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Great Philadelphia Wagon RoadThis was in Mom's records and it was a brief overview of a road I never knew existed, so I decided to put up this portion. Great Philadelphia Wagon Road From Gloria Forrester Prologue For nearly 150 years after North America was settled, it remained a green wilderness. Only a few trails cut through the vast forests which spread from New Hampshire to Georgia, for the Appalachian Mountains thrust a stern barrier between the Atlantic plateau and the unknown interior of the continent. As settlers moved inland, they usually followed the paths over which Indians had hunted and traded. Many of these trails had been worn down in earlier ages by buffalo, which once had roamed the eastern uplands in search of grazing lands. These paths usually followed valleys and river shores. Few trails in early America were more important than the Indian route which extended east of the Appalachians from Pennsylvania to Georgia. This ancient Warriors' Path was long used by Iroquois tribesmen of the north to come south and trade or make war in Virginia and the Carolinas. Then, by a series of treaties with the powerful Five Nations of the Iroquois, the English acquired the use of the Warriors' Path. After 1744, they took over the land itself. The growth of the route after 1744 into the principal highway of the colonial back country is an important chapter in the development of a nation. Over this Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, vast numbers of English, Scotch-Irish, and Germanic settlers entered this continent and claimed lands. The endless procession of new settlers, Indian traders, soldiers, and missionaries swelled as the Revolution approached. "In the last sixteen years of the colonial era," wrote the historian Carl Bridenbaugh, "southbound traffic along the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road was numbered in tens of thousands; it was the most heavily traveled road in all America and must have had more vehicles jolting along its rough and tortuous way than all other main roads put together." As the principal highway of the eighteenth-century frontier southward from Pennsylvania, the Wagon Road also played an important part in the French and Indian wars and in the American Revolution. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett traveled it as explorers. George Washington knew it as an Indian fighter....
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