Numerous traders, missionaries, soldiers, and settlers traveled the Great Wagon Road, referred to by some historians as the most important, if possibly most traveled, road in colonial America. The frontier pathway had first served as a Native American trading path and war trail, and it was commonly referred to as the “Warrior’s Path.” However, by the 1720s Pennsylvanian colonists started traveling the Great Wagon Road into the southern colonies, particularly North Carolina.
Most migrants were English, German, and Scots-Irish who left their homes in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to find more suitable farmland. Many had been unsuccessful finding inexpensive land in some northern areas. Soon colonists looked south and started to follow frontiersmen and land speculators down the Great Wagon Road into North Carolina. In addition, traders used the pathway to transport goods north and south along the frontier path. One important traveler was frontiersman Davy Crockett and another was Daniel Boone.
One group that employed the use of the Great Wagon Road were the Moravians. Once the Earl of Granville had allocated the Wachovia Tract to the Unity of Brethren, Moravian families traveled the road in droves in the 1750s. The Moravian Church established the important communities of Bethabara, Bethania, and Salem along the colonial pathway. In addition to these Moravian towns, the western cities of Salisbury and Charlotte “owe their creation and expansion to the Great Wagon Road” (Powell, p. 534).
Travel on the Great Wagon Road was arduous. With hopes of arriving at promising farmland in North Carolina, families from the northern colonies loaded all their possessions on covered wagons. The first travelers rode horseback, for the road was too narrow for wagons; eventually paths were widened to allow more traffic. Settlers also had to become self-sufficient on their sojourn and capable of removing impeding rocks, fallen timber, and miry mud. Yet, as more settlers used the Great Wagon Road the better the road became, and by the 1750s immigrants flooded into the western region of North Carolina.
General Charles Cornwallis recognized the vital importance of the Great Wagon Road during the Revolutionary War. Patriot and militia forces made use of the road as they battled the British, siphoning supplies up and down the pathway to support western Patriot troops. General Cornwallis, with the intention to defeat General Nathaniel Greene’s Continental Army, moved through the Great Wagon Road via Camden, South Carolina. Moving northward, General Cornwallis moved his forces through Charlotte and Salisbury, but General Greene proved too elusive for the British forces, defeating Cornwallis at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.
At its zenith of colonial travel, the Great Wagon Road was over 730 miles long and stretched from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Augusta, Georgia. However, with the arrival of the railroad, the old frontier path began to disappear in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, many paved roads overlaid stretches of the Great Wagon Road; a concrete example is Highway 311 from Walnut Cove in Stokes County to Madison in Rockingham County. Some sections of the Great Wagon Road, however, have been uncovered in forests where development has not yet covered it.