The Old Wagon
Road
When the crops were in, they started. Early in the morning-even
early for farm people, they'd set out. During the first years, they
walked, leading five or six pack animals laden with supplies: tools,
seed, fabric. In places, the famous path they trod was only three or
four feet wide. The wilderness literally crept right up to their feet
and brushed their faces as they walked. In later years they marched
alongside oxen as these oversized beasts pulled two-wheeled carts heaped
to overflowing, crossing rivers that licked high about their animals'
flanks and often soaked every single, individual piece of their worldly
possessions. Finally, when the path had been worn clear by thousands
and thousands of previous travelers, they rode in wagons that,
themselves, grew as the path widened into an honest to goodness road.
These Pennsylvania- German-built wagons (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. This is the first great
interior migration in our nation's history. It's the story of a road,
the Great Pennsylvania Wagon Road.
The Road
Only a few trails cut through the vast forests, which covered the
continent between the northernmost colonies and Georgia, the southern
tip. The settlers, as they moved inland, usually followed the paths over
which the Indians had hunted and traded. The Indians, in turn, had
followed the pre-historical traces of animals. Who knows why the animals
wandered where they did, but some of those early travelers on that road,
the Scots-Irish Presbyterians, would have assured us it was certainly
predetermined. Even so, few paths crossed the Appalachians, which
formed a barrier between the Atlantic plateau and the unknown interior.
In his 1755 map of the British Colonies, Lewis Evans labeled the
Appalachians, "Endless Mountains." And so they must have seemed to the
daring few who pierced the heart of the wooded unknown. But through
this unknown, even then, there was a road. The Iroquois tribesmen of
the North had long used the great warriors' path to come south and trade
or make war in Virginia and the Carolinas. This vital link between the
native peoples led from the Iroquois Confederacy around the Great Lakes
through what later became Lancaster and Bethlehem, Pa. through York to
Gettysburg and into Western Maryland around what is now Hagerstown. It
crossed the Potomac River at Evan Watkins' Ferry, followed the narrow
path across the backcountry to Winchester, through the Shenandoah Valley
of Virginia to Harrisonburg, Staunton, Lexington, and Roanoke. On it
went into Salem, NC, and on to Salisbury, where it was joined by the
east-west Catawba and Cherokee Indian Trading Path at the
Trading Ford across the Yadkin River. On to Charlotte and Rock Hill,
SC where it branched to take two routes, one to Augusta and another to
Savannah, Georgia. It was some road, but it was just a narrow line
through the continuous forest. Virginia's Gov. Col. Alexander Spotswood
first discovered this Great Road in 1716 when his "Knights of the Golden
Horseshoe, " finally crossed the mountains, drank a toast to King
George's health and buried a bottle claiming the vast valley for the
King of England. His Knights' motto became "Sic Juvat Transcendere
Montes, ~ or "Behold, we cross the mountains." In 1744, a treaty between
the English colonists and the Indians gave the white men control of the
road for the first time. By 1765 the Great Wagon Road was cleared all
along it way enough to hold horse drawn vehicles and by 1775, the road
stretched 700 miles. Boys and dogs, smelling like barnyards, drove tens
of thousands of pigs to market along this road, which grew gradually
worse the farther South you went. Inns and ordinaries, which spotted the
road undoubtedly taught more than a few of them the ways of the world.
But that was all later.
The majority of the folks who by the thousands would walk over
Spotswood's buried bottle would have probably thought his whole 1716
ceremony a little preposterous and quite a bit pretentious. You see,
they were plain folk trying to get away from Latin, from mottoes, and
from knights with horseshoes no matter their element of manufacture,
lead to gold. They were as different from Spotswood's cavaliers as a
golden horseshoe is from an ox's hoof.
Who were the Wagon Road's Travelers?
For 118 years, the English and Dutch settled the New World, lining
the harbors and pointing their cities, their eyes, their hearts to the
east, across the Atlantic. They were on the fringes of a vast continent
but, for the most part, they forever more turned away from it and toward
home. They were certainly colonists, even those stem- faced few who came
to these shores for religious reasons, and most of the other settlers,
you see, had come to expand the business opportunities of home
establishments. Their ties
to those establishments were strong.
