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From: Jim Eubank <>
Subject: [BARRINGER] The Great Pennsylvania Wagon Road
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 15:07:56 -0700
Something for my other Berringer cousins and friends
Jim Eubank
By Kevin Cherry Rowan County Library Historian
The Great Pennsylvania Wagon Road
This is the first great interior migration in our nations history. Its
the story of a road, the Great Pennsylvania Wagon Road.
When the crops were in, they started. Early in the morning-even early
farm people, theyd set out. During the first years, they walked,
leading five or six pack animals laden with supplies: tools, seed, and
fabric.
In places, the famous path they trod was only three or four feet
wide. The wilderness literally crept right up to their feet and brushed
their faces as they walked. In later years they marched alongside oxen
as these oversized beasts pulled two-wheeled carts heaped to
overflowing, crossing rivers that licked high about their animals
flanks and often soaked every single, individual piece of their worldly
possessions. Finally, when the path had been worn clear by thousands and
thousands of previous travelers, they rode in wagons that, themselves,
grew as the path widened into an honest to goodness road. These
Pennsylvania - German-built wagons (Conestogas) at their largest would
be twenty-six feet long, eleven feet high and some could bear loads up
to ten tons. It took five or six pairs of horses to pull them. These big
vehicles, the eighteen-wheelers of their day, were called Liners and
Tramps. Ships would later gain their nicknames.
No matter if they walked or rode, in the mid afternoon, they stopped to
take care of the animals, prepare food, and put up the defense for the
night. The cries of wolves in the distance and the pop of twigs just
outside of the firelight sounded danger. Bands of Indians in the early
days, bands of thieves later, chased away deep sleep no matter how
tiring the day, how bone-weary the traveler. The fastest loaded wagon
could go about five miles a day. The trip took a minimum of two months.
Wagons broke down, rivers flooded, supplies gave out, and there was
sickness but no doctors. Wagons were repaired, floods ceded, the
wilderness supplied, and the sick were buried or stumbled on. The Road
Only a few trails cut through the vast forests, which covered the
continent between the northernmost colonies and Georgia, the southern
tip. The settlers, as they moved inland, usually followed the paths over
which the Indians had hunted and traded. The Indians, in turn, had
followed the pre-historical traces of animals. Who knows why the animals
wandered where they did, but some of those early travelers on that road,
the Scots-Irish Presbyterians, would have assured us it was certainly
predetermined. Even so, few paths crossed the Appalachians, which formed
a barrier between the Atlantic plateau and the unknown interior. In his
1755 map of the British Colonies, Lewis Evans labeled the Appalachians,
Endless Mountains. And so they must have seemed to the daring few who
pierced the heart of the wooded unknown. But through this unknown, even
then, there was a road.
The Iroquois tribesmen of the North had long used the great warriors
path to come south and trade or make war in Virginia and the Carolinas.
This vital link between the native peoples led from the Iroquois
Confederacy around the Great Lakes through what later became Lancaster
and Bethlehem, Pa through York to Gettysburg and into Western Maryland
around what is now Hagerstown. It crossed the Potomac River at Evan
Watkins Ferry, followed the narrow path across the backcountry to
Winchester, through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia to Harrisonburg,
Staunton, Lexington, and Roanoke. On it went into Salem, NC, and on to
Salisbury, where it was joined by the east-west Catawba and Cherokee
Indian Trading Path at the Trading Ford across the Yadkin River. On to
Charlotte and Rock Hill, SC where it branched to take two routes, one to
Augusta and another to Savannah, Georgia. It was some road, but it was
just a narrow line through the continuous forest.
Virginias Gov. Col. Alexander Spotswood first discovered this Great
Road in 1716 when his Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, finally crossed
the mountains, drank a toast to King Georges health and buried a bottle
claiming the vast valley for the King of England. His Knights motto
became Sic Juvat Transcendere Montes, or Behold, we cross the
mountains. In 1744, a treaty between the English colonists and the
Indians gave the white men control of the road for the first time. By
1765 the Great Wagon Road was cleared all along its way enough to hold
horse drawn vehicles and by 1775, the road stretched 700 miles. Boys and
dogs, smelling like barnyards, drove tens of thousands of pigs to market
along this road, which grew gradually worse the farther South you went.
