in North Carolina, traveling regularly from
Pennsylvania to the southern colonies and back again.
To them and to other newcomers from the Old World, the
Warriors' Path became a familiar and well-worn path. Of them and
other unsung early pioneers, William Rose Ben6t wrote an appro-
priate epitaph:
Little of brilliance did they write or say.
They bore the battle of living and were gay.
Little of wealth or fame they left behind.
They were merely honorable, brave, and kind!
t42l
CHAPTER 6
Along the Way South
When Alexander Spotswood led his Knights to the Virginia moun-
taintop in 1716 and foresaw the resistance which France would pose
to the colonies' westward growth, he proved himself a farsighted
statesman. Though Louis XIV had lost the Hudson Bay region to
England, the French still held strong outposts beyond the Appala-
chians.
By 1744, the two great nations were at war again. France had
erected fortresses along the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes,
and the Mississippi. Increasingly, her trappers ventured eastward
to trade with the Ohio Valley Indians. Along the eastern uplands,
frontier settlers heard again the dreadful war cries of the Iroquois
and the southern chieftains.
The Five Nations blamed the Catawbas. After the Treaty of
Albany had been signed by the Five Nations with New York,
Pennsylvania, and Virginia in 1722, they said they had asked the
southern tribesmen to confirm it.
"The Catawbas refused to come," the Iroquois complained to the
English signatories, "and sent us word that we were but women.
That they were men, and double men, for they had two penises.
That they would make women of us and would always be at war
with us," Chief Gachradadow of the Cayugas told the Virginians.
'They are a deceitful people. Our Brother Assaragoa is deceived by
them: 'i
The Iroquois knew the meaning of the Catawbas' weird boast, for
Indian warriors often kept a group of submissivd males to perform
domestic chores while the warriors fought and hunted. These pitiful
male concubines, v I-som Europeans described as "transvestites,"
were forced bi - tribesmen into sodomistic acts. Such was the
fate with v► b i :e Catawbas had threatened the Iroquois.
As war a. reatened between France and England, the gov-
ernors of t: -idle colonies saw need again to meet with the
warring trii . ,.cu and brighten the chain of friendship. This was
a part of the struggle between the two powers for Indian allies, fi-
nally to be fought out in the French and Indian Wars. After long
[43l
THS GREAT WAGON ROAD I ALONG Tim WAY SOUTH
negotiations, the governors of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Vir- i a people whose principles forbid them to draw the carnal sword
ginia traveled over the Warriors' Path in the spring of 1744 to meet were in the right to give no provocation.2
once more with the Iroquois.
They chose as their meeting place the village of Lancaster, seat Thi wrote William Byrd II, who derived much of his wealth frog
of one of Pennsylvania's eastern counties, thirty miles west of Phila- Fade with the Indians of western Virginia
When the chieftains and colonists had gathered in Lancaster
delphia. Here, aired the tobacco and wheatfields of the Pennsyl-
vania Dutch (as the Germanic settlers were called), gathered the courthouse on June 22, Governor Thomas had a clerk come forth t
chieftains of the Iroquois. Now known as the Six Nations since the keep b written record of the talks. This was printed later in th
Oneida had adopted the remnants of North Carolina's Tuscarora Y Y the young Philadelphia printer, Benjamin Franklin.
tribesmen about 1722, they came down from New York and en- Pennsylvania's Governor Thomas, known as "Ones" to the Ir(
quois, first scolded the Delaware tribesmen for murdering the Penn
camped near the Conestoga River.
The proceedings followed the pattern which the Iroquois had laid sylvania trader john Armstrong and two others near the WarriorPath. Ones demanded that the Delawares deliver up the culprit,
down at Albany in 1685 and again in 1722. From Maryland came
Governor Edmund jenings and Philip Thomas, while Virginia was and return the stolen goods to Armstrong's wife and children.
represented by councilors Thomas Lee of Westmoreland County "That what I have said may have its due weight with you," th
and William Beverley of Essex County, who held the vast Beverley Governor said, holding up a gift of colorful beads, "I give you th
Manor tract in western Virginia. The handsome and ambitious Lee string of wampum.
came as spokesman for Virginia's Governor, Colonel William Gooch, Ile
Maryland's e Indians assented with the cry, "Yo -ha, yo -h&',
who had been wounded three years earlier in the British attack on spokesman, Governor Jenings, known to the Indian
Cartagena, on the coast of South America. as "Tocany-Hogan," next came forward and offered the Iroquois
But the two principal figures in the Lancaster Treaty conference gift of 300 pounds sterling in goods and currency if they 'woul
were Pennsylvanian: the experienced and trusted interpreter,, renounce all claim to lands in that colony. "And as a broad roa
Conrad Weiser, and the polished Governor, George Thomas. will be made between us," he said, gesturing to show the friendl.
Thomas dominated the Lancaster conference just as Virginia's Gov- corridor, we shall always be desirous of keeping it clear, that w
ernor Spotswood had guided the Albany treaty twenty-two years may from time to time take care that the links of friendship be nc
before. Adhering faithfully to William Penn's Quaker policy of rusted. Then, accepting a handsome belt of beads from his aide, h
treating the Indians peaceably and fairly, Governor Thomas insisted told them, "In testimony that our words and hearts agree, we giv
that Pennsylvanians buy lands from the natives instead of seizing you this belt of wampum."
them by conquest. Aided by the veteran German trader, Conrad "Yo -ha, Yo -ha," cried the Indians. Marylanders then began t
Weiser, who was the colony's Indian interpreter, Governor Thomas spread the goods out for the Indians to see. There were 200 shirt. -
preserved the peace between white man and Indian. much cloth, 47 guns, a pound of vermilion for war paint. 1,000 Hint
As one Virginia councilor conceded of Pennsylvania's policy: to light their gunpowder, four dozen Jew's harps, a dozen woode.
boxes, 1 quarters of bar lead, two quarters of gunshot, and sever
7%ey have observed exact justice with all the natives that border half is of gunpowder. The Pennsylvanians said it was work
upon them; they have purchased all their Lands from the Indians; £ in Pennsylvania currency.
and tho they paid but a trifle for them, it has procured them the s luring to each other as they fingered the articles, thegrea
credit of being more righteous than their neighbors. They have Is finally shook their heads and agreed to take the oodi
likewise had the produce to treat them kindly upon all occasions, Ver, they were not yet ready to give up their land. g
which has saved them from many wars and massacres, wherein the Glincilor Lee of Virginia next came forward Dressed in th
other colonies have been indiscreetly involved. The truth of it is, P-6110 Lid ed style -of a Virginia planter, he had come to Lancaster
pavle Du t wit
[] MIDIMVille, NC
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
strong misgivings. Since the settlement of Jamestown in 1607, Vir-
ginia had warred chronically with the red men. Many settlers had
been massacred along the James River in 1622 and 1644, almost
destroying the young colony. Frontier attacks in 1676 led. to
Nathaniel Bacon's assault on Virginia's southern Indians. Despite
the diplomatic efforts of Nicholson and Spotswood, the bloodshed
had continued.
Lee came to the heart of the matter. He asked the Iroquois to give
up the Great Warriors' Path altogether and to move farther west.
To this, an Indian spokesman replied that they had won the land
by conquest and deserved to hold it. But "Brother Assaragoa," as
Lee was called, persisted:
If the Six Nations have made any conquest over Indians that may
at any time have lived on the west side of the Great Mountains of
Virginia, yet they never possessed any lands that we have ever
heard of. That part [the Valley of Virginia] was altogether deserted,
and free for any people to enter upon, as the people of Virginia
have done, by order of the Great King [of England], very justly ...
and free from any claim of you, the Six Nations, our Brethren, until
within these eight years a
He reminded them of the chain of friendship which had been
made with them in Albany in 1685 by Virginias Governor, Lord
Howard of Effingham, and in 1722 by his successor, Colonel Alex-
ander Spotswood.
To this the Iroquois answered that Spotswood's treaty had bound
Virginians not to settle west of the Blue Ridge, leaving the Great
Warriors' Path beyond it to the Indians.
You have not recited [it] as it is [Thomas Lee contradicted them].
For the white people—your brethren of Virginia—are in no article
of that treaty prohibited to pass and settle to the westward of the
Great Mountains. It is the Indians tributary to Virginia that are
restrained, as you and your tributary Indians are from passing to
the eastward of the same mountains, or to the southward of the
Cohongoroaton [Potomac]
Lee pulled the hand-written treaty of 1722 out of his papers.
From it he read these words:
That the Great River of the Potowmack and the high ridge of
mountains, which extend all along the frontiers of Virginia to the
ALONG THE WAY SOUTH
westward of the present settlements of that colony, shall be for ever
the established boundaries between the Indians[,] subject to the
dominions of Virginia, and the Indians belonging and depending on
the Five Nations; so that neither our Indians shall not, on any pre-
tense whatsoever, pass to northward or westward of the said
boundaries without a passport in like manner from the Governor or
Commander in Chief of New-York.a
After the chiefs conferred, the spokesman told the Englishmen
that they needed the Great Warriors' Path to communicate with the
Catawbas and Cherokees in Carolina. A link was needed between
the tribes of North and South, and this was theirs.
Again Thomas Lee arose. He reminded the Iroquois that they had
promised Spotswood at Albany twenty-two years earlier that they
would make peace with the southern tribesmen. However, "It seems,
by your being at war with the Catawbas, that it has not been kept be-
tween you," he rebuked them. Brother Assaragoa told them, assum-
ing a fatherly and forgiving tone, Virginia would recognize the
Indians' right to use the Great Warriors' Path if the Six Nations
would "behave themselves orderly, like friends and brethren."
After more negotiations, the Iroquois renounced their right to
hunt in Maryland except in the uplands near the Potomac. How-
ever, the Indians were clearly resentful of the whites' continued
pressure. Chief Gachradadow of the Cayugas, an eloquent and
powerful man, rose at length and, with the aid of the interpreter,
painted this picture of his tribesmen's gradual loss of their home-
land:
Brother Assaragoa:
The world at the first was made on the other side of the Great
Water different from what it is on this side, as may be known from
the different colors of the skin and our flesh, and that which you call
justice may not be so amongst us. You have your laws and customs,
and so have we. The Great King [of England] might send you over
to conquer the Indans, but it looks to us that God did not approve
of it; if He had, he would not have placed the sea where it is, and
the limites between us and you .. .
You know very well, when the white people came first here, they
were very poor; but now they have got our lands, and are by them
become rich, and we are now poor. What little we have had for the
land goes soon away, but the land lasts forever. You told us that you
had brought with you a chest of goods and that you have the key in
[46] j [47]
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
your pockets, but we have never seen the chest, nor the goods which
are said to be in it. It may be small and the goods few...
The day was Saturday. The Virginians promised to open the
chest as soon as the conference resumed on Monday. Meanwhile,
on Saturday night, the three colonial delegations feasted the chiefs
and the "leading men" of Lancaster at a rich banquet, offering them
brandy and rum which they had brought with them from Phila-
delphia, Annapolis, and Wiliamsburg.
It was a memorable feast, seldom equaled in the annals of
colonial America. By the light of candles and lightwood, the un-
g chiefs and the colonial dignitaries sat down before tables
piled high with meat and drink. Each of the chieftains of Six
Nations first offered thanks, punctuated by the others with cries
and murmers of "Yo -ha, Yo -ha-ha." Then Chief Gachradadow,
from his high seat at the head table, spoke. According to the Penn-
sylvania clerk who wrote the record for Benjamin Franklin's press,
he was a formidable figure, standing "with all the dignity of a
warrior, the gesture of an orator, and in a very graceful posture."
He told of his vision of lasting peace between red man and white.
The feast ended and the Indians signed a deed releasing their
claims to all of Maryland's lands.
After the treaty -makers had devoted Sunday to rest and worship,
they gathered on Monday for Thomas Lee to open Virginia's trea-
sure chest. The thirteen chiefs and their naked warriors gathered
around while the Virginia negotiators spread out their array of
clothing, firearms, and baubles. To this, Thomas Lee said, Virginia
would add x'.200 in gold on condition that the Iroquois sign a deed
recognizing the right of the King of England to the uninhabited
Appalachian lands.
Speaking for the Iroquois, Chief Canasatego asked that Brother
Assaragoa promise to let the Iroquois continue to pass peacefully
through the Warriors' Path. Lee and Beverley agreed, but said the
colony must maintain control of the road.
Besides their official treaty, Lee and Beverley took occasion to
arrange a treaty with the Indians which sold to them and other
wealthy Tidewater land speculators about 500,000 acres beyond the
Appalachians which became Jefferson and Columbiana counties in
Ohio, and Brooke County in West Virginia.
The colonists devoted the closing days to an effort to strengthen
[48]
ALANG THE WAY SOUTH
their alliance with the Iroquois in the recurring warfare with
France. "I need not put you in mind how much William Penn and
his sons have been your friends," said Governor Thomas of Pennsyl-
vania. Giving the Indians a belt of wampum, he reminded them of
their treaty to assist Pennsylvania in any war with France. "In this
time of war with our common enemies, the French and Spaniards,"
Brother Onas told them, "it will be the wisest way to be at peace."
The thirteen chiefs and their braves murmured "Yo -ha, Yo -ha."
When the written treaties were about to be signed on July 3,
Councilor Thomas Lee of Virginia gave the chiefs another P,100 in
i gold and a belt of wampum. This, he explained through Conrad
Weiser, was:
to make our Chain of Union and Friendship as bright as the sun,
that it may not contract any more rust forever; that our children's
children may rejoice at and confirm what we have done; and that
you and your children may not forget it.?
Governor Thomas concluded with an appeal for the future:
Our friend, Conrad Weiser, when he is old, will go into the Other
World, as our fathers have done. Our children will then want such
a friend to go between them and your children to reconcile any dif-
ference that may happen to arise between them.
