The Great Wagon Road
Explore the passageway that helped settle the South
This feature written by
appears in our newly published Summer 2024 issue. At the end this post, we’ve included additional information about where you can find remnants of the Great Wagon Road.From the day I heard about it, I longed to see it. I wanted to walk my ancestor’s path—the fabled Great Wagon Road. I lived close by its southernmost terminus. All I had to do was find it.
A branch of the Great Wagon Road ended in Edgefield, South Carolina, its southern terminus, but where? In my backroad explorations of Edgefield County I had seen several old roadbeds with high shoulders. It looked as though the road had sunken from the weight of all the years.
A local down there told me she could show me a vestige of the old road. She never did. Time passed, and whenever I spotted an old roadbed in Edgefield County, I wondered, “Is that it?”
Ever elusive, I never found one inch of its remnant. In time, my desire to see a vestige of the Great Wagon Road petered out, as the old folks would say. It cooled on a back burner as others say. And when it was completely cold and out of my mind, it shocked me to stand beside its bridge support and walk its bed. It came about as a startling thing, but first there’s the road that helped settle the Southland.
In the Beginning
“Road” did not fit. Think footpath, think trails permitting single file passage. Indian trails, among them the Iroquois’s Warrior’s Path, developed into the Great Wagon Road, known also as the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road. That path turned trail turned road provided early settlers passage to the South. Over it passed deerskins to trade for salt, firearms, iron, and items frontiersmen needed. Drovers herded hogs and cattle down the road to markets in Virginia and South Carolina.