Inns and ordinaries, which spotted the road undoubtedly, taught more
than a few of them the ways of the world. But that was all later. The
majority of the folks who by the thousands would walk over Spotswoods
buried bottle would have probably thought his whole 1716 ceremony a
little preposterous and quite a bit pretentious. You see, they were
plain folk trying to get away from Latin, from mottoes, and from knights
with horse shoes no matter their element of manufacture, lead to gold.
They were as different from Spotswoods cavaliers as a golden horseshoe
is from an oxs hoof.
Who were the Wagon Roads Travelers?
For 118 years, the English and Dutch settled the New World, lining the
harbors and pointing their cities, their eyes, their hearts to the east,
across the Atlantic. They were on the fringes of a vast continent but,
for the most part, they forever more turned away from it and toward
home. They were certainly colonists, even those stem- faced few who
came to these shores for religious reasons, and most of the other
settlers, you see, had come to expand the business opportunities of home
establishments. Their ties to those establishments were strong. It took
a different kind of settler, someone who had cut his ties altogether,
someone who didnt really have all that much to lose, to look west at a
wilderness and there see something more than raw materials ready for
exploitation. It took folks like the Germans and the Scots-Irish to put
their backs to the ocean and see home in front of them. Escaping
devastating wars, religious persecution, economic disasters, and all of
those other things that still cause people to come to these shores, the
Scots Irish and the Germans had no intention of returning to their
native lands. They were here to stay. They didnt look east but to the
south and west-toward land. They didnt see wolves and Indians. They saw
opportunities. And as different as the Germans and the Scots Irish were,
they had what it took to flourish in the backcountry. Not possessions
that could be lost in the fording of a river, not personal contacts and
the sponsorship of powerful men, but rough and tumble ability and a
heavy streak of stubbornness. They knew slash and burn agriculture, they
knew pigs, they could hunt and forage, they knew hard work. They built
their cabins the exact same way. And eventually, they traveled together
in that same heavy stream southward along the Great Pennsylvania Wagon
Road.
In 1749, 12,000 Germans reached Pennsylvania. By 1775, there were
110,000 people of German birth in that colony, one-third of the
population.
When
Philadelphia was a cluster of Inns and Ordinaries: the Blue Anchor,
Pewter Platter, Penny-Pot, Seven Stars, Cross Keys, Hornet and Peacock.
Benjamin Franklin, one of that eras most open-minded men asked, Why
should the Palatinate Boors be suffered to swan into our settlement and
by herding together establish their language and manners to the
exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English,
become a colony of aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to
Germanize us, instead of our Anglicizing them and will never adopt our
language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion.
But the Germans kept coming, thinking like their Scots Irish compatriots
who are recorded as noting that!, It was against the law of God and
nature that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted
it to labor on and raise their bread. In short, Pennsylvania was
flooded.
Why they Headed South
There is probably no more beautiful land anywhere than that part of
Pennsylvania now known as the Amish Country. It must have appeared to
those people fresh off of the boat, truly a land flowing with milk and
honey. But it filled rapidly. Land became expensive. The most important
reason why the Germans and Scots-Irish put what little they owned on
their backs and took the southbound road was the cost of land in
Pennsylvania. A fifty- acre farm in Lancaster County, PA would have
cost 7 pounds 10 shillings in 1750. In the Granville District of North
Carolina, which comprised the upper half of the state, five shillings
would buy 100 acres. The crossing of an ocean was move enough for most
of the early immigrants. The generation, which could still feel the
waves beneath their feet when elderly, often stayed in Pennsylvania, but
their children repeated their parents adventure. Often, they cast off
their lines, raised whatever anchors they had, and sailed south right
after their patriarchs had gone to their reward. As North Carolinas
Secretary of State, William L. Saunders wrote in 1886, Immigration, in
the early days, divested of its glamour and brought down to solid fact,
is the history of a continuous search for good bottom land. In their
search for bottomland, English colonists encroached onto territories
claimed by France. This pressure became one of the reasons the French
and Indians went to war against England and her colonists.. The Germans
and Scots bore the brunt of the war, a cabin burning, wife kidnapping,
farm ambushing, bloody, and horrible guerrilla war
For eleven years mayhem reigned on the frontier.