The way to have such a friend is for you to send three or four of
your boys to Virginia, where we have a fine house for them to live
in, and a man on purpose to teach ... the religion, language, and
customs of the white people.8
He referred to the Indian school which had been established in
1873 at the College of William and Mary, in Virginia, to educate
and Christianize the sons of the chiefs. However, few Indians had
enrolled, and most who did soon quit and returned to their tribes.
Tocarry-Hogan, speaking for Maryland, urged" the Indians: "Let
not our chain contract any rust; whenever you perceive the least
speck, tell us of it, and we will make it clean."
D firing the three weeks of meetings, Chief Canasatego had acted
as . ` Indians' principal spokesman. Tall and muscular, he had "a
,fig liveliness" in his speech. As the meeting approached its
;ment, he asked that a dram of rum be poured for each
i . The colonials agreed and passed around small wineglasses.
Ti.. .-ising in his full regalia, Canasatego addressed Onas, Brother
i Assaragoa, and Tocarry-Hogan:
[49]
• _ .. .. ,�
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
We shall never forget that you and we have but one heart, one
head, one eye, one ear, and one hand.... In proof of our case we
told Onantio [the governor of French Canada] our Father, as he is
called, that neither he nor any of his people should come through
our country to hurt our brethren the English, or any of the settle-
ments belonging to them
Canasatego admitted that the Six Nations had obtained the prom-
ise of several tribes partial to the French not to aid the French in
the impending war. He also promised that the Iroquois stood ready
to make peace with the Catawbas whenever they would come up
the Warriors' Path from Carolina for that purpose.
Politely, he declined to send his sons to the College of William
and Mary. "We love our children too well to send them so great a
way," he said, "for the Indians are not inclined to give their children
learning. We allow it to be good, and we thank you ... but our
customs differing from yours, you will be so good as to excuse us."
Canasatego's wineglass was now empty. When he had first asked
for rum, he chided his hosts, "It turned out unfortunately that you
gave us it in French glasses," holding the small wineglass up for
them to see. "We now desire you will give us some in English
glasses," he said with a wink.
Governor Thomas expressed no surprise that the French "cheat
you in your glasses as well as in everything else." He said the com-
missioners had "enough left to fill our English glasses, and [we]
will shew the difference between the narrowness of the French and
the generosity of your brethren, the English, towards you."10 Rum
was passed again, and the chiefs and governors drank merrily.
To seal the bargain, the governors distributed one more round of
presents. Canasatego proudly wore the scarlet camlet coat he re-
ceived from Virginia. Gachradadow donned a broad, gold -laced hat
from Maryland, and others received gifts from Pennsylvania.
The conference over, Governor Thomas mounted his horse and rode
northward to Philadelphia while the other delegates heat.. south
over the Warriors' Path. It had been a fruitful meeting, } • • lien
the French and Indian Wars erupted a few months later, C jin
of friendship between the Iroquois and the English held fa. -ng
the St. Lawrence River and Lake Champlain, the Six Nation., ;ht
bravely for the Great English King Across the Water, as they had
pledged to do.
[50]
ALONG THE WAY SOUTH
But the most important result of the Lancaster Treaty was the
further withdrawal of the great tribes from the Atlantic coastal
plain. Once again the aborigines had been forced westward.
The Great Warriors' Path after 1744 was no longer an Indian trail.
It was slowly becoming the Great Philadelphia- Wagon Road to the
south and the southwest.
CHAPTER 7
Presbyterians in a New Land
Although the Germanic settlers were divided into many sects--
Moravians, Mennonites, Lutherans, Amish—the Scotch -Irish who
spread along the Great Warriors Path to the south were nearly all
Presbyterians. In a few years William Penns City of Brotherly Love,
which was at first strongly Quaker, became the stronghold of these
staunch -followers of john Knox in the New World.
Unlike Church of England ministers sent to Virginia and Mary-
land by the Bishop of London and supported by taxes on their
parishioners, the Presbyterian ministers came on their own. In 1718,
aminister in northern Ireland exclaimed in alarm that "no less than
six ministers have demitted their congregations, and great numbers
of their people go with them; so that we are daily alarmed with
both ministers and people going o$." But this was merely the be-
ginning.
Beset by conflict with both Anglicans and Catholics in Ireland,
the Presbyterians chose Pennsylvania as more hospitable to their
views than New England, where Congregationalists dominated, or
Virginia and Maryland, where the Church of England was estab-
lished by law. Penn's early insistence on freedom of conscience and
his opposition to "looseness, irreligion, and atheism" appealed to
the Scots. They found comfort in Pennsylvania's assurance of tolera-
tion to all who acknowledged "One almighty God, the Creator. Up-
holder and Ruler of the World."
Such worshippers were promised that they would never be dis-
advantaged by their "conscientious Perswasion or Practice, nor be
compelled to frequent or maintain any religious Worship, Place or
Ministry .. " Being dissenters against Anglicanism themselves,
Quakers favored religious toleration, and word of this had spread to
northern Ireland.
Wherever they went, the Scotch -Irish displayed a confidence
whit!, •.trried them far. "Teach me, O Lord, to think well of my-
self.. " ..1;fY prayed, unabashedly.
Philadelphia's first Presbyterian congregation had been formed in
1695 jointly with the Baptists in the waterfront storehouse of the
[531
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
Barbados Company. Soon others sprang up as new shiploads of
Ulstermen surged down the gangway into the growing town. Before
1720, Presbyterians had formed three new congregations westward
to the mouth of the Susquehanna, while the next decade saw
eighteen more congregations added in Pennsylvania. '
As early as 1707, a presbytery or council of elders was formed by
ministers of seven pioneer Presbyterian churches in Pennsylvania
and New England. Ten years later the Covenanters had increased
sufficiently to form the Presbyterian Synod of Philadelphia—the first
in America—to direct the growth of new congregations and enlist
ministers.
In May 1720, the Presbytery of New Castle reported that the
"number of people lately come from Ireland" had grown to such
an extent that settlers along the branches of the Elk River had sent
commissioners to ask for ministers, with the "design of having the
Gospel settled among them." One Presbyterian cleric, the Reverend
George Gillespie, reported in 1723 from the head of Christianna
Creek, near the later Delaware border:
As to the affairs of Christ in our parts of the world: There are a
great many congregations erected and now erecting; for within the
space of five years by gone, near to two hundred Families have come
Into our parts from Ireland, and more are following: They are gen-
way Presbyterians.)
Although many Presbyterian ministers came into Pennsylvania
with the Scotch -Irish, they could not keep pace with the denomina-
tion's growth. The Reverend jedidiah Andrews, minister of the
Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, called attention to this prob-
lem in 1730.
Such a multitude of people coming in from Ireland of late years [he
wrote] our Congregations are multiplied, in this Province, to the
number of 15 or 16, which are all but 2 .: 3 furnished with min-
isters. All Scotch and Irish but 3 or 4. P i • divers new Congre-
gations yet are forming by these neK -s, we call ourselves
Presbyterians, none pretending to be c: •ngregational, in this
Provinces
The beliefs of Scottish Presbyterians . �w England Congre-
gationalists were similar, but the two g ., followed separate
courses. The Congregationalist minister juaathan Edwards fre-
PRESBYTERIANS IN A NEW LAND
quently preached to Presbyterians, but he declined to serve as
a missionary to Scotch -Irish on Virginia's frontier.
To the handful of hard-working Presbyterian ministers in Pennsyl-
vania, it soon became clear that more clergy were needed. The
growing colonists could hardly expect the Scottish universities at.
Edinburgh, Aberdeen, St. Andrews, and Glasgow to supply these,
as they had done in the old country. The first man to try to supply
this need was the Reverend William Tennent, pastor at Neshaminy
in Bucks County, near the Warriors' Path. In 1726, he began to
teach his son William and other youths the Greek and Latin they
would need to attend college and prepare for the ministry.
At Tennent's "log college," at Neshaminy, young Scotch -Irish lads
lived and worked in the Tennents' household while meeting the
arduous intellectual discipline of the Church of Scotland. Soon the
Reverend john Blair started another log college at Fagg's Manor,
in Chester County. Inspired by the parish schools which john Knox
had instituted in early Scotland, the log colleges in the next twenty
years led to the creation of the first full-fledged Presbyterian college
and theological seminary in the colonies. This institution, the Col-
lege of New Jersey, eventually became Princeton University. They
also led other clergymen to open similar schools along the trail of
Scotch -Irish immigration in Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and
thence westward through the Appalachians.
Wherever the Scotch -Irish settled, wrote an admirer of those
hardy souls,
they started schools. As the parsons were their best -educated men,
they taught the youth as a part of their ministry. In time the schools
they started in their congregations grew to be common schools for
all. Later some of them became academies, and a few became
colleges. In this way these Presbyterians did more to start schools in
the South and West than any other peoples
The crusading spirit of the Presbyterians was strengthened in
1739 when the Reverend George Whitefield reached Philadelphia
from England and aroused great fervor in a series of revival sermons.
The minister was only twenty-five, but his golden eloquence and his
vivid word -pictures of the hell which awaited sinners stirred Penn-
sylvania,
ennsylvania, young and old. Although he was an Anglican, he was at
this period an adherent of Charles and john Wesley's Methodists,
[54] 15M
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
whose popular evangelism, tinged with Calvinism, influenced many
other sects.
The normally skeptical Benjamin Franklin was one of the many
who heard the Wesleyan and was transported with religious fervor.
"It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of
our inhabitants," he glowed after hearing the youthful fire-eater.
In his autobiography, Franklin described his unsuccessful effort to
persuade Whitefield to establish his orphanage in Philadelphia in-
stead of Georgia, and Franklin's resultant decision not to contribute.
However, he wrote:
I happened soon after to attend one of his Sermons, in the course
of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I
silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my Pocket
a handful of Copper Money, three or four silver Dollars, and five
Pistoles of Gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded
to give the Coppers. Another Stroke of his Oratory made me
asham'd of that, and determin'd me to give the Silver; and he
finish'd so admirably, that I empty'd my Pocket wholly into the
Collector's Dish, Gold and all .. 4
Although still a nominal adherent of the staid Church of Eng-
land,
ngland, Whitefield's eloquent evangelism greatly influenced William
Tennent and many other Pennsylvania Presbyterians. Transplanting
the emotionalism of Europe's "Great Awakening" to the middle
colonies, the young Wesleyan stimulated the growth of evangelical
"New Side" ministers like Tennent and his log -college graduates.
Many of these went forth to the frontier and planted new churches.
From their hub in Philadelphia, young Scotch -Irish ministers
carried the Presbyterian gospel down the Warriors' Path and else-
where along the frontier. Probably the first Presbyterian church in
the Valley of Virginia was organized at Opequon near Winchester
in 1737. In the churchyard is a fieldstone slab with its crude, home-
made letters still readable:
JOHN WILSON
INTERED HERE
THE BODYS OF
HIS 2 CHILDER &
WIFE YE MOTHER
MARY MARCUS
PRESBYTERIANS IN A NEW LAND
WHO DYED AGST
THE 4TH 1742
AILED 22 YEARS.
In 1740, the Donegal Presbytery directed the Reverend John
Craig, who had recently arrived from Ireland, to accept a call to
the Presbyterians in the Valley of Virginia. Traveling southward
along the path to Augusta County, he established the second church
in the Valley at Fort Defiance, eight miles north of the county seat
at Staunton. A year later he planted another church at Tinkling
Spring, near the future Lexington.
After a preaching trip southward to new settlers along the New
and Holston rivers, in southwestern Virginia, Parson Craig brought
home to Augusta a long list of church elders he had ordained. For
some of them, known as "great sinners," he apologized. "When I
cudna get hewn stones," he explained, 1 tuk durnaks [brickbats]."
No pioneer Presbyterian, however, equaled the effect of young
Samuel Davies, who went south from Pennsylvania in 1748 to preach
to frontiersmen in five upland Virginia counties east of the Blue
Ridge Mountains. Although only twenty-five at the time, the godly
and soul-searching minister—a graduate of John Blair's log college—
was soon the most famous preacher in Virginia. He was the leader
in the Great Awakening in that Anglican colony and began to stir a
demand for greater religious freedom. Rough frontiersmen who grew
grain and tobacco in the piedmont uplands gathered by the hun-
dreds wherever Davies came to preach. Anglicans as well as Presby-
terians subscribed money to construct seven plain wooden meeting
houses which extended his circuit from Hanover to Henrico, Louisa,
Goochland, and Caroline counties.
Why did Davies and other Presbyterians exert such strong appeal?
Why did so many American specially on the frontier—flock to
the Presbyterian meeting in preference to the established Anglican
churches? The answer was that the Scottish clerics were freer to
follow the pioneers than were the settled Anglican clergy of the
coastal plain. Furthermore, Presbyterianism was more democratic
and direct than some other faiths: the Scotsman was by nature prao.
tical, pragmatic, and impatient of distinctions. All of this appealed to
the frontiersman. They were qualities that became part of the
American spirit.
The Scottish clergy also appealed to Americans for their Whiggish
[s'l]
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
independence and their skepticism toward British rule. Having
chafed under British imperialism in their native Scotland or northern
Ireland, they were accustomed to speak out. Many urged disestab-
lishment of the Church of England in the colonies. The Reverend
John Witherspoon, who guided American Presbyterianism as presi-
dent of The College of New Jersey from 1788 to 1794, effectively
spoke for separation of Church and state. In essence, Presbyterian
preachers on the frontier seemed the most American of the religion-
ists until the Baptists and Methodists hit their stride a little later.
