Many new roads developed in the first part of the eighteenth century. In Virginia, the King's Road turned toward the ocean at Fredericksburg and followed the coastal route. But as people were moving west (the Second Germanna Colony was at the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1725), there was a need for interior roads. The Fall Line Road started at Fredericksburg and followed the division between the Tidewater lands and the Piedmont. This took it in a generally southerly to southwestern direction about one hundred miles inland from the coast. It headed for the future Augusta, Georgia.
About 1740, as the Piedmont was more settled in Virginia and the Carolinas, a road to the west of the Fall Line Road was needed. This Upper Road gave better communications to the higher Piedmont. Towns that developed along its route include Salisbury and Charlotte.
These roads provided for north and south travel. East-west roads from the coast were slower to develop as the rivers were still used to transport goods. Some of the first inland roads were the Boston to Springfield road, which was a part of the King's Highway, and a road from Philadelphia to the West, first to Lancaster, then extending to Harrisburg and York.
The Philadelphia Road to Lancaster and York was diverted by the Blue Ridge Mountains to the south, and led to the Shenandoah Valley (Great Valley, or Valley of Virginia). At first, it was only an Indian trail, but it developed into the most heavily traveled road in the Americas. At Big Lick (Roanoke), it later divided into a western road and a southern road. By the mid-century, a road extended up the Hudson River to Albany, and a road was beginning to appear along the Mohawk River to the west of Albany. By then the road at Springfield, Massachusetts, had been extended west to the Hudson River Road.
Other east-west roads ran from Alexandria to Winchester (Pioneer's Road), to tie the Atlantic coast to the Great Valley at Winchester. A road ran from New Bern in North Carolina to the west, and preliminary roads ran west (usually northwest) from Wilmington, Georgetown, Charleston, and Savannah in the Carolinas and Georgia.
In 1750, the colonial road system was predominantly a north-south network paralleling the coast. A minimum of roads penetrated the interior. When I say "road," I refer to a dirt path through the forests with hardly any bridges. If two wagons were to meet, one of them had to find a wide spot in the road so it could pull over. There were several essential tools for the wagon traveler. Foremost was the spade and the axe so that emergency repairs to the road could be made. It was also convenient to have a chain so additional draft animals could be used to pull out a mired wagon. And the Moravian brothers used a chain to drag a log to serve as a brake going downhill.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.