Whether Daniel Boone or Thomas Walker actually “discovered” the site that was described as “Wolf Hills” in 1760, in less than a decade a settlement in that remote corner of Southwest Virgina grew in to the community named Abingdon. Boone is also with the development of a portion of The Wilderness Road which made it possible for settlers to migrate and settle not only in Southwest Virginia, but also in the new territories of Kentucky and Tennessee.
“As settlers moved inland, they usually followed the paths over which Indians had hunted and traded. 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 Warrior’s Path was long used by Iroquois tribesmen of the north to 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 use of The Warriors Path.” (Rouse, Prologue, p.ix)
“Hard on the heels of these agreements came the push for a road leading through Southwest Virginia and on to Kentucky and Tennessee. Daniel Boone and his crew were hired to carve such a road through the Cumberland Gap… . They started at a crossing of the Great Wagon Road at Fort Chiswell, established in 1760 to protect settlers… . By 1775 Boone’s company had chopped a rough path through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky.”
“The east-west Wilderness Road, a spur of the Great Wagon Road, passed through Southwest Virginia, providing a major migration route into the area. Tracts were sold to German, Scots-Irish, and British settlers. The towns of Christiansburg, Wytheville, and Abingdon grew up as major stops along the way.” (Anne Carter Lee, SAH Archipedia)
Settlers poured through what became the gateway to settlement in the West, looking for land and opportunity. It would be difficult to overstate the lack of security, the privation and uncertainty that attended this migration. In 1755 the Draper’s Meadow Massacre “claimed four lives, including Col. James Patton.” Black’s Fort, was erected around 1776 near what would become Abingdon by early settlers to provide protection against attacks from Indian tribes, principally the Cherokee, following the Battle of Long Island Flats in East Tennessee.
“By 1790, nearly 70,000 people [including Thomas Lincoln and his wife Nancy, parents of Abraham Lincoln] had climbed on foot or on horseback over that steep path.” (Rouse, p. 116-117)
The Slave Trail of Tears
A difficult and arduous life awaited prospective settlers, but this was a way of life they had chosen. Within a quarter of a century another kind of migration was taking place, following the Great Wagon Road into the Deep South. Far from being a matter of choice, these migrants were captives, close to a million enslaved people being transported from the Upper South to the Deep South, a million people, the largest migration forced or otherwise in North America prior to 1900, from “the tobacco south to the cotton south.” Hundreds of men, women, and children were rounded up and forced to walk, if possible, to slave markets in Natchez, MS. and New Orleans. (Ball, “Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears”)
George W. Featherstonhaugh, who we will encounter again later in this narrative, observed one such “coffle” under the supervision of rhe reprehensible John Armfield, as he traveled through Southwest Virginia in his capacity as a professional geologist (or amateur sleuth; Doug Ogle suggests he was actually spying on the Cherokee Indians). ” ‘A singular spectacle,’ Featherstonhaugh wrote. He counted nine wagons and carriages and some 200 men ‘manacles and chained to each other,’ lining up in double file. ‘I had never seen so revolting a sight before,’ he said.”
- The Great Wagon Road: from Philadelphia to the South, Parke Rouse. New York, McGraw-Hill (1973)
- “The Name of Abingdon,” James Hagy, HSWCVa, Series II, No. 53 (2016)
- “The French and Indian War and Its Aftermath,” sah-archipedia.org/essays/VA-02. Source: Virginia: Valley, Piedmont, Southside & Southwest, by Anne Carter Lee. SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville, UVaP, 2012
- “Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears. America’s forgotten migration–the journey of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South,” Edward Ball. Smithsonian Magazine, “Secrets of American History,” Nov. 2015 https://www.smithonianmag.com/history/slavery-trail-of-tears-180956968
- Slavery Trail of Tears map, created by Laszlo Kubinyi. Source: Digital Scholarship Lab, Univ. of Richmond (Edward Ball, Guilbert Gates, Dacus Thompson, Sonya Maynara listed as collaborators)