Church of England ministers in Virginia eyed Davies' ministry
coldly. By attracting so many members of the Established Church
in the colony, he was diverting support from settled parish min-
isters. Furthermore, many dignified Anglicans felt that Davies and
other New Side Presbyterians were
preaching the terrors of the law in such a manner and dialect as had
no precedent in the Word of God ... and so industriously working
on the passions and affections of weak minds as to cause them to
cry out in a hideous manner, and fall down in convulsion -like Sts, to
the marring of the profiting both of themselves and others ... that
they cannot attend to or hear what the preacher says .. a
Replying to their "Old Side" or traditionalist Presbyterian critics,
the New Siders castigated them as "Dark Lanthorns." Surviving
tests of Davies' sermons reveal him to have been an eloquent and
sound preacher, who avoided the "hellfire and damnation" of many
New Siders. Even so, he was suspect as an itinerant evangelist.
One critic of Davies was Peyton Randolph, the learned and dis-
tinguished attorney general of Virginia. He advocated that the
colony limit the revival meetings which Davies could hold. It would
weaken the Established Church, he protested, if New Side evange-
lists "are permitted to range and raise contributions over the whole
country, when our [Established Church] clergy are confined to a
single parish." However, the colony continued to permit Davies to
preach at will.
Governor William Gooch, himself partly Scottish and originally
sympathetic to the dissenters in Virginia, branded the New Siders
as "False teachers ... professing themselves ministers under the
pretended influence of new light, extraordinary impulse, and such
like fanatical and enthusiastical knowledge..." His objection also
PRESBYTERUNS IN A NEW LAND
applied to "New Light" Baptists and "enthusiastick" Wesleyans.
In 1747, the Virginia Council ruled that dissenting ministers in
the colony must be "settled" and minister to established congrega-
tions. It disapproved of circuit riding as destructive of the Anglican
concept of orderly parish ministries. It declared:
It is with Hearts full of the most unfeigned Concern that we ob-
serve a Spirit of Enthusiasm introduced among the People by Itin-
erant Preachers; a Spirit, more dangerous to the common Welfare
than the furious Element which laid the Royal Edifice [the Virginia
Capitol at Williamsburg, which had just burned] in Ashes; a Spirit,
productive not only of Confusion, but of Blasphemy, Profaneness,
and the most wicked & destructive Doctrine and Practices...
But such Anglican objections merely strengthened Davies' popu-
larity. A boy named Patrick Henry, brought up in the Church of
England, heard Samuel Davies in Hanover County, Virginia, and
remembered him as the greatest orator he had ever listened to. Re-
ports of such disaffection began to reach the ears of English states-
men with disturbing frequency. In a few years, the writer Horace
Walpole would tell a worried British public: "There is no use crying
about it. Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson,
and that is the end of it."
Another Presbyterian pioneer was the Reverend Hugh McAden,
who became one of the first "settled" (as opposed to itinerant)
ministers in North Carolina. Graduating from the College of New
Jersey in 1753, he was licensed to preach two years later and or-
dained. In 1759, he accepted a call from Hanover Presbytery, which
Samuel Davies had helped establish, serving from Virginia south-
ward to Georgia.
McAden recorded his first preaching mission down the Wagon
Road in his journal. Traveling on horseback, he stopped overnight
with Presbyterian ministers and laymen "on both sides," referring to
the Old Sides and New Sides who divided that denomination. Once
he noted: "Alone in the wilderness. Sometimes a house in ten miles,
and sometimes not that." Near Augusta Courthouse, later named
Staunton, he "stayed for dinner" at Mr. Poage% "the first I had eaten
since I left Pennsylvania."
At the invitation of the Reverend John Brown, he preached at the
Timber Ridge Church in the Valley of Virginia "Felt some life and
[59]
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
earnestness in alarming the people of their dangers on account of
sin, the procuring cause of all evils that befall us in this life, or in
that to come," wrote the Calvinist.
While staying with the family of Joseph Lapsley in Augusta
County, McAden's host received the shocking news of General. Brad -
dock's tragic defeat in Pennsylvania. "This, together with the fre-
quent account of fresh murders being daily committed upon the
frontiers," he wrote, "struck terror in every heart.... In short, the
whole inhabitants were put into an universal confusion. Scarcely
any man durst sleep in his own house—but all met in companies
with their wives and children, and set about building little fortifica-
tions
ortifications to defend themselves ... "
Some frontiersmen urged McAden to return to the safety of
Pennsylvania, but he continued southward. Several weeks later he
preached at a Presbyterian meeting house on the Yadkin River in
North Carolina. "Many adhere to the Baptists that were before
wavering," he wrote. "O may the good Lord ... visit this peoplel"
Passing through the lands of the Catawba Indians, the minister was
surrounded and his baggage rifled, but he was unharmed. As a
consequence of his trip, McAden became the "settled minister" of
two congregations at Duplin and New Hanover, North Carolina, in
1759, and died in 1781 in North Carolina.
Bitterness between Old Side and New Side Presbyterians in Penn-
sylvania
ennsylvania reached such intensity that they split into two groups from
1741 to 1758. During this period, the liberal Presbyterians of New
York and of New Brunswick broke away from the more conservative
Old Side Presbyterians of the Synod of Philadelphia.
It was during this period that the Synod of New York created a
new institution to replace Tennent's log college, principally to train
clergymen and schoolmasters. Opening its doors first in 1747 at
Elizabeth, New Jersey, it moved five years later to nearby Princeton
and became the College of New Jersey. This stronghold of Presby-
terian thought soon took over and broadened the log colleges' mis-
sion of supplying religious and intellectual leaders to the Sc. -h
immigrants who were infiltrating the Appalachian region. In ! �t
became Princeton University.
As the Scotch -Irish spread, other ministers opened scho: , he
those which Knox had created in Scotland. The first to be ;.�ub-
lished in the Valley of Virginia was taught in 1749 or earlier by the
1601
PRESBYTERIANS IN A NEW LAND
Reverend John Brown, who had come south on the Warriors' Path
and begun his ministry at Timber Ridge, near Staunton. When the
Hanover Presbytery twenty-two years later resolved to create a
"Seminary of Learning," it decided to take under its patronage the
struggling Augusta Academy, then located in Virginia's "Irish tract"
at Mount Pleasant. In 1776, the Hanover Presbytery, which served
Virginia and much of North Carolina, assumed control of the
academy and moved its location to Timber Ridge, on the Wagon
Road. It installed as rector the Reverend William Graham, who had
i graduated from the College of New Jersey in 1773 as a classmate of
Henry "Lighthorse Harry" Lee. ( Lee later persuaded George Wash-
ington to endow the Presbyterian academy with $50,000 of canal
stock, and his son, Robert E. Lee, was still later the president of the
school.)
Like the pioneer log college at Neshaminy, the academy of
Timber Ridge was a rough-hewn institution of high idealism but
spartan severity. The building was only twenty-eight by twenty-four
feet in size, but its course of study was such as to satisfy the rigorous
requisites of Presbyterian education. About 1780 the academy, now
named Liberty Hall, was moved to a hill near Lexington.
Describing the first academy, a later head of the school wrote:
The schoolhouse was a log cabin. A fine forest of oaks, which had
' given Timber Ridge its name, cast a shade over it in the summer
and afforded convenient fuel in winter. A spring of pure water
gushed from the rocks near the house. From amidst the trees the
student had a fine view of the country below, and of the neighbor-
ing Blue Ridge. In short, all the features of the place made it a fit
habitation of the woodland muse, and the hill deserved its name
of Mount Pleasant.
Hither about thirty youth of the mountains repaired, "to taste of
the Pierian spring," thirty-five years after the first settlement of
Burden's Grant. Of reading, writing, and ciphering the boys of the
country had before acquired such knowledge as primary schools
could afford; but with a few late exceptions, Latin, Greek, algebra,
geometry, and such like scholastic mysteries, were things of which
they knew perhaps to lie covered up in the learned heads of their
pastors—but of the nature and uses of which they had no conception
whatever .. .
It was a log but of one apartment. The students carried their
dinner with them from their boarding-houses in the neighborhood
1611
TRE GREAT WAGON ROAD
They Conned their lessons either in the school-room,the forest, where
he
recitations were heard, or under the shades
of breezes whispered and birds sang without disturbing their poostudies.
A horn—perhaps a real cow's iiom�ummol
from
play, and the scattered classes to recitation. Instead of broadcloth
coats, the students generally wore a far more graceful garment, the
hunting -shirt; homespun, homewoven, and �e eaminusementshwere
in-
dustrious wives and daughters of the land.
not the less remote from the modern tastes of students; ecards cards,
flutes, fiddles, and even marbles w y
known
among these homebred mountain boys. Firing pistols and ranging
the fields with shot -guns to kill little birds for sport they would
have considered a waste of time and ammunition.
As to frequenting tippling -shops of any denomination, this was
impossible, because no such catchpenny lures for students existed
in the country, or would have been tolerated. Had any huckster of
liquors, knicknacks, and explosive crackers hung out his sign in
those days, the old puritan morality of the land was yet vigorous
enough to abate the nuisance. both manly and
The sports of the students were mostly gymnastic,
healthful, such as leaping, running, wrestling, pitchingnumer of and
playing ball. In this rustic seminary a considerableyoung
men began their education, who afterwards bore a distinguished
part in the civil and ecclesiastical affairs of the country.
The Scottish schoolmaster was a revered and familiar figure in
America and in Great Britain throughout these years. Known as
"dominie" ( from the Latin dominos), he did not hesitate to inflict
bodily punishment on miscreant students. Such a schoolmaster was
the Reverend Samuel Doak, a graduate of Augusta Academyn old
ho
founded two schools in the territory of Tennessee. This stem
classicist transported his library by packhorse and at commencement
presided in the classic garb of the colonial clergyman: powdered
wig, long black coat, short breeches with white stockings, and
broad -toed shoes with shining buckles.
As they spread southward, Scotch -Irish ministers planted
other
schools. From such beginnings in Virginia grew Hampden -Sydney
and Mary Baldwin colleges. Further south, in North Carolina,
Davidson was begun in 1836. In Georgia, Franklin College, be-
gun about 1800, grew into the University of Georgia. Similarly, in
the Appalachian territories which they settled after the Revolution,
PRESBYTERIANS IN A NEW LAND
the Scotch -Irish launched Transylvania and Centre colleges in
Kentucky and the predecessors of the University of Tennessee, and
George Peabody College for Teachers in Tennessee.
Like their parishioners, migrant Scotch -Irish ministers lived with
hardship and sudden death. In his journal, the 'Reverend John
Cuthbertson, who came to Pennsylvania in 1751 as the first Ameri-
can missionary of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, described
grueling travels on horseback in his thirty -nine-year ministry
amounting to 60,000 miles. He preached on 2,400 days, and bap-
tized 1,800 children.
Cuthbertson's energies knew no bounds.
After being forty-six days at sea from Derry Loch [his journal be-
gins], landed safely at New Castle, Delaware, August 5th, 1751.
... In good health,laus Deus [praise God]. Then ... at four, after-
noon, took horse and rode twenty miles to Moses Andrews $
Shortly after his arrival in Pennsylvania, Cuthbertson rode down
the Appalachian corridor as far south as Opequon and Winchester
in Virginia, preaching and baptizing as he went. Such mission jour-
neys were frequent on the Wagon Road.
Another Presbyterian missionary who traversed the Road was the
Reverend Philip Vickers Fithian, who in his journal described a
mission tour from Philadelphia to York, Hagerstown, Martinsburg,
Winchester, and other Valley of Virginia settlements in May and
June 1775. '
On a preaching trip in 1775, the Reverend David McClure re-
ported an instance of the riotous living which the puritanical Presby-
terians sometimes observed along the frontier. He noted disap-
provingly:
Attended a marriage, where the guests were all Virginians. It was
a scene of wild and confused merriment. The log house, which was
large, was filled. They were dancing to the music of a fiddle...
Tl:+ ,nanners of the people of Virginia who have removed into these
pi!,; are different from those of the Presbyterians and Germans.
are much addicted to drinking parties, gambling, horse racing,
and fighting. They are hospitable and prodigal. Several of them have
run through their property in the old settlements and have sought
an asylum in the wilderness.z
[631[tel . , . . � ...
,ir 1
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
Despite their lonely isolation along the frontier, the Scotch -Irishmen
played a steadily larger part in colonial affairs. Critical of English
policy before they had left Ireland, most of them were natural ad-
herents to the Revolutionary cause. Thus when Patrick Henry—
himself partly Seottis"undered against the Stamp Act in 1765,
his words found response on the Appalachian "Krish tract and be-
yond
Truly, as the English writer Horace Walpole saw, Cousin America
in the years before the Revolution was running off with a Presby-
terian parson.
K
CHAPTER 8
Mapping the Great Mountains
As colonists moved westward to the foothills and highlands of the
Appalachians, surveyors were repeatedly called on to extend the
boundaries which separated the colonies. Border disputes between
adjoining settlers absorbed much of the attention of governors and
assemblies in these years of frantic growth.
In Virginia, the far -spread upland claims of Lord Fairfax compli-
cated the colony's westward growth. Based on early grants by Stuart
kings to lords Culpeper and Arlington, they were resented by
Virginians as an unwarranted exercise of royal favor. Inherited by
the Fairfaxes, the claims embraced a vast tract from Tidewater
westward to the mountains. It was an empire in itself.
Part of the problem was that no one knew the upland headwaters
of the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers, whose "first heads or
springs" were designated by King James II in 1685 as the westward
boundaries of the Fairfax tract. Governor Gooch of Virginia in 1729
protested the claim, and the House of Burgesses asked King George
II to reconsider it, but King George II refused.
