On a warm, sunny morning in November, I back my SUV out of the driveway of my home in Durham and drive out of town on a northwesterly tack. At Hillsborough I cross over the Eno River and I pass near the reconstructed Indian village of Occaneechi. I make my way to the western edge of town on Dimmocks Mill Road. About a half mile outside of town I cross the bridge back over the Eno River. In mid-bridge, I glance to my right, up river, and spot the railroad bridge that spans the water just beyond the site of an old ford across the river. I know its there because I’ve followed the old road bed down to the river and seen where the old road continues on the other side of the ford. Over the bridge, where Dimmocks Mill Road bends slightly to the right, I shift into a higher gear, and drive onto the Great Indian Trading Path. It’s been paved at this particular spot - or so I’m told. My plan for today is to follow the Path some ninety miles or so to the traditional lands of the Catawbas and to stop at the famous Trading Ford on the Yadkin River near Salisbury. Three hundred years ago, in February of 1701, John Lawson took about a week to cover this same route on foot. I hope to make it to the Ford in time for a late lunch.
The Great Indian Trading Path was actually a series of paths connecting the area of Virginia in the vicinity of present-day Petersburg with the Catawba Indian lands near present-day Charlotte. The Path was in use by the native population of traders and travelers long before the appearance of European explorers and traders. Early maps of this area show the Path crossing the Yadkin and then cutting across present day Davidson, Randolph, Guilford, Alamance and Orange Counties. Early European explorers such as John Lederer in 1670, Lawson in 1701, William Byrd in 1728, and Bishop Spangenburg in 1752, wrote at some length about the Trading Path. Bishop Spangenburg contrasted traveling on the Path to traveling over the land beyond the Path: “[O]n the Trading
Path . . . we could find at least one house a day where food could be bought; but from here we were to turn into the pathless forest.” A teenaged Daniel Boone probably walked the Path with his parents in 1750 when the Boone family moved down from Pennsylvania to make a new home in the Forks of the Yadkin. George Washington traveled on a part of the Path during his southern tour in 1791. The Path continued to be heavily used on into the 19th century, as horses, and later wagons, replaced foot travel as the common means of transportation. Some have claimed that the route of Interstate 85 from Petersburg to Charlotte, and in particular the crescent connecting the cities of Durham, Hillsborough, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Salisbury and Charlotte, was dictated by the location of these population centers which grew up where they did because of the proximity of the Trading Path.
The construction of Interstate 85, various other roads, farms, towns and other developments, have removed much of what might have remained of the Path itself. I am driving on the small country roads to the south of and parallel to I-85, with names like West 10 and Bowman Road. These roads may well have been built directly on top, or just to one side, of the Trading Path. I look into the woods on either side of the road for signs of any old roadbed but see nothing to make me stop and investigate. But I do stop at the old cemetery at the church at Hawfields on State Road 119. Churches were often built along the Trading Path and an old cemetery may well be a clue as to the location of the Path. A portion of the path is said to be found in the woods adjacent to the Hawfields cemetery. Sure enough, in the woods adjoining the cemetery, at the edge of a plowed field, I find a broad, deep depression in the land. It runs straight down a slight incline, about twenty feet across and about five feet below the level of the surrounding land. The forest has grown up in the road bed itself, obscuring the road. I believe I am standing in a remnant of the Trading Path itself.
From Hawfields, I continue driving west/southwest along country roads that approximate the route of the Trading Path. In the small town of Alamance I pass an historical marker which says: “Trading Path: Colonial trading route, dating from 17th century from Petersburg, Virginia to Catawba and Waxhaw Indians in Carolina passed nearby.” Although you would never find it on your own, the Trading Path does actually still pass nearby. Earlier in the fall I was fortunate to accompany Trading Path historian Tom Magnuson on a public hike he guided along a section
of the Path that still exists between the Bellemont-Alamance Road and Great Alamance Creek. On this hike a group of twenty of us followed the well-defined road bed, though forested over with secondary growth hardwoods, for almost a mile to a ford of the creek. Magnuson, head of the Trading Path Association, told us about his study of the Path and efforts to preserve its heritage. Magnuson notes that locating the remnants of the Path often depends on discovering the river fords that provided the only passage across Piedmont rivers before the advent of bridges.
“Find the fords and you’ll find the footpaths. Find the footpaths and you’ll find the villages,” says Magnuson.
From Alamance I drive State Road 62 to Julian in the edge of Guilford County. This road may well follow the old course of the Trading Path. There is evidence of old road beds in the woods crisscrossing the right of way of 62. At several points I pull over, park and tramp through the woods to look at possible sites. They seem to be likely candidates but there is no way for me to tell for sure. Driving through Julian, however, I find myself on a secondary road that, according to the road sign, is named “Colonial Trading Path.”” This evidence may not satisfy
an historian but it lets me feel that I am still on the right path. I follow Old Red Cross Road and New Salem Road into Randolph County to Randleman - but past Randleman I am guessing.
