The subtitle is “A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey on the Great Wagon Road”. So this is part travelogue, part history lesson. Personally, I’m more interested in the history, but Dodson does make the journey itself interesting. While he has obviously planned ahead, and set up meetings with various experts along the way, he also serendipitously encounters a number of other people on his journey, who generally give him good advice and suggestions. To his credit, he is not only open to such encounters, but usually profits from the interactions as well. I was surprised by how many museums, parks, and memorial plaques he explored along the way.
The Great Wagon Road was the path that tens of thousands of people, mostly recent immigrants, took from Pennsylvania into what was then the frontier in the 1700’s. The road started in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, went south west through Virginia to the Carolinas. It broke into several different paths, depending on the ultimate destination of the people traveling down it. Not only was this road important before and during the Revolutionary era, but there are a number of sites along it whose names would be familiar to Civil Wars buffs. While you may not be able to travel the exact route today, many current highways and state roads owe their existence to the Great Wagon Road.
Dodson weaves the history of the road into his travels and his encounters with others who still live and work along the path of the road. I would have preferred more history, and Dodson even says the book is more of a portrait of the road. He does have an extensive bibliography at the end of the book. If you have family that lived or traveled along this route, you might want to travel it yourself. Even if you can’t physically travel there, as Dodson does, you can research different towns and counties along the way. The challenge is that not everyone agrees on where the original Road went, especially along the stretches further to the south.
If this was your family, how would you research them? As you track your family back, if they are in Georgia, the Carolinas, or Virginia, or even Pennsylvania, you might discover they got there down the Great Wagon Road. While Pennsylvania seems, at least to me, an odd place to start a journey to the south, remember that Philadelphia was a major port, and many immigrants disembarked there. If you know of a specific location where your people lived, or at least paused, try to focus on that first, and then work your way back up or down the road. There are a lot of families that still live in the area, whose ancestors were early pioneers, and got there by traveling down the road.