Disturbed by protests, Lord Fairfax himself arrived in Virginia
in 1735 with an order from the King to have the western bounds of
the Fairfax lands surveyed When the Governor and Fairfax dis-
agreed on survey methods, each sent his own survey party out. On
the strength of the surveys, the court in 1745 confirmed Fairfaes
claim to 6,000,000 acres, making up most of northern and western
Virginia. Nineteen counties of Virginia and five in West Virginia
were carved from this kingly domain. •
The settlement enabled Virginia at last to extend its government
to the disputed area, which embraced several hundred miles of the
Great Warriors' Path. The colony at first divided the region into two
v=i,.counties, which it designated as Frederick and Augusta—
F• =._.k in honor of the eldest son of King George II and Augusta
f i -ess Augusta of Saxe -Gotha, Frederick's wife. Their county
st re the tavern -stop towns of Frederick Town ( later Win -
cls and Staunton, which were among the uplands' earliest
settlements.
[S]
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
In charge of the surveys for the Fairfax grant settlement was
Thomas Lewis, a bespectacled Scotch -Irishman whose father had
settled near Staunton in 1715. His chief assistant was Peter Jeffer-
son, a descendant of lowland Virginia pioneers who had moved up-
land into Albemarle County. The surveys which they laboriously
made were soon the basis for large land sales to the incoming
Scotch -Irish and German immigrants.
Working with Lewis and Jefferson was Joshua Fry, a versatile
Oxford graduate who had come to Virginia about 1720 and taught
mathematics at the College of William and Mary. Seeking land for
his growing family, Fry moved to the frontier and put his geometry
to use as a surveyor.
Beginning his survey near the Rappahannock River's source,
Thomas Lewis and his party of forty men worked from September
1746 until February of the following year. Lew&s journal lists many
hardships. Though winter made forest travel easier, it inundated the
surveyors with rain and snow, retarding the movement of men and
horses. Describing a mountain creek, Lewis wrote:
This River was Calld Styx from the Dismal apperance of the place
Being Sufilcen to Strick terror in any human Creature[;] ye Lorels
[laurels] Ivey & Spruce pine so Extremly thick in ye Swamp through
which this River Runs that one Cannot have the Least prospect
Except they look upwards[.] the Water of the River of Dark Brown-
ish Cooler & its motion So Slow that it can hardly be Said to
move[.] its Depth about 4 feet the Bottom muddy & Banks high,
which made it Extremely Difficult for us to pass[.] the most of the
horses when they attemped to asend the farthest Bank tumbling
with their loads Back in the River. most of our Bagage that would
have been Damaged by the water were Brought over on mens
Shoulder Such as Powder, Bread and Bedclothes &c ... we Could
not find a plain Bieg enough for one man to Lye on no fire wood
Except green or Roten Spruce pine[,] no place for our horses to
feed[.] And to prevent their Eating of Loral tyd them all up least
they Should be poisoned&
The surveyors erected a stone monument at the beginning of the
line, marking it with their names.
On October 30, Lewis and Jefferson and their party celebrated
George II's birthday. "This Being his majesty Birth Day," Lewis
wrote, "We Concluded the Evening in meriment [.1 Drank his
1681
MAPPING THE GREAT MOUNTAINS
majesty health which was Followed by a Discharge of nine guns."
Lewis's narrative uncomplainingly describes the winter's cold, the
chilling rains, and the beds of wet leaves on which they sometimes
slept. When their job had been completed, the surveyors were paid
by Lord Fairfax and the Virginia colony. Then they hastened home
to their farms to plow up their newly cleared lands in readiness for
the spring plantings of tobacco, wheat, and corn.
Three years after surveying the Fairfax grant, Peter Jefferson and
Joshua Fry accepted a commission to extend further west the bound-
ary between North Carolina and Virginia. ( John Lewis, by this time
a dignified member of the Virginia Council, was busy handling
western Virginia land sales as chief agent of the Loyal Company.)
William Byrd II had surveyed the line with North Carolinians in
1728, but now it needed to be carried further west.
Peter Jefferson and Joshua Fry were again chosen in 1750 when
the Lords of Trade in London directed the Governor of Virginia to
have a map drawn of the inhabited portions of Virginia.
By this time the two men had become leaders of the frontier
which was growing along the Great Warriors' Path. Fry was Albe-
marle County's presiding magistrate, the head of its militia, and its
county surveyor. As such, he ranked as its first citizen. Not far be-
hind was his neighbor Jefferson, who was also a magistrate, or justice
of the peace. At his rustic plantation, Shadwell, Peter's son Thomas
Jefferson was born in 1743, the eldest son of the family.
Peter Jefferson was largely self-taught, but he possessed a working
knowledge of mathematics and surveying. His son Thomas, who was
only fourteen when his father died in 1757, wrote of him:
My father's education had been quite neglected; but being of a
strong mind, sound judgment and eager after information, he read
much and improved himself insomuch that he was chosen with
Joshua Fry ... to continue the boundary line between Virginia & N.
Carolina which had been begun by colo Byrd, and was afterward
employed with the same Mr. Fry to make the 1st map of Virginia
... that of Capt. [John] Smith being merely a conjectural sketch."s
The two map makers returned to the Appalachian trail with their
surveying instruments, and by the autumn of 1751 they had com-
pleted their map. Received by the Virginia Council in Wdliamsbur&
it was approved and each man was paid £►150 for his work and
expenses. In 1754, the map was printed in England. So useful did it
Irn
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
prove that several later editions were issued in the twenty years
leading to the Revolution.
Titled "A Map of the Inhabited part of Virginia, containing the
whole Province of Maryland, with Part of Pensilvania, New Jersey
and North Carolina," it showed the Great Wagon Road from Penn-
sylvania
ennsylvania crossing the Potomac at Watkins' Ferry ( later Williams-
port) into Virginia. Then, slanting southwestward through the
Valley, the map projected the "Indian Road by the Treaty of
Lancaster,
"signed in 1744.
By the time the 1775 edition of the map had been issued in Lon-
don, this Appalachian pathway was labeled "The Great Wagon
Road from the Yadkin River through Virginia to Philadelphia distant
435 miles." From the Yadkin, several extensions of the road led
southward, one as far as the Indian trading town of Augusta, on the
upper Savannah River in Georgia.
Boundary disputes created many problems for settlers along the
Pennsylvania -Maryland border in these same years. These resulted
from ambiguous grants made by the Crown to the original pro-
prietors of these two early colonies. In the first of these, King
Charles I in 1632 gave to Lord Baltimore the land north of Virginia,
to a point "which lieth under the Fortieth degree of north latitude"
and westward to the Potomac River. However, Charles II in 1681
granted some of the same property to William Penn, who estab-
lished the proprietorship of Pennsylvania to the north of Maryland.
In an effort to resolve the Maryland -Pennsylvania dispute, James
II in 1685 ordered the contested territory to be divided equally
and the western half given to Pennsylvania. Nothing was done,
however, and the boundary remained undefined. Emigrants coming
south from Philadelphia found the land claimed by both colonies.
Hostility threatened to burst into flame unless the confusion could
be ended.
To resolve the issue, Lord Chancellor Hardwick ruled in Eng-
land in 1750 that the dividing line should be drawn due west from
a point slightly north of New Castle, Delaware. Two English
surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, were engaged to
do the work. Starting in 1765, they established the Mason-Dixon
line westward, marking it with milestones. Every fifth one was a
"crown stone," bearing the Penn family arms on the Pennsylvania
side and those of the Baltimores on the Maryland side. The 233-
[68]
MAPPING THE GREAT MOUNTAINS
mile boundary was completed in 1768. At last the long controversy
was ended.
The growing emigration south from Philadelphia gave colonists
an increasing awareness of the trail through the Appalachians. The
Virginia Assembly in 1744 ordered a ferry kept on the Potomac,
where the road had crossed by a shallow ford from Maryland into
Virginia. The act specified that it be "On Patomack river from Evan
Watkins landing opposite to the mouth of Anagochego creek to
Edmund Wade's land in Maryland, the price for a man 3 pence and
for a horse 3 pence."
Watkins' Ferry made the Potomac crossing safer and faster. Soon
the growing movement southward justified a larger boat, which
could transport wagons as well as horses and cattle. Ferryman Evan
Watkins was kept busy from dawn to dusk poling his boat back and
forth across the river. As trade grew he expanded his services and
became a prosperous figure, well known to travelers along the road
He typified the ferrymen who became prominent and prosperous
along the early road.
Watkins and his wife Mary had settled by the Potomac about
1741. The river landing was then known as Maidstone in honor of
an English town familiar to Lord Fairfax, who owned the area
Watkins first built a one -room log cabin. As his family grew, he
added to it, renting beds overnight to travelers. He also built a
forge to make hardware and implements and a riverfront store to
supply travelers. His ledger book listed ferriage rates, blacksmith-
ing charges, and prices for such refreshments as wine slings,
toddies, and "cideroyl." Watkins' Ferry in time became Light's
Ferry, then Lemen's Ferry, and finally Williams' Ferry. Eventually
the site became Williamsport, Maryland.
Further south along the Wagon Road, other settlers began to
ferry travelers across the streams. In 1749, a few western Virginia
settlers petitioned their House of Burgesses for a ferry across New
River, not far from Big Lick, which later became Roanoke. In
response, the Burgesses chose as ferryman a thirty -three-year-old
Engli-liman, William Ingles, who had come to the frontier with his
fatlis. r and uncle.
Inglis at first poled his ferry. Later he pulled it by a cable sus-
pende ,d across the stream. Like Evan Watkins, he also kept a public
house, which passed- after his death to his descendants. The ferry
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
was replaced by a covered bridge in 1842 but was resumed after
the bridge was burned in the Civil War. Ferry service at Ingles'
Crossing did not end until 1948.
Mile by mile, the Wagon Road spread further into the Deep
South. After Ingles' Ferry was established, travelers by horse and
wagon could travel with some assurance down the Appalachians as
far as the Yadkin River in North Carolina, though the road grew
progressively worse.
Once the Yadkin River was reached, the road branched into
several old Indian trails which had developed in earlier days be-
tween the villages of the Occonneechee, Tuscarora, Catawba,
Shawnee, Cherokee, and other tribes. The growth of the Moravian
settlement of Wachovia after 1753 increased travel from Virginia
south to that region. So many settlers were now coming into pied-
mont North Carolina that the frontier county of Rowan was created
in 1753 and the county seat of Salisbury established thirty miles
south of Wachovia, at the juncture of the old Catawba and Chero-
kee paths.
Traveling west to view his farthest frontier, North Carolina s
Governor Arthur Dobbs in 1755 wrote glowingly to England of his
colony's progress.
Yadkin ... is a large, beautiful river where is a ferry [he wrote].
It is nearly 300 yards over, it was at this time fordable, scarce
coming to the horses' bellies. At six miles distant I arrived at Salis-
bury, the county seat of Rowan. The town is but just laid out, the
courthouse built, and seven or eight log houses erected.$
Most Salisbury householders operated public houses, taking in
travelers for the night. So great was the demand that their number
had grown to sixteen by 1762. Among Wagon Road travelers,
Salisbury enjoyed a reputation as the first important trading center
of the Carolina frontier. There a Germanic pioneer, John Lewis
Beard, built a tavern about 1757 and operated it and a tanyard
until after the Revolution. Hudson Hughes became an innkeeper
there in 1766, later playing host to Colonel Banastre Tarleton at his
hostelry during the Revolution. Andrew Jackson later lived at the
Hughes House while studying law, and George Washington put up
there during his Presidential tour in 1792.
Another Salisbury tavern was Thomas Gillespie's, which was
operated after his death by his widow. When the Revolutionary
.
MAPPING THE GREAT MOUNTAINS
general, Nathanael Greene, arrived at Elizabeth Shields' in 1781,
"hungry, penniless, and without a friend," she gave him a bounte-
ous meal and a bag of specie. "Now," she said, "you are no longer
without food, money, nor friends." The grateful soldier never for-
got her.
Several stores in Salisbury supplied the frontier, and a shoe
manufactory, prison, hospital, and armory grew up there before the
Revolution. One merchant, John Mitchell, in 1767 supplied Gov-
ernor William Tryon with a large quantity of goods to trade with
Indians. Another, William Nesbit, sold Daniel Boone the powder,
shot, and yellow ribbon which he took on his trading missions to
the Indian territories of Tennessee and Kentucky.
Other early merchants in Salisbury were William Montgomery,
Archibald Craige, Thomas Bashford, James Bowers, John Verrell,
Luke Dean, James Berry, and Henry Horah. They enjoyed a grow-
ing trade. As Governor Tryon wrote the Board of Trade in Eng-
land, more than a thousand immigrants' wagons had passed
through Salisbury in the fall and winter of 1765.
Thirty miles south of Salisbury, the hamlet of Charlotteburgh
grew similarly. Settled about 1750, it attracted a few innkeepers
and shopkeepers. As the seat of the large frontier county of Meck-
lenburg, it grew so steadily that by 1768 it was chartered as a
town, largely by Scotch -Irish traders.
As it had done in Pennsylvania and Virginia, the Great Wagon.
Road in the Carolinas forced the Indians to move farther west.
Like most of our historic highways [historian Carl Bridenbaugh has
pointed out] the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road followed the
meanderings of old Indian trails.... Year after year, along this
narrow -rutted intercolonial thoroughfare coursed a procession of
horsemen, footmen, and pioneer families "with horse and wagon
and cattle." In the last sixteen years of the colonial era, southbound
trafl; �- a long the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road was numbered in
tc�=: thousands; it was the most heavily traveled road in all
•4• and must have had more vehicles jolting along its rough
a ..ous way than all other main roads put together.4
po of settlement to the south increased after the Treaty
Of U, : ter cleared the way for European settlers in 1744. It was
stimulated further by the victory of British and colonial forces over
the French and their Indian allies in 1763, which made Britain the
r.+.., 1 roll 1 _
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
greatest naval power in the world. The decisive triumph of British
redcoats and American frontiersmen over the forces of King Louis
XV turned the eyes of many colonists toward the Appalachians and
beyond.
