It was an ordinary day. Checking out a variety of road maps that were originally established in the New World by Native Americans in the eighteenth-century. One such map showed a road which was known as the Great Wagon Road which connected Philadelphia and its hinterlands westward to the town of Lancaster and then south into the backcountry of Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas. Thousands of my Scotch Irish relatives as well as Germans and others left the Philadelphia region to establish villages, farms, taverns and new lives along the rugged road that stretched across southeastern Pennsylvania and eventually continued more than four hundred miles through the Shenandoah Valley of the Appalachian Mountains and beyond. The new population of the backcountry sustained connections with Philadelphia through trade, often facilitated by merchants in market towns such as Lancaster and York Pennsylvania, Hagerstown, Maryland and Winchester in northern Virginia. The Great Wagon Road was most active in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, prior to the American Revolution.
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| The Great Wagon Road |
It was during this period that the increasing population of Pennsylvania made land more scarce and costly for new arrivals as well as settled farmers who were seeking to secure more land for livelihoods for future family generations. It was during the same time that elected Governors in Maryland and Virginia were promoting backcountry settlements by Europeans as a means of securing their frontiers. In the 1720s a new flow of settlers comprised of Germans and Scotch-Irish made their way into Pennsylvania, then increased dramatically after the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster settled Iroquois Nation claims in the Shenandoah Valley. It was about the same time that a German migrant, Jonathan Hager bought land in Maryland and Virginia and founded Hagerstown. The Governors of both Maryland and Virginia began a rapid settlement in their states by awarding large land grants to individuals on the condition that they recruit specified numbers of migrants. One such settlement gave 140,000 acres to German immigrant Jost Hite to recruit 140 families to begin a settlement in Virginia much like a similar group of Quakers who migrated from Chester County to form the new town of Winchester. The Great Wagon Road was actually nothing more than an Indian trail for much of its length with narrow pathways more suited for individuals to walk in single file. Eventually more people arrived on horseback with herds of cattle, carts pulled by animals and eventually the heavy-duty Conestoga wagons that became the freight-haulers of the road.  |
| A Conestoga Wagon along the Great Wagon Road |
The journey on the Great Wagon Road required fording or ferrying across rivers along the way. The Pennsylvania portion of the road roughly followed the Great Minquas Trail used by the Lenni Lenape, Susquehnnocks and European traders. During the middle of the eighteenth century, travelers on this route between Philadelphia and Lancaster found a stump-punctuated dirt road despite its designation as a "King's Road". The road eventually turned south after Lancaster and York and became the Great Warriors' Path which was created and valued by Native Americans for passage through the Shenandoah Valley west of the Blue Ridge. The Great Wagon Road could hardly be termed a "road." The Indian trails that it traced for much of its length originated as pathways for individuals walking single file. But, the roads eventually grew as more traffic used the road. In places, the route consisted of not a single road, but of variations created by travelers to void hazards or to reach new destinations. The journey also required fording or ferrying across rivers along the way. The road eventually turned south after Lancaster and York and became known to Europeans as the Great Warrior's Path, created and still valued by Native Americans for passage through the Shenandoah Valley West of the Blue Ridge. The Great Wagon Road was designated such in 1753 on a map of the inhabited part of Virginia. Eventually migrants came to establish farms in the broad valley between the backcountry's mountain ranges. Towns also developed at intervals along the Great Wagon Road in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. Spaced approximately one day's journey apart, often founded by former Pennsylvanians and at times with street grids and center squares reminiscent of Philadelphia. Towns along the Great Wagon Road served as points of transfer for crops bound for market including wheat and flour. Peddlers plied their trade along the road, and drovers moved herds of cattle to Philadelphia butchers. Philadelphia merchants and banks extended credit to backcountry businesses and land investors. The Great Wagon Road became a pathway of settlement deeper into the western frontier after 1769, when Pennsylvania-born Daniel Boone opened the Wilderness Road from North Carolina west into the territory that became Tennessee and Kentucky. Daniel was born in the rural area of Philadelphia County that later became Berks County. He later migrated to North Carolina with his Quaker family at the age of 15. He gained fame as the trailblazer of the pass through the Cumberland Gap, thereby connecting the Great Wagon Road to points west. Eventually more improved roads were built and the railroad entered the picture in the early nineteenth century. In the 20th century, US Route 30 in Pennsylvania and US Route 11 and Interstate 81 through the Shenandoah Valley traveled the same route of the Great Wagon Road. The old road remained a subject of interest for scholars and a source of heritage tourism, and knowledgeable locals could still point out ruts and trenches believed to be remnants of the original road that linked Philadelphia to the settlement of the backcountry South. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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