If there’s any truth to the ancient idea that a good journey begins with a single step—even one delayed many decades—perhaps it’s only fitting that a journey I’ve dreamed of making since I was knee high to a historic road marker begins with an excellent colonial beer and a surprise wedding toast.
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Four fine colonial-era-inspired beers sit at my fingertips on a late-August evening, a sampling board of brews that includes Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Ale, Thomas Jefferson Tavern Ale, George Washington’s full-bodied porter, plus a spruce beer called Poor Richard’s, made from Ben Franklin’s own house recipe. While I await delivery of my period-correct supper, savoring the thought of the long and unknown road ahead, I nibble delicious cinnamon-and-pecan biscuits from Tom Jefferson’s own Monticello recipe book and polish off all four mini-glasses of beer, promptly ordering a full pint of Franklin’s best.
Three hours after my arrival in Philadelphia, I am a party of one but hardly alone in the noisy, candlelit second-floor dining room of historic City Tavern, a place that claims to be the birthplace of American cuisine.
A few feet from where I sit, awaiting delivery of their own suppers, is a table with three young couples who seem to be having a lively celebration of friendship and matrimony, offering rowdy toasts to a blushing couple while a ginger-haired woman struggles to keep their trivia game on the rails.
“Where and what year,” she calls out over her boisterous tablemates, reading from a game card, “were the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first constitution, created?”
My ear rises to the question like a trout to a mayfly. Nobody but me, however, is paying the slightest attention.
I am finally yielding to my inner eighth grader, hoping to find the flame tenders of a forgotten American highway before time runs out.
“Earth to people,” the frustrated moderator declares, “are we playing pub trivia or not?”
The big fellow seated next to her at the table, his Penn State ball cap reversed, makes a comment that produces a burst of laughter and touched pewter mugs. She glances my way and shrugs.
“Sorry for the noise,” she apologizes. “We’re celebrating a surprise engagement. You probably can’t even enjoy your book because of us.” She nods toward the paperback resting at my elbow.
I assure her that reading by eighteenth-century candlelight isn’t my thing.
“Tony and Elise—they’re the two cuties at the end of the table— surprised us this afternoon with news of their engagement.”
She adds that they are the last of her college crowd to marry, having met on trivia night at a bar at Penn State thirteen years ago. “The boys played club lacrosse together. We do this every few years in the cities where we now live.” They’ve convened from Nashville to San Francisco. This year it’s Philadelphia, so American history and the birth of democracy is their chosen topic. My new friend sips her white wine and gently slurs her words. “Every time we get together, I’m afraid, we seem less interested in trivia and more interested in just being silly tourists.”
For an instant, I’m tempted to make a plea for more silliness in a world that seems to be fracturing by the minute. But there’s a response more relevant. “I believe it’s York, Pennsylvania. November 1777. By the way, the Articles of Confederation contained the first use of the phrase ‘United States of America.’”
She checks her game card and her freckled face lights up, evidently pleased that the lonely old dude in the dark corner of the room knows the answer off the top of his graying head.
“Correct! How’d you know that?”
“Because it happened on the Great Wagon Road.”
Her eyebrows arch. She scooches her chair closer to mine and tilts forward, so we don’t have to shout as her mates launch into some sort of fraternal fight song. “So, what is the Great Wagon Road?”
She is far from alone in asking. The Great Wagon Road is probably the least known historic road in America. So, I give her the brief elevator speech I’ve prepared for just such moments: “It’s the eighteenth century’s backcountry road that tens of thousands of European settlers traveled to find their place in the wilderness of North America, our original immigrant highway.”
She gulps her chardonnay, surprised and grinning. “Seriously? That is so cool!” A firm hand comes at me in the candlelight. Gina Sparrow, I learn, hails from Grand Rapids.
“As it happens,” I add, taking her hand, “I’m setting off tomorrow to travel it.”
She wonders how long the trip will take. I admit that I have no clue. The road stretches more than eight hundred miles, beginning on Market Street in Philadelphia and ending in Augusta, Georgia, crossing six contiguous states and some of the most historic and hallowed landscapes, battlefields, and burying grounds of eastern America, not to mention village squares where democracy first took root and bloomed. During its peak years of use in the 1750s, I explain, a determined traveler on horseback could sometimes make it from Philly to Virginia or the Carolinas in a matter of weeks, though most traveled by wagon and in groups for safety and often took two or three months to arrive (provided decent weather and no unexpected problems like flooded river fords, wrong turns, sudden illness, or hostile encounters with man or beast). Many travelers stopped along the way to rest and resupply for lengthy periods of time, sometimes taking years to reach their final destinations. My hope is to split the difference and complete the road in just three or four weeks, I tell Gina, though in truth I have no idea if this time frame is reasonable or a romantic pipe dream.