The rumble of wagon wheels along the Great Philadelphia
Wagon Road mounted in the 1750s and '60s. An irrepressible con-
fidence in Americas destiny drove men forward, creating ever new
frontiers.
f7$1
CHAPTER 9
f
I
I
Bethabara and New Salem
Having planted themselves early in Pennsylvania and Georgia, the
devout Moravian in 1750 looked for other places where they might
spread their austere gospel. After much searching and prayer they
chose western North Carolina, where they bought 98,985 acres from
Lord Granville.
Thus began the great undertaking which they named Der Nord
Carolina Land ural Colonie EtabIissement.
Bishop August Spangenberg, known as Brother Joseph, led a
small group from Pennsylvania over part of the Wagon Road in
1752 to choose the site for the first buildings. After passing south
of Augusta Courthouse ( later Staunton), Virginia, on October 24,
he observed that "there the bad road began. It was up hill and
down, and we had constantly to push the wagon, or hold it back
by ropes that we fastened to the rear."
On reaching the Catawba River, the bishop wrote: "Hitherto we
have been on the Trading Path, where we could find at least one
house a day where food could be bought, but from here were to
turn into the pathless forest."
At Quaker Mpadows on November 24, he observed:
The land is very rich, and has been much frequented by buffalo,
whose tracks are everywhere, and can often be followed with profit.
Frequently, however, a man cannot travel them, for they go through
thick and thin, through morass and deep water, and up and down
banks so steep that a man could fall down but neither ride nor
walk.... The wolves here give us music every morning, from six
corners at once, such music as I have never heard They are not like
the wolves of Germany, Poland, and Livonia, but are afraid of men,
and do not usually approach near them. A couple of Brethren
skilled in hunting would be of benefit not only here but at our other
tracts, partly to kill the wolves and panthers, partly to supply the
Brethren with game. Not only can the skins of wolves and panthers
be ci•' i but the government pays a bounty of ten shillings for each
one ki:1'ed.1
Once they reached the Catawba River, near the lands of the
Catawba Indians, Spangenberg and his followers were invited to
-- -0 41F., .
Ta GREAT WAGON ROAD
stay at the house of Andrew Lambert, a Scotsman. Here they gave
final approval for the purchase of Lord Granville's land.
"Our land lies in a region much frequented by the Catawbas and
Cherokees, especially for hunting," Spangenberg wrote.
The Indians in North Carolina behave quite differently from those
in Pennsylvania. There no one fears- an Indian, unless he is drunk.
Here. the whites must needs fear them. If they come to a house and
find the men away, they are insolent, and the settler's wife must do
whatever they bid. Sometimes they come in such large companies
that a man who meets *them is in great danger. Now and then a man
can do as Andrew Lambert did; a company of Senecas came on his
land, injured his corn, killed his cattle, etc. Lambert called in his
bear hounds, of which he had eight or nine, and with his dogs and
his loaded gun drove the Indians from his place s
The Moravian named their tract Wachau for the ancestral
estate of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, reviver of the
Moravian faith in Austria. Later it was changed to the more musical
Wachovia, a term which was to embrace the original village of
Bethabara and the larger towns of Salem and Bethania.
When word of the land acquisition reached Bethlehem, prayers
and song rang through the Congregation of Saints there. Leaders of
Moravian colonies from Lititz, Nazareth, and Bethlehem gathered
at the Single Brothers' Farm at Christiansbrunn and carefully chose
the pioneers to go south in advance of the main group.
Two ministers were chosen to lead it: Bernard Adam Grube,
who would direct spiritual life, and Jacob Loesch, who would man-
age business affairs. Thirteen others were selected, four of them to
return to Pennsylvania after a few months to guide others to the
new mission field.
Hitching the horses to their homemade wagon, the fifteen men left
Bethlehem on October 8, 1753, and were soon headed south on the
Wagon Road. Crossing Watkins' Ferry over the Potomac, they ad-
mired the reddening of the great maples along the Valley hill-.i.les.
By mid-November they had entered North Carolina and r.:,.'
the initial Moravian settlement site, which they named Betls
or House of Passage.
In ten days they cleared three acres of densely forested land a►Ad
cultivated it with a plow built by Brother Henrich Feldhausen.
[74]
BETHABARA AND NEW SALEM
Within five months they were growing wheat, corn, potatoes, flax,
cotton, tobacco, barley, rye, oats, millet, buckwheat, turnips, and
pumpkins. In a fenced garden, to keep out rabbits and squirrels,
they cultivated "salat" greens.
Winter was confining, but in spring the Brothers visited neighbors
to buy apple and peach trees, livestock, and poultry. They branded
their cows with an M on one flank and a mark on the left ear. They
hollowed tree trunks into barrels. Except for a few items—glass,
nails, salt, and coffee among them—they supplied their own wants.
To Carolina frontiersmen the newcomers were an enigma, but
they found them helpful. A Scotsman came to have a tooth pulled.
Others asked them to make leather breeches or shoes. Others wanted
nails from the smith, brandy from the distiller, or cooking ware
from the potter.
Brother Hans Peterson was named f remden diener, or foreign
worker, to receive visitors. Brother Adam Grube looked to the day
when they could offer more hospitality. "It is very inconvenient for
us to entertain strangers," he explained, "for our space is small and
we have nothing for them to sleep on. Nearly every day we have
some extra people to feed:'
Soon the Moravian opened a store and brought a gunsmith and
other craftsmen from Pennsylvania. When a neighbor, Abraham
Wilson; cut his foot, Brother Kalberlahn doctored him for a fee of
two cows. Two other visitors felled 100 trees and rived 3,000
shingles in exchange for two pairs of shoes. Soon settlers were
coming sixty miles to trade.
Within a few months the Brothers built the log -cabin guesthouse
which Brother Grube had advocated. Even so, visitors often out-
numbered beds, impelling the Moravian hosts to sit up all night to
accommodate them.
When the first spring came, the Brethren laid out their garden,
orchard, and cow pasture.
The usual and best food of the Brethren [one of them wrote] has
been milk and mush and whatever can be made from cornmeal. The
garden did well, and from May 8 to July 5 we had salat every day
for midday dinner and often at evening meal. When salat came to
an end we had cucumbers for three weeks, with three or four
meals of sugar peas, beans several times, occasionally cabbage, and
squash twice. Meat has been scarce, and we have had only four
i
[75]
TRE GREAT WAGON ROAD
BETIMARA AND NEW SALEM
deer and two small bears --the bears generally are smaller than in
Bishop Spangenberg, an able and godly man who was second -in -
Pennsylvania. Hunting has not proved profitable, and we give little
command to Count Zinzendorf among the Moravians. Born in Ger-
time to its
many in 1704 and trained for the Lutheran ministry, he had
The diary of John Jacob Friis, who came from Bethlehem as
deserted that sect at twenty-nine in objection to its formalized doc-
Bethabara s pastor in 1754, reflects the industry of the Moravian.
trine. Though highly educated, he patiently accepted the hardships
One day he noted that he had hunted strayed pigs for a whole
of travel between Moravian settlements from Pennsylvania to
afternoon. On another he carved intricate claw feet for a table,
Georgia.
' "One da I am a joiner and the next da a
meanwhile musing, y 1 y
John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism became ac-
>
carver; what could I not learn if I was not too old?" With rueful
quainted with Spangenberg as a fellow missionary in Georgia. He
humor he proclaimed himself `your first cowherd in North Caro-
was amazed and impressed that a bishop who preached the gospel
lina. "
one day would demean himself as the village cook the next.
In one two-week span Pastor Friis harvested flax, served as com-
Bishop Spangenberg was constantly dismayed by the godlessness
munity cook, picked blackberries for vinegar, tended the chickens,
of frontiersmen. "There are many cases of murder, theft, and the
cleaned the dormitory and yard, and cured tobacco.
like, but noone is punished," he complained. "Land matters in
Soon Bethabara was complete, and planswere considered for a
North Carolina are in unbelievable confusion. A man settles on a
larger village. Its principal buildings were a gemeindehaus, or meet-
piece of land, does a good deal of work on it—from the Carolina
ing house, a two-story Single Brothers' House, blacksmith shop,
standpoint—and then another comes and drives him out."
cooperage, grain mill, brick kiln, toolmaking house, pottery, tannery,
He also disapproved of North Carolina's laws. "No Christian
washhouse, and tailor shop. The Brethren had also cleared roads to
brought into this land can be a bond servant," he wrote. "Yet a man
the Yadkin River and the Wagon Road and surrounded their whole
who helps another's slave to escape must serve the slave's owner for
town with a wooden palisade against the India.
Indians.
five years."
Laying the cornerstone for the Single Brothers' House, the
Like William Byrd II, who had found Carolinians shiftless and
Moravian offered up this hymn:
ignorant, Spangenberg painted a dark picture of the colony:
The Corner -stone of a new house we're laying,
The inhabitants of North Carolina are of two kinds. Some have
And for Thy presence, Lord, we're humbly praying;
been born in the country, and they bear the climate well but are
May Thy dear blood, for our salvation given,
lazy, and do not compare with our northern colonists. Others have
Our work and rest, our thoughts and actions, leaven.
moved here from the northern colonies or from England, Scotland,
O Jesus, grant our prayer: may every Brother
or Ireland, eta Many of the first comers were brought by poverty,
for they were too poor to buy land in Pennsylvania or Jersey, and
Here live in joy and peace, one with the other,
And Thou with us; and every day and hour
yet wished to have land of their own; from these the Colony re -
Show us Thy wounds, and their redemptive power.4
ceives no harm. Others, however, were refugees from debt, or had
deserted wives and children, or had fled to escape punishment for
The second village was named Bethania and placed three miles
evil deeds, and thought that here no one would find them, and they
from Bethabara in Black Walnut Bottom. Eight Moravian couples
could go on in impunity. Whole bands of horse thieves have moved
from Pennsylvania and eight other couples who wished to adopt
here, and constantly show their skill in this neighborhood; this has
the Moravian way of life set to work building it in 1759. Fear of
giv, ' � %;orth Carolina a very bad name in the adjoining Prov-
.
Indian attack had forced the sect to abandon its plan for a scattered
farming community, like those in Pennsylvania.
Like 3ethabara before it, Bethania prospered from the hard work
Constantly guiding the destiny of the Wachovia settlements was
of its settlers. Five years after it was started, word came from Count
[78]
[771
TSE GREAT WAGON ROAD
Zinzendorf that the time had come to build the principal town,
which he directed be called Salem.
The Brethren in North Carolina were not convinced that this was
a wise move and appealed to the Governing Board in Saxony. That -
body accordingly "referred it to the Lord" through the lot. Back
came word from Saxony: "We are to tell our Brethren in America
that the Savior wills that Salem shall be the town of our Brethren
in Wachovia for trade and the professions and they shall be moved
thither from Bethabara."
Salem's location was chosen by lot, and in May 1765 the site was
surveyed. Money was raised by selling some of Wachovia's acres,
and the Moravians agreed that the new town would be given 3,159
acres rent-free for five years.
Artisans to build Salem were brought down the Wagon Road
from Pennsylvania. By 1766 they had raised the population of
Bethabara to 130 and of Bethania to 87.
As Salem took shape in brick, clapboard, and shingles, its congre-
gation began to move in. The first building, a gemeindehaus or meet-
ing
eeting house, was consecrated in 1771. Others followed rapidly: a
Single Brothers' House, Single Sisters' House, store, tavern, pottery,
homes for the blacksmith and gunsmith, an apothecary, mill, saw-
mill, and a farm with a barn for ten cows. As the town took shape,
more Moravian came by wagon from Pennsylvania to take their
places in the new mission.
Just as the Pennsylvanians had done, the people of North Carolina
found the Congregation of Saints a remarkable group. In the tough
and amoral environment of the frontier, they miraculously preserved
some of the Christian virtues of medieval monasticism: altruism,
self-denial, meditation, industry, frugality, and selfless submission
to discipline.
Shunning the moral relativism of politics, they refused to take an
oath or to bear arms. "It does not accord with our character as
Brethren," they told the Carolinian, "to mix in such political affairs.
We are children of peace and wish peace of all men. Whatever God
lays upon us, that we will bear." When passage of the Stamp Act
incensed the Carolinas, a Wachovian exclaimed: "We sigh and
pray: `From tumult and uproar, deliver us, oh Godl' "
In lieu of the Catholics' mass and the Anglicans' eucharist, the
Moravian periodically observed a "love feast." Here the congrega-
. • [78]
BETSABARA AND NEW SALEM
tion sat down to share their bounteous food and drink as primitive
Christians did. Observing their simple brotherhood, the poet Goethe
concluded that "the Moravian doctrine has something magical in
that it appeared to continue ... the conditions of those first times."
The most glorious event of Moravian life was their observance of
Easter. Beforesunup the congregation gathered in God's Acre,
where the bodies of their dead lay buried in choirs—men in one
section and women in another, each marked by a simple stone to
signalize the democracy of death. At the sight of the sun's first rays,
the cry, "The Lord has risen indeedl" provoked a glorious choral
outburst, accompanied by the majestic chords of the massed bands.
Originated at Herrnhut, Austria, in 1732, the sunrise service
brought the worshippers of Salem in a body to their hutberg, or
watch hill. Each Moravian congregation had such a hill, celebrated
by Count von Zinzendorf in one of his many hymns:
If in this Darksome wild I stray,
Be Thou my light, be Thou my way;
No foes, no evils need I fear,
No harm while Thou, my God, art near.