A Trading Path scholar from the 1950s, Douglas L. Rights, said that old maps show the Trading Path traveling though Randolph County’s Caraway Mountains and that this little mountain range actually appears much as John Lawson described in his writing about the Path in this section of North Carolina. Rights also notes that the Keyauwee village where Lawson spent the night in 1701 could well have had its name transformed into the name Caraway over the centuries. I drive to Flint Hill and down Flint Hill Road through the Caraway Mountains. I find myself in agreement with Lawson and Rights - these are impressive mountains even if located in the Piedmont.
I turn onto Highway 64 and immediately cross Caraway Creek with Shepherd Mountain and Ridges Mountain in the distance. Archaeologists have located the site of an Indian village in the bottom lands of Caraway Creek that they believe is Lawson’s Keyauwee Town.
I cross the Uwharrie River on Highway 64 knowing that somewhere nearby is the Trading Path’s ford across the Uwharrie - probably identifiable even today. I don’t have the time to explore and, of course, private property rights must always be respected. I soon turn off Highway 64 following any roads that head due west. I may still be in the vicinity of the Trading Path but the roads I am following are now more questionable. High Rock Lake now covers the section of the Yadkin before me and I must turn northwest, away from the Path, in order to find a crossing of the Yadkin. I join Interstate 85 and drive 65 miles per hour for a short stretch before I exit on
Highway 70 just before crossing the Yadkin. On the far side of the river is another historical marker. This one proclaims the “Trading Ford: On famous trading path used by Indians and early settlers. There Greene retreating from Cornwallis crossed on Feb. 2, 1781. East 1 mi.”
In early February of 1701, John Lawson stayed several days at Sapona, the Indian town at the Trading Ford. Calling the Yadkin the Sapona River, he described the locale as follows:
[W]e reach’d the fertile and pleasant Banks of Sapona River, whereon stands the Indian Town and Fort. Nor could all Europe afford a pleasanter Stream, were it inhabited by Christians, and cultivated by ingenious Hands. These Indians live in a clear Field, about a Mile square, which they would have sold me; because I talked sometimes of coming into those Parts to live. This most pleasant River may be something broader than the Thames at Kingston, keeping a continual pleasant warbling Noise, with its reverberating on the bright Marble Rocks. It is beautified with a numerous Train of Swans, and other sorts of Water-Fowl, not common, though extraordinary pleasing to the Eye. The forward Spring welcom’d us with her innumerable Train of small Choristers, which inhabit those fair Banks; the Hills redoubling, and adding Sweetness to their melodious Tunes by their shrill Echoes. One side of the River is hemm’d in with mountainy Ground, the other side proving as rich a Soil to the Eye of a knowing Person with us, as any this Western World can afford.
To reach the Ford, I drive into the edge of Salisbury and turn left or east onto Long Ferry Road. On Dukeville Road I turn left again and drive through a residential area toward the river. At the end of this road is the Yadkin and the Trading Ford. Douglas Rights tells us that although the backwater of High Rock Lake now covers the Ford, the islands in the Yadkin River that made up a part of the Ford are still visible in dry seasons. It has been dry this fall so I am optimistic. But at the end of the road is the large and imposing Dukeville power station with visitor parking and a chain link fence between the parking lot and the river. I park, find a gate in the fence and a short trail down to the Yadkin. I can see the islands across the still water in the mid-afternoon sunlight. I decide that I am standing close by the famous Trading Ford near where Lawson must have lingered three hundred years ago. I wish I could see the Path’s old roadbed angling down to a free flowing and reverberating Yadkin, but I’m content with what I have seen on my day’s travel. I still marvel at the survival of the fragments of the Path’s old roadbed that I did find and I hope there are many more remnants for Tom Magnuson to locate and preserve. And some day soon, maybe I can help search for the Trading Path’s fords over the Uwharrie, Rocky, Alamance and Haw Rivers. But that day will have to wait at least a bit. I’m due back in Durham so I back out of the Dukeville power plant parking lot and head for the on-ramp to the latest version of the Great Indian Trading Path. Soon I’m traveling again at 65 miles per hour heading north on I-85. I’ll make Occaneechi Town, present day Hillsborough, before dark.
A remnant of the Great Indian Trading Path can be seen along a section of the Poet’s Walk, at Ayr Mount Historic Site, 376 St. Mary’s Road, Hillsborough, North Carolina.
For further information about the Trading Path and related matters:
- The Trading Path Association website: www.tradingpath.org.
- John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (UNC Press 1967) (originally published 1709)
- Douglas L. Rights, The American Indian in North Carolina (John F. Blair, Publisher, 1957)
- Douglas L. Rights, “The Trading Path to the Indians,” North Carolina Historical Review, Volume VIII, page 403 (1931)
- Stephen Davis and Trawick Ward, Time Before History: The Archaeology of North Carolina (UNC Press, 1999).
- Stephen Davis, Patrick Livingood, Trawick Ward & Vincas Steponaitis, Excavating Occaneechi Town: Archaeology of an Eighteenth Century Indian Village in North Carolina, a CD-Rom (UNC Press, 1998)
- Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation Web Page (with information about reenactments at the reconstructed Occaneechi Village in Hillsborough): www.occaneechi-saponi.org
- N. C. Archaeology Home Page: www.arch.dcr.state.nc.us