“In that case,” she says with a laugh, “I sure hope you have a good horse and wagon!”
“As a matter of fact, I do. My wagon has three hundred and fifty horses.” She gives a charming goose honk when I explain that I’m traveling in a vintage 1994 Buick Roadmaster Estate station wagon with a 350-horsepower V-8 engine, acquired ten years ago from an elderly retiree in North Carolina with this very trip in mind. The Pearl, as I call it, is like many things in America: a symbol of a bygone era, one of the last true iconic station wagons that rolled off the line before General Motors switched to building SUVs.
“Is that the one with, like, the seat facing backward and fake wood paneling and stuff?” she asks.
“That’s it.”
“Oh, wow! We had one like that when I was little. My younger brother and I fought to the death over that third seat every time we went on a vacation.”
Just then a pair of waiters in colonial livery and brass-buckled shoes swoops down on us holding six suppers on large trays for Gina’s table. Quickly but carefully, they place steaming dishes in front of each member of her party.
“Well,” she says, “I guess I should get back to my friends. Sorry to interrupt your reading. What’s your book about, if I may ask? The Great Wagon Road, I suppose?”
“Indirectly.” I show her Susan Cheever’s addictively readable Drinking in America: Our Secret History, one of several histories, biographies, and works of favorite poets I’ve packed for the road.
Gina tilts forward and asks if I can give her a “juicy tidbit” about drinking for the group’s next trivia night, since drinking now seems to be their favorite group activity.
I mention that the Pilgrims were probably legally drunk when they landed at Plymouth Harbor in 1620, missing their target area of Virginia by hundreds of miles, and only put to Cape Cod Bay’s cold November shore because they’d run out of beer.
She looks surprised. “I thought the Pilgrims were religious!” “Very much so. But theirs is a story of God and good beer.”
Ignoring her supper, she asks to hear more. I briefly mention that fermentation made beer safe to drink from the Middle Ages to the Age of Enlightenment, even suitable for small children. As a result, according to Cheever, every man, woman, child, and ship’s mate on the Mayflower was provisioned a full gallon of beer per day for their grueling ocean crossing.
The big fellow next to Gina suddenly leans our way, tuning in as I mention that after three terrible months at sea, one of the first things the pious Pilgrims did was construct a brewhouse for making fresh beer, followed by a tavern and a house of worship, a pattern of settlement that established itself across New England and the rest of colonial America.
“That’s why Ben Franklin said beer is proof that God loves us, hon,” he contributes with a mouth full of something.
“This is Jerry. My husband,” Gina says, stopping just shy of a wifely eye roll. “We got married in April. I don’t think Ben Franklin really said that, Jerry. You just saw it on a T-shirt at Penn’s Landing.”
Jerry grins. “True, babe. But everyone knows Ben Franklin really said it.” “He’s going down the Great Wagon Road,” Gina declares matter-of-factly, nodding at me. “All the way to Georgia.”
Jerry, chewing slowly, considers this news. “Never heard of it.”
Gina shakes her head. “It’s only the most historic road in America, Jerry.” He nods. “Yeah? So why you doin’ that?”
The simplest explanation is that I am finally yielding to my inner eighth grader, hoping to find the flame tenders of a forgotten American highway before time runs out, though I don’t feel the slightest inclination to share this with Jerry, or anyone else for that matter. Six months ago, two weeks before my planned starting date, a mysterious pain in my side sent me to see Doc Morris for a checkup that led to a surprise double surgery to remove both a dodgy gallbladder and a carrot-sized tumor from my lower intestines, the first serious medical crisis of my life. Time waits for no man. All that matters now, following several months of slow recovery, is that I’ve been cleared by Doc Morris to hit the road, and not a minute too soon.
Fortunately, Jerry’s plucky bride rises to my rescue.
“Because, Jerry, his people came down the Wagon Road and family history is totally freaking hot right now. Even you should know that much.”
In truth, Jerry is far more interested in his platter of ale-braised sausage, garlic mash, and seasoned German sauerkraut. And who can blame him? His supper smells divine. I ordered the same dish, as it happens, with a side of chestnut fritters and corn-fried oysters from Martha Washington’s personal cookbook.