Savior, where'er Thy steps I see,
Dauntless, untired, I follow Thee:
O let Thy hand support me still
And lead me to Thy holy hilll°
Brother Grube and other musician at Salem continued to add to
the treasury of great Moravian hymns—many of which were later
adopted by countless other churches. Describing his arrival at
Salem, Brother Seidel told of the zeal with which he sang the stanza
which Grube had written to honor the newcomers:
We hold arrival love feast here,
In Carolina land;
A company of Brethren true,
A little pilgrim band,
Called by the Lord to be of those
Who through the whole world go,
To tell of Jesus everywhere,
And naught but Jesus know.T
Outside, wolves howled in the night and owls screeched a coun-
terpoint to the music.
[79]
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
BETHABARA AND NEW SALEM
The constant journeys of Moravian back and forth from Penn-
prosperous settlement. By 1772 it housed 120 persons. Around this
sylvania to North Carolina were typified by the experience of Anne
central market town clustered the two earlier villages plus the later
Catherine Antes, who wrote on arriving in Salem:
Friedland and Friedberg. Far-seeing Bishop Spangenberg saw
part
In the latter for North Carolina,
ril, 1759, we set out
Salem as the principal trading center of its region, sparing North
accompanied b the other five Brethren Bethabara and their
P Y
Carolinians the trouble of sending their produce north to Virginia:
wives. It was not a long journey, only one month, for our big wagon
was drawn by six horses, and we had others for riding; so we made
A good deal of tobacco is raised but it is generally taken to
good time. It was a pleasant experience; the country was new to
Suffolk or Norfolk [he wrote]. Thus it is shippedg b the Virginia
Y
merchant, and the Carolinians must accept whatever prices he
me, and the budding trees and balmy air made us forget the bad
stretches of road. Even the night camps had their charm, though
chooses to pay. Many cattle also are sold outside of North Carolina,
we began to hear of renewed Indian activity. Cherokees, who had
but the profit is in Virginia, not here. They are not killed, salted
and exported from this province but are driven to Virginia and sold
accompanied General Forbes in the campaign against Fort Du-
quesne, were returning home along the mountains and were involv-
ing themselves in quarrels with the back settlers of Virginia and
Carolina. We were taking the lower road by Frederick, Maryland,
In all their deliberations the Moravian sought direct guidance
and Orange Court -house, Virginia; so we were not in great danger
e
from God. In this effort they depended on the lot, which earlier
Brethren had used in the fifteenth century to select bishops. Seekin
and saw no red men
g
a decision on a congregational matter, they would submit their
Incited by the French, the Carolina Indians made widespread
question in prayers "Dear Savior, I have nothing. I make no choice.
attacks against the Carolina frontier in 1760. It was the worst danger
Show me Thy will and I will be obedient thereto."
the Moravian had known in America. In February of that year,
Three choices, on identical ballots, would answer yea, nay, and
several settlers were killed by Cherokees near the Yadkin. Nine days
in blank, which meant that the question was unanswerable. Once
later, frightened refugees rushed into the safety of Salem, aghast
drawn, the lot's answer was accepted.
at the Indian atrocities. But Wachovia escaped Indian attack.
Not all Moravian could constantly adhere to the abstinence and
ging and praying together, the Moravians made light of their
celibacy which their faith required. In 1762, Brother Feldhausen,
labor.
the Salem distiller, was expelled when he yielded to carnal desires
As intimate converse turned washday into almost a pleasure [wrote
and fell into all kinds of sin and shame." Young members who be -
Anna Catherine Antes], so did the pulling and resting of the flax
came engaged to outsiders without permission of village elders were
have its happy side as we worked together in the fields, singing
dismissed. It was a faith which demanded one's whole soul.
sometimes, and thinking of the shirts and towels and other things
Despite their puritanism, the Moravian had no scruples against
which our flax would make when it had been broken and swingled
temperate use of alcoholic beverages. In their Salem taverns they
and hackled and spun and woven. The Brethren did the heavy work
sold brandy, whiskey, and other spirits. Tavern fights were not un -
of breaking and hackling, and some of the weaving, but the rest of
known, but they were usually provoked by Scotch -Irish customers.
it fell to us 9
To protect themselves against Indian attack, North Carolina's
Many visitors came to Salem's church, and Moravian ministers
Mo. ; ..-as eventually had to overcome their lifelong scruples and
went out to preach to frontiersmen. One wrote in 1766: "The Bap-
bet. crying guns. Brother Jacob Loesch trained a militia unit to
Lists are the only [other] ones who go far and wide preaching and
pix), tie Wachovia settlement when the watchman sounded his
caring for souls." Brother Utley was the itinerant minister, preach-
tru; :?r rang the village bell. When peace came, however, the
ing in English and German.
Bre:: put away their guns and sent missionaries to the Chero-
As at Bethabara and Bethania, the Moravian made Salem into a
kees. Many Indians were thus converted to Christianity.
10. [80]
1811
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
Over the years, the Moravian contributed greatly to the peace
and upbuilding of the frontier which lay along the Great Road. As
Bishop Spangenberg believed, the settlement at Salem grew, ulti-
mately becoming part of the city of Winston-Salem. But in the
aggressive capitalism of frontier America, the monastic idealis7an
of his faith found fewer converts with each generation.
Even so, the gentle spirit of the Fratres Unitas was perpetuated
in song and legend. The village of Salem remained a monument to
a remarkable people. And in the great Easter litany and in countless
soaring hymns, Zinzendorf and his followers left an undying legacy:
Jesus, lead the way
Through our life's long day
And with faithful footsteps steady,
We will follow, ever ready.
Guide us by Thy hand
To the Fatherland
Order Thou our ways,
Savior, all our days.
If Thou lead us through rough places
Grant us Thy sustaining graces
When our course is o'er
Open heaven's door.
Amenl'
[82]
CHAPTER 10
The Threat from the French
Once the English colonies in 1744 took over the Great Warriors'
Path, the stage was set for a new westward surge of settlement. In
this effort, which set off the French and Indian Wars in 1754, the
north -south Appalachian road became a strategic link binding the
six southern colonies, from Pennsylvania southward to Georgia.
The murderous conflict between Great Britain and France for
control of eastern North America was to end in a great victory for
the British, but it was won only at great loss of life to frontier
settlers. It also thrust the British government deeply in debt, lead-
ing to King George III's efforts to tax the thirteen colonies which
brought on the Revolution. For the frontier dwellers, however, the
French and Indian Wars brought immediate gains: a sense of
colonial unity, new lands to the south and beyond the Appalachians,
and less danger from the Indians.
The Virginians' incessant westward drive brought on the war. Em-
boldened by a 1609 grant from King James I to the Virginia Com-
pany of territory "from sea to sea," the tobacco barons of Tidewater
believed with Alexander Spotswood that Virginia should possess
the lands west and north of the Appalachians. Land—the symbol
of wealth and family position to the English country -dwellers who
were the ancestors and models of Virginia's tobacco planters—
became their consuming passion.
The coming of the French into the Ohio Valley pricked Virginia's
pride. Sir Walter Raleigh had dreamed of "a new English nation" in
North America. Virginia's Governor and Council agreed the French
must be combatted. In this heroic and lengthy struggle, the Wagon
Road became a vital colonial supply line.
To seize the Ohio Country, the wealthy Thomas Lee and other
Virginia investors formed the Ohio Company and in 1749 obtained
frur:: Fagland a grant of 500,000 acres on the Ohio River, which
thtl armed to populate. Learning this, the Marquis Duquesne,
Coo :.vr-General of New France (Canada), sent a party of soldiers
and Indians southward to resist Virginia's encroachment and hold
the Ohio country for France. The French in 1753 built three forts
[83l
TRE GREAT WAGON ROAD
in the Ohio Valley, west of the Wagon Road, and manned them
with 13,000 soldiers to hold the land.
Virginia countered France'smove by dispatching to one of the
French forts, Le Boeuf, the Virginia militiaman, George Washing-
ton, to warn the French to withdraw. The twenty-one-year-old
Washington proceeded from Frederick Town ( later Winchester)
up the Wagon Road, crossing the Potomac on Evan Watkins' Ferry,
over land he had surveyed for Lord Fairfax. As the principal artery
for the British frontier, the Road was already familiar to Washington.
His knowledge of the frontier was to serve him well.
When the French at Le Boeuf ignored Washington's warning,
Governor Dinwiddie sent a force to Virginia's Northwest Territory
to fortify the strategic point where the Monongahela and Allegheny
rivers join, and to hold back the French. Virginia claimed this un -
peopled area as part of her Northwest Territory. However, the
French forced the Virginians' surrender and built their own Fort
Duquesne on the spot. Now alarmed, Virginia's government sent
Colonel Joshua Fry and Colonel Washington at the head of 300 men
to regain the strategic site.
To outfit the force, Washington went to Winchester on the
Wagon Road and began buying and impressing wagons, horses, and
foodstuffs. He found them almost impossible to obtain. "Out of
seventy-four wagons impressed at Winchester," he complained to
Dinwiddie, we got but ten after waiting a week, and some of those
so badly provided with teams, that the soldiers were obliged to
assist them up the hills, although it was known they had better
teams at home."
Fortunately, Benjamin Franklin was more successful in obtaining
wagons in Pennsylvania. A broadside he printed at Lancaster and
distributed to German farms produced 150 in the next two weeks.
Franklins appeal, dated at Lancaster on April 26, 1755, called for
150 wagons of four horses each, plus 150 saddle or packhorses. In a
letter to the inhabitants of Lancaster, York, and Cumberland, he
held out the prospect of ready cash.
The People of these back Countries have lately complained to the
Assembly that a sufficient Currency was wanting; you have now an
Opportunity of receiving and dividing among you a very consider-
able sum; for if the Service of this Expedition should continue (as
it's more than probable it will) for 120 Days, the Hire of these
[84l
THE TREAT FROM T= FRENCB
Waggons and Horses will amount to upward of Thirty thousand
Pounds, which will be paid you in Silver and Gold of the Kings
money.l
Leaving the Wagon Road and heading west across the Alle.
ghanies, George Washington's regiment surprised a French party on
May 28 and killed all but one man. Five weeks later, however, his
force was attacked and forced to surrender at Fort Necessity, on the
Pennsylvania border. When General Edward Braddock was sent
from England the next year to command the colonials, his army was
ambushed by French and Indian forces and Braddock killed. France
was then in control of the Ohio country.
While the two great powers built up their forces for the decisive
North American battle, Indians and settlers along the Appalachian
frontier continued the war. The years 1756 1757 and 1758 were
stained with the blood of many German and Scotch -Irish settlers
along the Wagon Road and in the settlements beyond it. Fear of the
French and their Indian allies drove many Pennsylvania settlers
southward in these years, adding to the traffic along the Wagon
Road.
Turned against the English colonists by the French, the Indians
of the Appalachians converted the frontier into a war zone in these
Years. All the frontiers of Virginia have been reduced to one uni-
versal waste by the burning, murdering and scalping committed b
-
was fetched t Virginia the enemy
the Indians," wrote Lewis Evans in 1755. "In o the door and left there, without any body to oppose
him; there no forces were left to cover the militia, while they formed
themselves into an army for their own defense."
From Winchester, one of George Washington's officers wrote him
on October 4, 1755, that the Indians "go about and commit their
outrages at all hours of the day and nothing to be seen or heard of,
but desolation and murder heightened with all barbarous circum-
stances, and unheard of instances of cruelty. They spare the lives
of young women and cavy them away to gratify the brutal passions
Of lawfess savages. The smoke of the burningplantations darkens
the day, and hides the neighboring mountains from our sight."
The Shawnees were France's chief allies. Occupthe hi
of the Appalachian range, they resented the br tmogf lan
the colonis d
steady movement beyond those mountains. In strike after strike
they inflicted bloody death on pioneer households along the Wagon
[U]
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD -
Road. Against them, the English colonies turned the Cherokees,
who had carried on much of the fur trade in the South. Anxious to
keep their loyalty, the English in 1763 sent seven Cherokee chiefs
to England, where they had pledged their faith to "the Great King
over the Waters." But before the war was over, even the Cherokees
were to prove traitorous allies.
When the western Indians began to attack, the colonies were
poorly prepared to resist them. Hurriedly, they built a series of
Indian forts and blockhouses along the Wagon Road and the passes
which led from the road through the Appalachians to the west. In
Virginia, Major Andrew Lewis led an expedition against Shawnee
strongholds in these mountains, while Colonel George Washington
directed the frontier defense and strung a chain of forts along the
Wagon Road and its western perimeter.
The Indian raids first hit the western reaches of Virginia settle-
ment. In 1755, Shawnee from the Scioto Valley of the Ohio country
crept through the forests and massacred the settlers at Draper's
Meadows, later to be known as Blacksburg. There they killed
Colonel James Patton, a pioneer Scotch -Irish settler, and three others,
wounded another, and captured five more. One of those captured
was Mary Draper Ingles, who was carried to a Shawnee town on
the Scioto and then to Big Bone Lick, where she made her escape
and returned after a hair-raising journey through several hundred
miles of wilderness to her home.
When news of General Braddock's defeat filtered through the
colonies, fear enveloped the frontier. A German settler in the Valley
of Virginia wrote:
One terrifying message after another came in that the Ceneral Brad-
dock had been completely beaten with all his men by the French
and Indians, raising such alarm and horror among the people that
it is hard to express while we daily fear to be fallen upon by the
Wild Men.$
No crueler war has ever been fought in America than the F f ench
and Indian Wars. To win the Indians' support, the colony of ' . ; i a
paid them for scalps of French and enemy Indians. At Wb
where he desperately trained Virginia's frontier defender-
the spring and summer of 1756, Colonel Washington AY
whipped soldiers into fighting condition. For drunkenness, , re-
ceived 100 lashes; for profanity, 25 immediately and more on the
THE THREAT FROM THE FRENCH
next offense; for malingering, 50 with a cat -o -nine -tails; and for a
sergeant for "running away with his party" a second time before the
enemy, death by hanging. Washington timed the hanging so that
"the newly draughted recruits for the regiment may be here by that
time to see it executed, and it will be good warning for them."