In 1756, three years after the war started, George Washington wrote that
the Appalachian frontiersmen were in a general motion towards the
southern colonies and that Virginias westernmost counties would soon
be emptied. Western North Carolina seemed to those escaping the war to
be safer because the Cherokee were on the British side-at least at the
beginning. To western North Carolina they came. This French and Indian
War, which started the year Rowan County was created, joined the quest
for more and better land as a major factor in sending those Germans and
Scots-Irish down the Wagon Road to safer territory. Not only that but,
the peace treaty that ended the war stated that no English settlers
would go over the Appalachians. Thus, the best-unclaimed land in all of
the colonies lay along the Yadkin, Catawba and Savannah Rivers between
the years 1763 and 1768. When the war ended in 1764, the western
settlements of Pennsylvania had suffered a loss of population. Virginia
and North Carolina had grown.
What they Found
When those Scots Irish and Germans got here the country of the upper
Yadkin teemed with game. Bears were so numerous it was said that a
hunter could lay by two or three thousand pounds of bear grease in a
season. The tale was told in the forks that nearby Bear Creek took its
name from the season Boone killed 99 bears along its waters. The deer
were so plentiful that an ordinary hunter could kill four or five a day;
the deerskin trade was an important part of the regional economy. In
1753 more than 30,000 skins were exported from North Carolina, and
thousands were used within the colony for the manufacture of leggings,
breeches and moccasins. In 1755, NC Gov. Arthur Dobbs wrote to England
that the Yadkin is a large beautiful river. Where there is a ferry it
is nearly 300 yards over it, [which] was at this time fordable, scarce
coming to the horses bellies. At six miles distant, he said, I
arrived at Salisbury the county seat of Rowan. The town is just laid
out, the courthouse built, and 7 or 8 log houses built.
Most of Salisburys householders ran public houses, letting travelers
sup at their table-and drink, too. In 1762, there were 16 public
houses. There was also a shoe factory, a prison, a hospital and armory
all here before the Revolution. Even so, it was still only an outpost
in the wilderness. Salisbury was for twenty-three years the farthest
west county seat in the colonies. And through this outpost the wagon
road ran, and on that road the immigrants continued to travel even
after the area was settled. Governor Tryon wrote to England that more
than a thousand wagons passed through Salisbury in the Fall and Winter
of 1765. That works out to about six immigrant wagons per day.
Summary
In the last sixteen years of the colonial era, wrote historian Carl
Bridenbaugh, Southbound traffic along the Great Philadelphia Wagon
Road. was numbered in tens of thousands. It was the most heavily
traveled road in all America and must have had more vehicles jolting
along its rough and tortuous way than all the other main roads put
together. When the British captured Philadelphia, the Continental
Congress escaped down the Pennsylvania Wagon Road. Daniel Boone and
Davy Crockett traveled it.
Indian fighter. John Chisholm knew it as an Indian trader.
Countless soldiers-Andrew Jackson, Andrew Pickens, Andrew Lewis, Francis
Marion, Lighthorse Harry Lee, Daniel Morgan, and George Rogers Clark,
among them-fought over it. Both the North and South would use it during
the Civil War.
And down this road, this glorified overgrown footpath through the middle
of
nowhere leading to even greater depths of nowhere, came those people
looking for a better life for themselves and their children, down it
came those
settlers, those hardworking stubborn Scots Irish and Germans: the
preachers,
the blacksmiths, and farmers. Down it came the Holshousers and the
Barringers,
the Alexanders and the Grahams, the Millers and the Earnhardts, the
Catheys and
the Knoxes, the Blackwelders and the Halls, and the Cherrys and the
Brauns
and the Fishers.
When the crops were in, on a day like today, they started.
Thank you.
Kevin Cherry
Rowan County Library Historian
how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen
gathereth her chickens under [her] wings, and ye would not! . . Behold,
your house is left unto you desolate.
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