Gina gives me a second firm handshake. “Well, golly, it’s been so much fun to talk with you. I hope you find lots of cool things on the Great Wagon Road.”
I thank her for the kind words and wish she and her merry band of trivial pursuers a long and prosperous journey of their own.
*
My choice of City Tavern as a starting point is no accident.
Not only does it sit just two short blocks from the original Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, but it opened for business in January 1773, just past the peak years of the Wagon Road’s use. At the time, Philadelphia was the second-largest and most prosperous town in North America, the third largest in all of the British empire, and the center of colonial art, culture, and commerce, boasting twenty thousand citizens, brick streets illuminated by whale oil lamps, a college, three libraries, and the first hospital in the New World. Twenty ships a week arrived at its busy ports on the Delaware River, releasing hundreds of European immigrants into Philly’s bustling streets, where wagons teeming with produce cultivated by German immigrant farmers south and west of the city arrived daily through the summer months.
Funded by fifty-three prominent Philadelphians who paid twenty-five pounds sterling to be chartered members and investors, among them a future governor of Pennsylvania and several future signers of the Declaration of Independence, the tavern was considered the finest dining experience in the British colonies. Its grand opening was accompanied by glowing notice by the ambitious publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette, a sociable polymath named Benjamin Franklin, who noted that the five-story brick building featured the best equipped kitchen in the city, a well-stocked bar, two coffee rooms ideal for private conversations, three dining rooms, and the second- largest ballroom in the New World. There were also five lodging rooms and a servants’ quarters for hire.
It became a weekly gathering spot for foreign dignitaries and members of the First and Second Continental Congresses. Regulars included Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, Dr. Benjamin Rush, George Washington, and Patrick Henry. It was here, as talk of revolution crackled in the steamy summer air of 1776, that George Washington supposedly met John Adams for the first time, following Adams’s wearying ride down the King’s Highway from Boston. Adams was particularly impressed with City Tavern’s quality of fare. (“A fresh welcome,” he committed to his diary afterward. “As elegant as was ever laid upon a table.”) And even after the British army took possession of the city in 1777 and the Congress fled town, it remained the place to be for Philadelphia’s elites. Its popularity lasted well into the early nineteenth century, declining only after the surrounding neighborhood fell into disrepute, causing the once proud establishment to eventually shut its doors. The building was used as a mercantile exchange until fire gutted the structure in 1834, only to sit as a vacant hulk until the building was razed twenty years later.
Its seeds of rebirth were sown in 1948 when the Truman administration authorized the US Department of the Interior to create an Independence National Historical Park, which would include several original structures in the oldest part of the city. Following twenty-five years of painstaking research and urban archaeology, City Tavern was reproduced brick-for-brick in time to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, becoming a popular tourist stop for almost two decades until it closed doors for a second time in 1992.
Two years later, it was resurrected again by an enterprising German immigrant named Walter Staib, an award-winning chef who hailed from a family of celebrated cooks and bakers. With an exclusive contract to serve as the sole proprietor of historic City Tavern, Staib researched and developed a revolutionary culinary concept based on the authenticity of colonial-era cooking. An award-winning cooking show on PBS called A Taste of History soon followed.
“You had two irresistible subjects—cooking and American history,” Chef Staib told me over the phone. “No nation on earth can match the cultural diversity of America, a fact beautifully reflected in the astonishing diversity of our early American cuisine. We talk about farm to table today—ha! Everything then was fresh, local, and far more creative than people of today can even imagine. The more I traveled and researched, the more I became convinced that we had the opportunity to tell the story of America through colonial cooking, a melting pot of blended traditions and tastes from everywhere beyond our shores. That’s what made City Tavern the first great restaurant in America.”
Trooping downstairs for a nightcap in the tavern bar, I find myself thinking about Staib’s mission, and how it mirrors my own. I, too, had come to this odyssey through researching frontier American life. The source that rekindled my long-dormant fantasy of finding and traveling the Wagon Road of my ancestors had been a folksy, dog-eared, long-out-of-print gem from 1973 called The Great Wagon Road: From Philadelphia to the South by the late Williamsburg historian Parke Rouse, Jr. that I’d found in a used bookshop in Roanoke in 2006 while serving as writer-in-residence at Hollins University. Packed with information and a schematic drawing that showed the approximate path of the road from Philadelphia to Georgia, it quickly became my inspiration, and my bible.