Many settlers fled south to the supposed safety of North Carolina,
whose western flank was protected by the friendly Cherokees. De-
scribing "the wretched and unhappy situation" of the western
frontier in a letter to the Governor of Virginia in 1756, George Wash-
ington wrote that the Appalachian frontiersmen were "in a general
motion towards the southern colonies" and that Virginia's western-
most countries of Frederick, Hampshire, and Augusta would soon
be empty. Previous defense steps were "evidently insufficient for
the security and safety of the Country," and the young colonel
recommended "a vigorous and offensive war" to "remove the cause"
of the trouble.
In the Valley of Virginia, settlers built community blockhouses
and forts and fled to them on word that the Indians were coming.
Such was Fort Harrison,, erected about 1749 in Rockingham County,
near the present Dayton. The stone house was built with an under-
ground passage that led to a spring by the nearby Cook's Creek.
During this period, several villages of Germanic settlers grew in the
lower Valley of Virginia as farmers left their lands and sought safety.
From this era of Indian raids date the villages of Stephensburg,
Woodstock, Strasburg, and Staunton.
Many pioneers lost their lives. Captain Robert McKenzie at-
tempted to visit a Dunker settlement in the Valley in 1757 but
"found nothing on the Spot they inhabited but some Spears, broken
Tomahawks, and the Ashes of Their Hutts. The Spears are of French
make."
In March and April 1758, Shawnees took nearly fifty captives from
Germanic settlements in the Valley. As a consequence, most German
neighborhoods were abandoned. Some moved east of the Blue
Ridge, while others returned to eastern Pennsylvania over the
Wagon Road.
Four members of a colony at Massanutten wrote to Europe:
We were 39 Mennonite families living in Virginia. One family was
murdered and the remaining of us and many other families were
forced to flee for our lives, leaving all and going empty-handed.
[so] 1 194
TSE GREAT WAGON ROAD
Last May, the Indians murdered over 50 Persons and more than 200
families were driven away homeless.3
The building of forts gave greater security to the Wagon Road
after the outbreak of the French and Indian Wars. Hastily thrown
together, the forts were similar to the wooden palisade which
Virginia's first settlers had erected at Jamestown in 1607. Such was
Fort Loudoun, for example, which the colony of South Carolina
built on its western extremity, later a part of Tennessee. Built of
rough-hewn logs, spiked at the top and inserted into the earth, they
were protected on the outer side by an earthwork and a hedge of
thorny honey -locust bushes.
Inside the fort was a blacksmith shop, guardhouse, barracks for
the colony's soldiers, storehouses, a powder magazine, quarters for a
half-dozen officers, and a well. The smith's shop was the most im-
portant building in the fort, serving also as guardhouse, council
house, and chapel. The guardhouse held arms and ammunition
and a station for the officer of the guard. To protect Fort Loudoun,
nearly a dozen small cannon were carried over the Wagon Road and
the Great Smoky Mountains by packhorses, and mounted in the
fort.
Built near the Indian village of Chota, which was the chief seat
of the Cherokees beyond the Appalachians, Fort Loudoun main-
tained a friendly alliance between South Carolina and the Cherokee
until 1759. In that year, French influence succeeded in winning the
sympathies of the Overhill Cherokees away from the British and
their American colonists. The Indians laid siege to the fort, forced
its surrender, and then violated their surrender terms to kill most of
the garrison and to ransom the others to their governments.
Another Wagon Road fort attacked by the Indians was Fort
Evans, near Winchester, Virginia. In the spring of 1756, when its
garrison of men was away, it was surrounded by a force of Shaw-
nees. The women and children inside were alarmed, but one soldier's
wife, Polly Evans, ran inside the fort from one gunport to another,
firing one gun after another. Misled into thinking the fort was
strongly garrisoned, the Indians retreated.
By the year 1758, England had sent troops and ships t4 • th
America in readiness to launch her great offensive against •c
for control of the New World. In three successful offensivcs. the
English commanders in the north colonies and Canada wrested
THE THREAT FROM THE FRENCH
control of the continent from France. Most important to Pennsyl-
vania and the southern colonies, Great Britain's General John Forbes
at last took Fort Duquesne from the French in 1758, eliminating
the threat of French expansion eastward into the Appalachians.
Frontier troops under General Andrew Lewis of Augusta County,
Virginia, played a part in the victory.
Indians still remained a danger along the Wagon Road, but the
skillful diplomacy of Sir William Johnson, who served as a sort of
roving British ambassador to the western tribes, gradually reduced
their threat. Border troops under Johnson's command destroyed
French forts. By keeping the covenant chain between the British
colonies and the Six Nations bright, Johnson restored a shaky peace
along the Appalachian frontier. The loyalty of the Iroquois was
again pledged to King George II of England, "the Great King Who
Rules Across the Water."
But peace with the Indians did not last long. Though Great
Britain in 1763 expelled the French from the trans -Appalachian
region, warfare with the red men continued. The very next year
Chief Pontiac of the Ottawas—one of the Six Nations—renewed
attacks on white settlers. Shawnees again ravaged the Valley of
Virginia, annihilating a whole settlement on the Greenbrier River
and harassing others on Kerr's Creek, near the later site of Lexing
ton.
Again the valley's settlers fled into their chain of forts, leaving the
unprotected frontiersmen in Pennsylvania to feel the Indians' fury.
As Francis Parkman, the historian, wrote: 'Me country was filled
with the wildest dismay. The people of Virginia betook themselves
to their forts for refuge. But those of Pennsylvania, ill supplied with
such asylums, fled by thousands ..:'
Anger against the tribes impelled Pennsylvania frontiersmen,
known as "the Paxton boys," to invade the peaceful Conestoga
Indian settlement in Lancaster County in 1762 and slay fourteen
in cold blood. When local officials placed the surviving Conestogas
in Lancaster jail for safekeeping, the Paxton boys stormed it and
murdered them, cutting off their hands and feet and removing their
scalps.
Similar attacks on the Christianized Indians of Nequetank and
Nain, Pennsylvania, were barely averted by action of that colony.
By the time news reached North America in 1764 that a treaty
w# I 1881 1 1891
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
had been signed in Paris between France and Great Britain, the
Appalachian frontier was more peaceful. In the eleven years since
George Washington had gone up the Wagon Road to discourage
French settlement on the Ohio River, villages had developed around
several English forts. Paths between the upcountry and the sea-
coast had improved. Trade had increased between western farmers
and coastal towns like Annapolis, Baltimore, Alexandria, Fredericks-
burg, Williamsburg, and Charles Town, South Carolina. Continued
western warfare had compelled the frontier to look east for its guns
and ammunition instead of to Philadelphia.
The exposed western settlements of Pennsylvania had suffered
a loss of population from Indian threat, but the western reaches of
Virginia and the Carolinas had grown in consequence. Edmund
Burke, the great British advocate of the colonists' rights, wrote in
his Account of the European Settlements in America in 1761:
The number of white people in Virginia is... growing every day
more numerous by the migration of the Irish who, not succeeding
so well in Pennsylvania as the more frugal and industrious Germans,
sell their lands in that province to the latter, and take up new
ground in the remote countries in Virginia, Maryland and North
Carolina. These are chiefly Presbyterians from the northern part of
Ireland, who in America are generally called Scotch -Irish
In the Germanic and Scotch -Irish influx of the French and Indian
Wars, the Carolinas actually gained more settlers than Maryland
or Virginia. Contributing to this southern growth was King George
III's prohibition of further trans -Appalachian settlement, which he
proclaimed shortly after peace was reached between the French and
British in 1764. The King decreed that no American settlers were to
advance westward beyond the sources of the rivers emptying into
the Atlantic. For the sake of peace with the Indians, the King's sub-
jects were to stay east of the Appalachians. Thus another complaint
was added to Americans' grievances against His Majesty's govern-
ment.
Word now spread that the best lands available east of the Ap-
palachians were along the headwaters of the Holston, the Watt;
the Yadkin, the Catawba, and the Savannah rivers.
In Carolina [wrote a chronicler of those colonies], large tracts <:i
the best land as yet lay waste, which proved a great temptation to
THE THREAT FROM THE FRENCH
the northern colonists to migrate to the South. Accordingly, about
this time above a thousand families, with their effects, in the space
of one year resorted to Carolina, driving their cattle, hogs and
Ihorses overland before them.a
IThe Great Wagon Road was expanding, and English America
along with it. Victory over the French and Indians made the diverse
peoples of the thirteen colonies realize their unity of interest. The
Americanization of people once English, Scottish, or Germanic was
underway. Out of this sense of purpose was to come a yearning for
independence.
A ' [90] 1 [91l
CHAPTER 11
Life in the Appalachians
! Hardly had the Treaty of Paris been signed in- 1763 and peace re-
stored along the American frontier than new rumblings were heard
i in the seacoast capitals of several of the colonies. Confronted by
Parliament with a Stamp Tax in 1765 to help pay the enormous
cost of driving France from Canada and the Ohio Valley, bold
spirits like John Adams and Patrick Henry strongly objected. Soon
colonial assemblies in Boston and Williamsburg bristled with pro-
tests.
Being far removed from legislative halls, the farmers of the
Appalachians were slow to take up the cry of "Liberty or Death."
They were tired of war. Once they saw the French and Indians
beaten, they hitched up their oxen and began again to cultivate
their wheat and tobacco fields. But not for long.
These years which followed the Treaty of Paris saw great growth
along the Wagon Road. In a few short years it was extended from
the Yadkin River in North Carolina to the newest British colony in
North America: Georgia, once the domain of Creeks and Cherokees
but claimed in 1733 in the name of King George II. The southern
terminus of the Road now became the English fur -trading center
of Augusta, laid out by Governor James Oglethorpe in 1735 along
the upper Savannah River.
Riding along the Great Wagon Road in the decade before the
American Revolution, visitors from Europe expressed amazement
at the rapid growth of the interior. Stretched from Philadelphia to
Georgia were endless farms, punctuated by an occasional fort,
tavern, or village. In simple meeting houses along the trail, sectar-
ians from England, Ireland, and the Germanic lands gathered each
Sunday to worship God.
By 1765, most of the road had been cleared to acoommodate
horse-drawn vehicles. To maintain it, county courts appointed
"over seers" and "viewers" who were responsible for keeping up
• n, t� `. ` � le d� ala nts ot the thoroughfare at county expense. To fill the holes
1. y gravel over last years mud, local farmers were em-
ployed in the fall, after they had gathered their crops. "Road
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
work" remained a source of o$ -season income for rural Americans
for many years thereafter.
A military officer thus described the Great Road as his soldiers
found it in the neighborhood of Winchester:
... on our march to this place the men experienced such distresses
as were severe in the extreme; the roads were exceedingly bad from
the late fall of. the snow, which was encrusted, but not sufficiently to
bear the weight of a man, so we were continually sinking up to our
knees, and cutting our shins and ancles, and, perhaps, after a march
of sixteen or eighteen miles in this manner, at night the privates
had to sleep in the woods; after their arrival at the place of destina-
tion, the officers had to ride five or six miles to find a hovel to rest
in.,
Such roads were difficult for men and packhorses; they often
became impossible for two -wheeled carts and especially for the
Pennsylvania wagons, which sometimes carried as much as ten tons
of goods. Developed to their highest form in the Conestoga Valley,
near Lancaster, these vehicles were eventually built to such size that
five or six horses were required to pull them, harnessed in pairs. To
relieve the horses' burden, the driver and his companions often
walked alongside or behind the wagon.
A family cow, an ox, a herd of sheep, or a pig or two were some-
times tethered to such a wagon. Chickens and other fowl were
transported in pens suspended from the tailgate.
To the uplander, the goods wagon served as the principal means
of transport. It was the cargo ship of the Appalachians. "Liners"
were freight -hauling wagons operated from town to town on fixed
schedules, while "tramps" moved at will; the terms were later
applied to ships.
Southward along the road two -wheeled carts outnumbered the
larger wagons. Lacking the German wagonsmiths of Pennsylvania,
southern farmers built homemade "carriages" with wooden axles
and wheels which were cross sections of large tree trunks. A single
ox or horse pulled such a vehicle.
As the prosperity of the uplands increased, the two -wheeled
"chair" or "chaise" was used for short hauls along the Wagon Road,
but the elegant carriages of Philadelphia and New York were non-
existent on the frontier.
LIFE IN THE APPALACM ANS
Packhorse trains vied with wagons as carriers of the frontier's
goods. Each horse in the train was fitted with a pack saddle, which
was strapped to its back. Cargo weighing as much as 600 pounds
was sometimes carried. A rider on the lead horse led as many as
ten or twelve horses in procession, the bridle of each being at-
tached to the saddle of the preceding horse. When staked out to
forage at night, packhorses were often belled so they could be
followed if they strayed. Many pack -train leaders wrote of the
trouble of rounding up a pack train dispersed by storm or Indian
attack.
Besides wagoners and packhorse drivers, the Great Road in
summer swarmed with drovers who led or drove livestock to
market. Boys were often hired to assist, and a boy's first trip to
town was a thrill he long awaited. Aided by vigilant shepherd dogs,
the drover kept his animals together until they could be sold and
delivered to the butcher, bawling and squealing in protest.
