The Great Wagon Road Odyssey: A Guest Post by James Dodson

The Road That Made America details the little-known story of a crucial pathway across the country that paved the way for early settlers and the exploration of North America. With research from on-the-ground work, academics, archeologists, history buffs and more, James Dodson reintroduces us to an obscure piece of American history in a whole new way. Read on for an exclusive essay from James on writing The Road That Made America.

Not long ago, during a breakfast talk in a retirement community about my forthcoming book The Road That Made America – A Modern Pilgrim Travels the Great Wagon Road — I was asked by a woman, “So, looking back, what would you say was the most surprising thing about your journey?”

“Everything,” I answered truthfully.

The audience laughed.

The first surprise, I explained, was that it took me more than half a century to find and follow America’s most fabled colonial road that brought more than 100,000 European settlers to the Southern wilderness during the 18th century. As much as one third of living Americans, it has been estimated, had an ancestor who traveled this road in search of a new life in North America.

 As I point out in the book’s prologue, I first heard about the GWR from my father during a road trip with my older brother in December 1966 to shoot mistletoe out of the ancient white oaks that grew around his great-grandfather’s long-abandoned homeplace off Buckhorn Road near the Colonial-era town of Hillsborough, North Carolina.

The story he told us about our Scottish, German and English ancestors who traveled the road to North Carolina lit a flame in my eighth-grade head that never dimmed. I vowed to someday find and travel the Great Wagon Road myself.

Fortunately, nearly six decades later, by the time I set off to travel the road from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia, in late August of 2017, a small army of regional historians, museum curators, state archivists and homegrown history nuts of every sort had finally determined the old road’s original path from Philadelphia through Western Pennsylvania, Maryland, the Valley of Virginia and both Carolinas  — passing through some of the most historic towns and villages where American democracy, religion and commerce first took root. Not surprisingly, given it’s strategic importance for well over a century, the most important battles of the French & Indian, American Revolution, and Civil War took place on or near the Great Wagon Road. Ditto at least eight presidents — who were either born on the road or traveled it extensively during their lives. 

My original intent was to travel the road for a month interviewing local historians and like-minded folks who shared my passion for the lore of the GWR, with the aim of producing a readable history of the “road that made America,” as a dear friend and architectural historian named Thomas Sears, Jr. aptly described the frontier highway that hosted America’s first immigration movement — tens of thousands of European settlers who were fleeing wars and troubles in their homelands along with others simply answering William Penn’s call to a mythical place of milk and honey that reportedly existed in the North American backcountry.

By my first month on the road, having discovered so much surprising and largely untold history, along with scores of local flame-keepers who were keeping the old road’s rich saga alive, I realized that they were the real story to be told.

At a moment when many Americans seem to be forgetting our unique and wondrous history and ignoring the mythic chords that bind us together as the world’s first immigrant nation (to paraphrase one Abraham Lincoln, who gave his sacred Gettysburg Address overlooking the Great Wagon Road) it was the flame-keepers of the once-forgotten Great Wagon Road that brought this story to life.

Their voices still linger in my head. And I hope you enjoy traveling the Great Road in their company — as I did for almost six years, a spiritual journey I shall never forget.