It took a different kind of settler, someone who had cut his ties
altogether, someone who didn't really have all that much to lose, to
look west at a wilderness and there see something more than raw
materials ready for exploitation. It took folks like the Germans and the
Scots Irish to put their backs to the ocean and see home in front of
them. Escaping devastating wars, religious persecution, economic
disasters, and all of those other things that still cause people to come
to these shores, the Scots Irish and the Germans had no intention of
returning to their native lands. They were here to stay. They didn't
look east but to the south and west-toward land. They didn't see wolves
and Indians. They saw opportunities. And as different as the Germans and
the Scots Irish were, they had what it took to flourish in the
backcountry. Not possessions that could be lost in the fording of a
river, not personal contacts and the sponsorship of powerful men, but
rough and tumble ability and a heavy streak of stubbornness. They knew
slash and 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, PewterPlatter, Penny-Pot, Seven Stars, Cross Keys, Hornet
and Peacock, Benjamin Franklin, one of that era's most open-minded men
asked, "Why should the Palatinate Boors be suffered to swan-n into our
settlement and by herding together establish their language and manners
to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the
English, become a colony of aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to
Germanize us, instead of our Anglicizing them and will never adopt our
language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion." But
the Germans kept coming, thinking like their Scots Irish compatriots who
are recorded as noting that!, "It was against the law of God and nature
that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to
labor on and raise their bread." In short, Pennsylvania was flooded.
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 parent's adventure. Often, they cast off
their lines, raised whatever anchors they had, and ~'sailed" south right
after their patriarchs had gone to their reward. As North Carolina's
Secretary of State, William L. Saunders wrote in 1886, "Immigration,
in the early days, divested of its glamour and brought down to solid
fact, is the history of a continuous search for good bottom land." In
their search for bottom land, English colonists encroached onto
territories claimed by France. This pressure became one of the reasons
the French and Indians went to war against England and her colonists.
The Germans and Scots bore the brunt of the war, a cabin burning,
wife-kidnapping, farm ambushing, bloody, horrible guerrilla war. For
eleven years mayhem reigned on the frontier. In 1756, three years after
the war started, George Washington wrote that the Appalachian
frontiersmen were "in a general motion towards the southern colonies"
and that Virginia's westernmost counties would soon be emptied. Western
North Carolina seemed to those escaping the war to be safer because the
Cherokee were on the British side-at least at the beginning. To western
North Carolina they came. This French and Indian War, which started the
year Rowan County was created, joined the quest for more and better land
as a major factor in sending those Germans and Scots-Irish down the
Wagon Road to safer territory. Not only that but, the peace treaty that
ended the war stated that no English settlers would go over the
Appalachians. Thus, the best unclaimed land in all of the colonies lay
along the Yadkin, Catawba and Savannah Rivers between the years 1763 and
1768. When the war ended in 1764, the western settlements of
Pennsylvania had suffered a loss of population. Virginia and North
Carolina had grown.
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
horse's bellies." At six miles distant, he said, "I arrived at Salisbury
the county seat of Rowan. The town is just laid out, the courthouse
built,, and 7 or 8 log houses built." Most of Salisbury's householders
ran public houses, letting travelers 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.
Click here (to see sites in Salisbury/Rowan)
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.
This river area now is part of
High Rock Lake
Summary
In the last sixteen years of the colonial era," wrote historian
Carl Bridenbaugh, "Southbound traffic along the Great Philadelphia Wagon
Rowan was numbered in tens of thousands. It was the most heavily
traveled road in all America and must have had more vehicles jolting
along its rough and tortuous way than all the other main roads put
together."
When the British captured Philadelphia, the Continental Congress
escaped down the Pennsylvania Wagon Road. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett
traveled it. George Washington knew it as an Indian fighter. John
Chisholm knew it as an Indian trader. Countless soldiers-Andrew Jackson,
Andrew Pickens, Andrew Lewis, Francis Marion, Lighthorse Harry Lee,
Daniel Morgan, and George Rogers Clark, among them-fought over it. Both
the North and South would use it during the Civil War.
And down this road, this glorified overgrown footpath through the
middle of nowhere leading to even greater depths of nowhere, came those
people looking for a better life for themselves and their children, down
it came those settlers, those hardworking stubborn Scots Irish and
Germans: the preachers, the blacksmiths, and farmers.
When the crops were in, on a day like today, they started.
