The Great Wagon Road

In the early 1700s most of the cities, towns, plantations and farms were

located in the Atlantic Coastal Plain region of what is today the United States. Few colonists had settled in the frontier or the backcountry.

The frontier or backcountry was the land between the Coastal Plain and the Appalachian Mountains.

It was "in back" of the settled land.

Travel in the backcountry was difficult. There were few roads and there

were waterfalls along the fall line. The fall line is the place where the land drops sharply. Rivers along the fall line form waterfalls. Settlers who went into the backcountry had to carry their boats and supplies around the waterfalls.

By the middle of the 1700s, many German and Scotch-Irish settlers began moving south from Pennsylvania into the backcountry of western Virginia and the Carolinas. The settlers followed an old Indian path that became wider with more use by the settlers. It became known as the Great Wagon Road.

The Great Wagon Road

began in Pennsylvania. It passed through the

Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and along the eastern side of the Blue Ridge
Mountains.

Appalachian Mountains - The White Mountains of New Hampshire, the

Green Mountains of Vermont, the Catskill Mountains of New York, the
Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, and the Blue Ridge, Clinch,
Shenandoah, and Great Smoky Mountain in the South are all part of the
Appalachian Mountain Range.

roads - The pioneers who went into Vermont could not take horses. They

had to travel on foot. The mountains were so thick with trees that grass didn't grow. There was nothing for the horses to eat. Before settlers could move west, they had to make a special trip to cut down trees for a road, plant seeds, and wait for a grasses to grow before they could bring their animals.

Credits

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