Customer Reviews

The Great Wagon Road: From Philadelphia to the South

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
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This book is great for those interested in genealogy and tracing their ancestry from the early 1700's in the PA/MD/DE area to the Carolinas. I often wondered why they took the route they did from the eastern seaboard into South Carolina. Now I know. I was especially interested in the Scotch-Irish emigration since it was the lineage of my ancestry. The book is well written and makes history come alive.

I do a lot of genealogy research and I knew for a fact that my ancestors migrated from the Philadelphia area down to North Carolina via the Great Wagon Road. They came into America via the Port of Phila in 1738 and were in North Carolina sometime in the mid to late 1750s to early 1760s. The book was a real learning lesson, I never knew there was such a "road" on the eastern seaboard states like there was out west. It was really good at informing you of the trials and tribulations our ancestors faced with the countryside, the indians, the British and the French. I highly recommend this book, it opens your eyes to just how many moved from the North to the South and the way they went. Although near the end of the book it did jump around, it nevertheless held my attention. Great source material for those of you researching your roots in these areas.

This work is so poorly written, repeats itself and wanders away from its subject so often that it is more like a collage written by a high school student than a serious history. It is a cluttered hodgepodge. Yet it is an important work, one that should be read.

It is only recently that I realized Philadelphia was to the continental colonies what Ellis Island was to the later United States. I wonder how many Southerners will be surprised to find out that their ancestors migrated from the North. While the concept is amusing in a wry sort of way, it also helps explain the developing sense of colonial identity. Those people up North or down South were not strangers. They were Aunt Mary, Cousin John, or Grandpa!

The growth of Great Britain's American colonies was constrained by 2 facts of 16th and 17th century life: the Appalachian Mountains and King George II. It was a horrendous task to cross the mountains and their sovereign forbid it.

Founded on religious freedom, Pennsylvania became a haven for all sorts of people fleeing Europe. So for years, as population concentrations grew in and around Philadelphia, and because westward migration was out of the question, a natural migration southward occurred along an ancient Indian trading and warring path which connected the entire northern and southern east coast. This path was acquired from the Indians over time and became known as The Great Wagon Road, so labeled on a map drawn by Thomas Jefferson's father, Peter. It is over this settlers' path from Philadelphia that the western portions of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia were originally peopled. This migration was vast, lasting 50 to 60 years and numbering in the tens of thousands of people. And many of the original overnight camping spots grew to become American cities such as Winston-Salem, Augusta, Winchester and Gettysburg to name a few. After the American Revolution this floodtide turned westward into Tennessee and Kentucky along Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road

This is the story of an almost unreported mass migration that occurred during Britain's colonial period, a movement that peopled major portions of what was to become the United States. Quietly, very quietly, the record shows that we really were one people long before the American Revolution occurred.

After researching my family tree, I found it interesting that for several branches generation after generation were going from Ireland to Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, then strangely up to Indiana and Illinois. Other branches of my family tree took the National Road west, but the Great Wagon Road is an interesting story for the development of the early eastern United States. It was a road "worn down in earlier ages by buffalo." Later after the extinction of the eastern buffalo it was "the ancient Warrior's Path...used by Iroquois tribesmen of the north to come south and trade or make war in [what later would become] Virginia and the Carolinas."

While much has been written about the Scots-Irish, this book includes other Protestant migrants such as the German, Moravian, Palatine, and Quakers. The book also describes the various Protestant preachers such as Francis Asbury and Peter Muhlenberg that so affected the settlers, broadly cast the seeds of religious freedom and anti-slavery. Many of those clans who migrated to North Carolina, moved onto Tennessee and Kentucky only to find that they could not compete economically with slaveholders and moved north to the free labor states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. There they met other branches who generally followed the National Road west from Philadelphia.

The book is full of details that give the reader clear pictures of what life was like living along the great wagon road and various branches west. I recommend the book for those wanting an in-depth image of what their ancestors did to survive and make a life for themselves in this part of the country.

This is a very interesting book pertaining to the migration of settlers from the North to the South. I was hoping to find some records on my family genealogy but really enjoyed the book.

This book is about as much fiction as truth. The author makes up the story as he goes along. If treated as historical fiction, it does give a fairly accurate notion of what happened, but it is not accurate history.

The author never discusses the Wagon Road itself which ran from Pennslyvania southward through Virginia into the Tennessee Valley with a branch going down into North Carolina. The book strays all over the map -- as far as South Carolina, and much of it has nothing to do with the Great Road.

When reading the early chapters of the book, I realized that it could not be trusted. Then I came upoon Chapter 13 "The Saga of Castle's Woods." The author had paraphrased my master's thesis. I am not sure if what he did is legal or not, but it, in my opinion was not ethical. He did give me one citation. But that is not the worst problem. He made up facts when he wanted to tell a colorful story about the people in Castle's Woods. Furthermore, he made quite a number of gross errors. For example, he states that Castle's Woods later became Saltville. Saltville is two counties away. Castle's Woods is in present Russell County while Saltville is in Smyth County Virginia. According to MapQuest that is a distance on 49.7 miles. Castle's Woods is about 25 miles from the Great Road.

I was delighted to read this book that described the path taken from Philadelphia into the Charlotte North Carolina region by my Morrisson ancestors. One of my favorite parts was discussion regarding The Battle of Kings Mountain which provided a stage for the King's Mountain Messenger who eventually moved to Lincoln County Tennessee and is buried near a community that we today call Po Grab. The Morrisson's also moved into Tennessee to claim therir Revolutionary War Land Grant as did the Kng's Mountain Messenger, first founding the town of Morrisson then moving on to adjacent Bedford County Tennessee. At 50 this book helped me find my sense of place in this world by branching over 200 years of American history that framed, touched and formed me. Not only does it describe my Morrisson heritage but quite likely it describes my Dunn and Dixon heritage as well.

Hurrah!