Great Philadelphia Wagon Road


	The Great Philadelphia Wagon Road

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 development of a nation. Over this Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, vast numbers of English, Scotch-Irish, and Germanic settlers entered this continent and claimed lands.

The endless procession of new settlers, Indian traders, soldiers, and missionaries swelled as the Revolution approached. "In the last sixteen years of the colonial era," wrote the 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 other main roads put together."

As the principal highway of the eighteenth-century frontier southward from Pennsylvania, the Wagon Road also played an important part in the French and Indian wars and in the American Revolution. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett traveled it as explorers. George Washington knew it as an Indian fighter. Countless soldiers— Andrew Jackson, Andrew Pickens, John Sevier, Andrew Lewis, Francis Marion, Lighthorse Harry Lee, Daniel Morgan, and George Rogers Clark among them—fought over it.

When British forces captured Philadelphia early in the Revolution, 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 Cumberland 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 traditions 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.