Author Unknown and
printed without permission


Westward
Movement
In Old Rowan County, there are
still many descendants of Jacob, Michael, Abraham & Andrew Braun. As
you know, these four men came into the county in the mid 1700s and
obtained much land in the eastern and middle part of what is now present
day Rowan County. Michael built his home in what is now Granite Quarry
and Dunn's Mtn. area. Abraham (my ancestor) had property in the
Persimmon Branch (Dan
Nicholas Park area) and operated a grist mill. Jacob had land in
this general area. Michael & Abraham died in Rowan County. Jacob
moved to Telford (Washington Co., TN) and died there. For the most
part, Michael & Abraham families stayed in Rowan County; the move
westward was originally by Jacob's family, although, members from all
four families DID move toward Washington County, TN., Kentucky &
southern Illinois. The man that owns part of the farm that Jacob &
Enoch owned is Mr. John Howze. This Jacob, was known as The Wagon
Maker. His farm and front door of his home is within yards of the Old
Wagon Road. The book written & Compiled by John Fisher, Dorothy Brown
Koller & Margaret Brown Anderson -- "Ancestors and Descendants of
Abraham Braun (The Miller) and Jacob Braun (The Wagonmaker) has pictures
of many parts of this farm in Telford. I have been fortunate to be able
to meet Mr. Howze and tour the house and farm. He is a jewel of a man
and would love to hear from any of you. I think his home is on John
Howze Farm Road, Telford, TN. This book traces these families from
Rowan County to TN to Illinois
and most parts westward. The
Brown-Fisher
Association has a website where you can pick up a little
info. We have about 500 or so members and we meet once a year for a
reunion. We also have a historian who has spent a lifetime gathering
information on many families in the county. Rowan County, NC has one of
the best history rooms in
the country.
We also have a well staffed and well managed
Visitor Center in Salisbury. Rowan Museum, Inc.
are working together to attempt to build a center (Archives Building) to
house much info on these families. It is in the planning stages now and
any donations would be greatly appreciated. It may be located on the
property of the
Old Stone House.. There are lifetime memberships offered for the
Association and those funds will be spent on the Archives building.
Abraham Brown II in 1814 traveled to Union County.
Took gourd with seeds and perishables in it. Can be seen at
Cobden, IL. Museum. Back to the migration, as these families
moved westward, they settled in the Washington Co., TN area. This
movement was also southward toward Cabarrus & Stanly Co., NC and toward
the northeast into Orange Co., NC where there was another large German
settlement. Later the movement was into the
Union Co., Vermillion Co., Alexander Co. (southern Illinois area.) As
early as 1806, pioneers were entering Union County, IL.
Places like Thebes, Jonesboro, Mill Creek and Dongola are familiar
village names. This is where many of you come into the picture. I
have heard that many cemeteries in that area
are
filled with tombstones that show (born in Rowan County).
Headstone of Abraham Brown II on right is located in St. John's Lutheran
Cemetery in Dongola, IL. If your name is not Brown, never mind.
As these pioneers moved westward, they
gathered wives and brothers-in-law, with a thousand other names. Adams,
Agner, Arey, Atwood, Ballard, Barrier, Barringer, Bell, Benson, Bost,
Bohnsack, Braun, Brownlee, Brun, Bunn, Campbell, Cluttz, Kluttz, Lemley,
Lyerla, Eddleman, Earnhardt, Fisher, Hamen, Hagstrom, Holshouser,
Hunsaker, Million, Pigg, Rendleman, Sifford, Vandergraph, Zwalen,
just to mention a few. In the early days the two largest groups were
the Hunsakers & Browns. Dig deep enough and you can probably find
one of these names in your past. I have included about 6 generations of
this family pertaining to being kin to me. The Abraham/Jacob Braun Book shows
much more.
One interesting note, in the Rowan Museum in Salisbury, NC there is
a "Sampler" on the wall on the second floor. It was embroidered by a
young lady named Laura Alexander at age of 9, dated 1845, Hawkins
County, Rogersville, TN. She is buried beside her father in a cemetery
in Rogersville, TN. It was a gift to the Museum in 1955.
There is a main road in Salisbury "Jake Alexander Blvd." The Alexanders
originated in Mecklenburg County and were Scotch-Irish. Their ancestral
home-the Heziah Alexander home-is restored and open to the public.
Dan Patterson
Rowan County Information OnLine
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