John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes
Note 239
[This should be the last of the Great Wagon Road.] In 1768, a chain of
events was launched which was to lead to a spur or new branch of the Great
Wagon Road. John Finley, an itinerant peddler, had told Daniel Boone that
there was a big gap in the mountain range which the Indians used. That was
all Daniel Boone needed to hear. Boone, Finley, and four others hacked their
way through dense underbrush to prove that a route was possible.
Colonel Richard Henderson, a North Carolina lawyer, saw the possibilities.
He purchased land from the Cherokees along the Ohio River in Kentucky. To
provide access, he hired Boone and thirty workers to cut a road through. His
actions were not universally acclaimed but Boone completed the road in short
order.
This modest beginning quickly became the Wilderness Road, leading to what
became Kentucky and Tennessee. The new road branched to the southwest at
(today's) Roanoke, VA, leaving the Great Wagon Road, which continued in a
southerly direction. In terms of today's locations, it passed Christianburg,
Wytheville, and Abingdon, in Virginia, before branching in a westerly
direction to pass through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and branching in
a southwestern direction toward Knoxville.
By 1776, Henderson's company, Transylvania, petitioned the Continental
Congress for admission as the fourteenth colony. Conflicting claims and
rivalries doomed the request.
However, colonists from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas were undeterred by the
political status of the new area. The lure of the new lands in the west
added to the volume of the traffic on the Great Wagon Road. By 1790, when
the first United States census was taken, 70,000 people had made new homes
across the Appalachians.
"The opening of Tennessee and Kentucky deflected much of the traffic on the
Wagon Road for several decades, but the road continued to grow in
importance. Indeed, the great years of the Deep South's settlement were yet
to come. The ancient path which had led through the Carolinas to Georgia
would continue to lead to green lands and golden opportunity. The Great
Philadelphia Wagon Road would grow with the years." (Frank Rouse, Jr., "The
Great Wagon Road," The Dietz Press, 1995.)
This history of the Wagon Road is of interest for its own story, but it was
also the route by which many of Germanna people moved on to new life's away
from Virginia. Germanna people were among the first in nearly all of the new
areas.