In the Wagon Road's early days, Philadelphia was the market
for most livestock. However, the growth of upland market towns in
Virginia and the Carolinas gradually diminished the drovers' jour-
neys to the City of Brotherly Love. Such towns as Lancaster, Win-
chester, Salisbury, and Camden—originally way stations for trav-
elers—eventually became trading centers.
Besides ferrymen and wagoners, many other tradesmen made
their living on the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road. Foremost was
the taverner or pub -keeper, who kept a house for the traveling
public. Licensed by his town or county court, the owner obligated.
himself to perform specified services at rates approved by the local
licensing body. The term "public house" included the roadside
boardinghouse and the "ordinary" (so called because guests dined
simply, at the host's table) as well as the larger inn or tavern. One
English visitor found accommodations hardly to his liking as he
progressed southward into Virginia:
... all taverns and public houses are, in Virginia, called ordinaries,
and faith not improperly, in general; they consist of a little house
placed in a solitary situation, in the middle of the woods; and the
made of describing the roads is from such an ordinary to such a one,
so many miles; the entertainment you meet with is very poor in-
deed, seldom able to procure any other fare than eggs and bacon,
with Indian hoe -cake, and at many of them not even that; the only
.6- W-. [e4] 1 - 19l
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
liquors are peach brandy and whiskey. For this miserable fare they
are not remiss in making pretty exorbitant charges.. 02
A German visitor in the same period left a similarly jaundiced
account of southern inns:
In the item of public houses Virginia and the other southern prow
inces are worse off than the northern. The distinction between
Private and Public Entertainment is to the advantage of the people
who keep the so-called Private Houses, they avoiding in this way
the tax for permission to dispense rum and other drinks and not
being plagued with noisy drinking -parties. Other public houses lack-
ing, travellers are compelled to seek out these and glad to find
them. Here, one eats with the family both thick and thin hominy
(a preparation of Indian corn), drinks water at pleasure, is not free
to demand and has no right to expect what he wants, but pays quite
as much as elsewhere... On the other hand, it must be said for
these "private houses" that in them one has to submit to a general
interrogation but once, on the part of the family, whereas in the
taverns every person coming in must be thoroughly answered .. :
Typical of local ordinances fixing tavern prices was one adopted
by the justices of the peace of Botetourt County, Virginia, in 1773,
setting rates in that section of the Great Road:
For West India Rum, 10s gallon
For Rum made on This Continent, 2s ed per gallon
Madeira wine, 12s per gallon
French Brandy, 5s per gallon
Claret, 16s per gallon
Teneriffe wine, 10s per gallon
Peach brandy, 4s per gallon
Virginia Strong Malt Beer, bottled 3 months, 7%d the bottle
Virginia Strong Malt Beer, not bottled 3 months, is 3d per gallon
Bumbo with 2 gills rum to the quart, made with White sugar, Is 3d
Same made with Brown Sugar, is per quart
Whiskey Bumbo made with white sugar, 7% d per quart
Virginia cider, 1 shilling 3d per gallon
Bristol strong beer, 1 shilling 3 pence per bottle*
In addition to these potations, the public -house keeper was per-
mitted to charge ninepence for "a warm diet with small beer"; six-
pence for "a cold diet with small beer"; sixpence for "lodging in
clean sheets, one in a bed"; and threepence three farthings apiece
LIFE IN THE APPALACHIANS
for "same, two in bed." No charge was added for more than two
persons in a bed.
To feed his horse the traveler paid sixpence for twenty-four
ho » pasturage. Stableage with plenty of hay or fodder, one
night,
cost 71 d. Oats by the sheaf were threepence.
The operation of ferries over heavily traveled routes was similarly
controlled by law. The Virginia, Assembly at its September 1744
session specified that ferries be kept at Evan Watkins' landing on
the Potomac, sometimes called Maidstone, and at several other
Virginia rivers. The statute concluded:
And the courts of the several counties, wherein such ferries are
kept, shall have the power to appoint proper boats to be kept .. -
for the convenient Transportation of coaches, waggons, and other
wheel carriages, that when any such boat shall be so provided and
kept, it shall be and may be lawful for the keepers of such ferries
to demand and take, for the ferriage of such wheel carriages, the
following rates, to wit, for every coach, chariot, or wagon, and the
driver thereof, the same as for the carriage of six horses. And for
every cart, or four-wheel chaise, and the driver of such chaise, the
same as for the ferriage of four horses; and for every two -wheeled
chair or chaise, the same as for the ferriage of two horses; accord-
ing to the rates herein before settled at such ferries, and no mores
A similar Virginia enactment in November 1762 authorized
William Ingles to operate his ferry across New River in lower
Augusta County. It authorized these rates:
Price for man, 3 pence; horse, same;
coach and driver, same as six horses;
cart or four-wheel chase, same as four horses;
two wheeled cart, same as two horses.
Every head of neat cattle: same as one horse.
Goat or sheep: 5th part of a horse
Hog: 4th part of a horse.'O
Next to the houses and churches along the road, nothing was
more important than the inns. County justices of the peace often
held court there before courthouses could be built in new counties,
and public meetings assembled on tavern steps. A German traveler,
Johann David Schoepf, commented on the notices and advertise-
ments tacked to tavern doorways:
[97]
THS GREAT WAGON ROAD.
It is not always the custom to hang shields before taverns, but they
are easily to be identified by the great number of miscellaneous
papers and advertisements with which the walls and doors of these
publick houses are plaistered; generally, the more the bills are to be
seen on a house, the better it will be found to be. In this way the
traveller is afforded a many sided entertainment, and can inform
himself as to where the taxes are heavy, where wives have run
away, horses been stolen, or the new Doctor has settled .. 7
Most inns were small and uncouth, but they gave backwoodsmen
a sense of identification with the larger world of Philadelphia and
the East Coast towns. Indeed, the rural inn served for several cen-
turies as the countryman's gathering place, marketplace, political
forum, and newspaper.
The greatest number of Wagon Road taverns were found in the
heavily traveled sixty-three miles between Philadelphia and Lan-
caster, which served not only southbound travelers to Maryland
and Virginia but also westbound traffic to Harrisburg and Wheel-
ing. Usually run by Germans, the southern Pennsylvania inns served
hearty meals which were famed throughout the colonies. From the
usfrau's tidy kitchen came such dishes as sauerbraten, schmor-
braten, Span f erkel, kalbsbraten, hinkel, apf elklme, bratwurst, apple
cake, coffee cake, and other German delicacies. Their hearthside
ovens exuded the aroma of yeast bread that braced the tired
traveler.
Inns often catered to specialized clientele as their numbers grew.
There were drovers' inns, packhorse inns, and wagoners' inns, each
equipped to handle its users' needs. As sentiment divided on the
Stamp Tax issue after 1765, certain Pennsylvania inns became
known as "loyalist houses" and others as "Whig houses." Later, when
mail coaches and stagecoaches began to operate from Philadelphia,
the best inns became regular stops, known as "stage stands." At
some of these the coach regularly changed horses.
Most inns or taverns proclaimed themselves in bright roadside
signs, painted in a style familiar in Europe and bearing a symbol
to illustrate the tavern's name for the benefit of those who could not
read. Among the several score hostelries between Philadelphia and
Lancaster in these years were such familiars as The Black Horse,
The Buck, The Plough, The Ball, The Sign of Admiral Warren, The
Ship. The Wagon, and Widdow Caldwell's Hat. Germanic settlers
4 • (lot WN
k
[981
LIFE IN THE APPALACHIANS
knew The Brown Fox as Die Braun Fuchs and similarly translated
other names.
One of the best-known early Wagon Road inns was originally
named The Admiral Vernon for Great Britain's Sir Edward Vernon,
hero of the battle of Porto Bello in South AmericA in 1739. How-
ever, its name was changed in 1747 in a surge of enthusiasm for
Admiral Peter Warren, who defeated a French fleet that year in
the War of the Austrian Succession.
The Admiral Warren became a rendezvous for Pennsylvania
militiamen after its first owner, George Aston of Northampton
County, had organized a militia company to defend his neighbor-
hood against the French and Indians. When Aston grew old, The
Admiral Warren was taken over by Peter Valleau. In 1763, it was
bought by Lynford Lardner, a Welshman and brother-in-law of
Richard Penn, son of Pennsylvania's founder. Under Lardner the
inn became a gathering place for Tory sympathizers, just as the
nearby General Paoli Inn attracted the neighborhood Whigs.
The most celebrated Pennsylvania tavern -keeper was undoubt-
edly
ndoubtedly the kindly German, Casper Fahnestock, who bought the
Warren about 1786. He and General Joshua Evans, who owned and
operated the competing Paoli, were household names along the
Great Road, just as was Evan Watkins at Maidstone on the Potomac.
In the Valley of Virginia, innkeeper Thomas Harrison in 1779
deeded his lands to become the town of Harrisonburg, county seat
of Rockingham County. At nearby New Market, the Huguenot
emigrant Valentin Sevier—father of Tennessee's early leader John
Sevier—kept a popular inn.
Another well-known Valley inn was Lincoln's, which was estab-
lished by John Lincoln at Lacey Spring in Rockingham County
after he had come to Virginia over the Great Road from Berks
County, Pennsylvania, in the mid -eighteenth century. One of his
five sons was Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of the President, who
emigrated westward with three of his four brothers into Kentucky,
Tennessee, and Ohio.
In several cases, the presence of an inn dictated the location of
a county seat, for county justices needed a place to meet before
newly authorized courthouses could be built. On "court days"—
pronounced "co't days" in the beep South—the inns of Lancaster,
York, Gettysburg, Hagerstown, Salisbury, Charlotte, and other
[991
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
county seats swarmed with lawyers and litigants. County farmers
also came to town on such days to trade livestock and produce.
Tavern greens and courthouse yards were enlivened with contests
of strength and skill: wrestling, foot racing, quoit pitching, bowling,
and other simple sports. Cockfighting was also popular in the South.
Lawyers waiting for their cases to be called often acquired skill at
these inn -yard sports. John Marshall, who was heard as a young
lawyer in cases in the Valley of Virginia, took modest pride in his
skill at quoits.
The uncouth flavor of American taverns was lampooned by
Ebenezer Cook in 1708 in "The Sot -Weed Factor; or a Voyage to
Maryland" Typical were these stanzas:
Soon after hearty Entertainment
Of Drink and Victuals without Payment:
For Planters Tables, you must know,
Are free for all that come and go.
While Pon and Milk, with Mush well stoar'd,
In Wooden Dishes grac d the Board;
With homine and Syder-pap
( Which scarce a hungry dog would lap.)
Well stuff d with Fat from Bacon Fry'd,
Or with Mollossus dulcify'd.
Then'out our Landlord pulls a Pouch
As greasy as the Leather Couch
On which he sat, and straight begun
To load with Weed his Indian Gun...
His Pipe smoak'd out, with aweful Grace,
With aspect grave and solemn pace,
The reverend Sire walks to a Chest,
Of all the furniture the best.
From thence he lugs a Cag of Rum
And nodding to me, thus begun:
I find, says he, you dont much care,
For this, our Indian Country Fate; .. .
Not yet from Plagues exempted quite,
The Curst Muskitoes did me bite:
Till rising Morn and blushing Day
Drove both my Fears and Ills away;"
6 16, Q9
nam
LIFE IN THE APPALACHIANS
The tavern -keeper was a good man to know along the road. Not
only could he forewarn you of dangers or discomforts but he pro-
vided medical aid, advice to the potential buyer or seller, and sym-
pathy for the homesick. "There is nothing which has yet been
contrived by men," Dr. Samuel Johnson aptly put it, `by which
so much happiness is produced as by a good inn." Not many inns
along the Wagon Road were really good, but they beat camping out.
Ferrymen also helped the wayfaring. Such men as William
Ingles on New River or James Patton on Loony's Mill Creek—
later Buchanan, Virginia—welcomed the company of travelers.
Lord Adam Gordon of England attested in 1755 that such men
"assist ... all strangers with their equipages in so easy and kind
a manner, as must deeply touch a person of any feeling. The ferries,
which would retard in another country, rather accelerate [in
America]," he observed.
The chief hazard to ferries was the floodwater which followed
heavy rains. A nervous horse might break a leg in a rocking boat,
despite the blinders they sometimes wore to limit their vision. Up-
country ferries were usually no more than flat-bottomed scows or
barges, seldom longer than thirty feet, with sloped end and high
gunwales or railings to restrain livestock from going overboard.
Most ferries were poled from the stern or pulled forward from
the bow by a rope pulley.
Where streams were shallow, the traveler simply forded them.
Such was the intention of William Brown when he reached New
River in Virginia in 1782. "The ford of New River is rather bad," he
observed on arrival. "Therefore we thought it advisable to cross in
the ferry -boat.... The fords of Holstein and Clinch are both good
in dry weather, but in a rainy season you are often obliged to raft
over."
For such reasons, traffic on the early Wagon Road rose and fell
with the seasons, as the streams themselves rose and fell. A dry
spell was best for travel, when mud roads turned to dust and creeks
narrowed to a trickle. But drovers had no choice but to drive their
pigs or cattle to market whenever they were fattened.
At any season travel was uncomfortable and often hazardous.
Even so, the adventurers steadily increased. For these were vision-
ary people, entranced by the promise of new and unknown lands.
Nomdangers were too bloody to discourage them for long.
Mose who explore and settle new countries," .john Marshall ob-
rim i
:j
TEE GREAT WAGON ROAD
served, "are g mmUy bold, hardy, and adventurous men, whose
minds, as well as bodies, are fitted to encounter danger and fatigue;
their object is the acquisition of property, and they generally suc-
ceed."
The Chief justice spoke knowingly, for his father and several
brothers went west frown Virginia into Kentucky. .
Of such tough-fibered men and women' was frontier America
made.
i
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