*
Owing to poor or nonexistent early record-keeping, historians have never fully settled on the precise numbers of America’s first mass migration movement. But most generally agree that well north of one hundred thousand immigrant travelers made the arduous trek down the Great Wagon Road between the close of the seventeenth century and the start of the American Revolution—hearty dreamers who arrived from all corners of western Europe in successive waves large and small: German Lutherans, English Quakers, Saxony Moravians, and Swiss Mennonites; Scots-Irish Presbyterians and Wesley Methodists; French Huguenots and Dutch adventurers, foundational generations of the world’s first immigrant nation.
Not unlike refugees from our own time, the road’s original travelers were life-hardened souls willing to brave a perilous ocean crossing to escape a continent ravaged by a thirty-year religious war. Fleeing their fractured native lands, some arrived hoping to build a New Jerusalem in the southern American wilderness. Others came in search of a mythic land of milk and honey they’d heard awaited in the untamed vastness of the North American backcountry.
Many sold everything they owned to fund the journey, or traveled as indentured servants committed to work their way into a New World life, most arriving on the busy docks of Philadelphia or nearby Delaware shore fueled by blind faith and a willingness to endure whatever hardships of disease or danger they might encounter for the chance of a fresh start. Others left behind hard-earned lives as prosperous farmers and skilled artisans, answering an ageless call to seek greater prosperity in a place they’d only heard wondrous tales about.
Undeterred by uncertainty, they claimed land and carved out farms, planted crops, formed communities and militias, built taverns and raised churches, created log schools and trading posts that grew into crossroad settlements as southbound traffic increased across the turbulent decades of the eighteenth century. Many put down roots while others moved on, restless to find even more land, fewer people, more freedom, and better soil. In time, a dozen towns populated the great fertile valleys that lay between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains, an Appalachian wilderness stretching from Western Pennsylvania to Georgia, seeding a fledgling nation’s first tender shoots of commerce, politics, religion, education, and industry—providing both a gateway and a staging ground for an even broader opening of the lands beyond the Appalachian range, into the Golden West itself.
A longtime friend named Tom Sears, an expert on Southern colonial architecture and furniture, once described the Great Wagon Road to me as “America’s first technology highway and Fertile Crescent of American democracy—essentially the road that made America.” Everything from the Conestoga wagon to early computer processing was developed along it. As the nation grew, villages and towns and cities of the Wagon Road became, in effect, the first incubators of America’s early industrial age.
In my imagination, I almost heard the creaking hinges and grinding complaints of farm wagons inching across the shallow fording spot.
By my rough count, more than a dozen colleges and universities had their beginnings on or near the Great Wagon Road, simple affairs typically begun by Presbyterian preachers who maintained that Christian education was next to godliness. Equally important to the evolving culture, technology, and commerce was the flood of German artisans and farmers who brought refined farming techniques and Old World craftsmanship to the beating heart of a wild frontier, resulting in revolutionary agriculture and some of the world’s finest furniture, decorative arts, and metal craftsmanship. Along with their advanced farming skills, Wagon Road Germans also imported their love of communal sacred hymns and the music of Haydn and Bach, while their feisty independent Scots-Irish counterparts brought Old World balladry and narrative folk song, dance, and poetry, and a God-given skill for fighting and making excellent corn whiskey.
In time, their soulful fiddle music took permanent root in the shaded hollers of Appalachia, blending with African slave songs to give birth to the original American musical forms of Southern gospel, bluegrass, and country music; Johnny Cash’s and June Carter’s ancestors were travelers of the Great Wagon Road. So were the forebears of Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass, and Nashville songbirds Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and a thousand other sons and daughters of today’s country music scene.
And they were not the only ones: Joe Wilson, America’s leading roots-music historian, observed that “a quarter of Americans today have an ancestor who traveled the Great Wagon Road. You can still see traces of it, a track across high ridges, a trough through piney woods, guarded by wild turkey and chipmunks, a road that was in use for a century—the most important road in American history.”
Given the road’s strategic importance on the edge of the contested western frontier, it’s no mystery why three major North American wars happened on or near it, including the early days of the bloody French and Indian conflict and pivotal Revolutionary War encounters at Camden, Kings Mountain, Cowpens, and Guilford Courthouse.
Eighty years on, the Confederacy’s doomed Valley of Virginia campaigns followed the road north to the pivotal bloodbaths of Antietam and Gettysburg, bold strikes meant to force an end to the war in the South’s favor; instead, they became killing fields that turned the tide in favor of the Union. In November 1863, Abraham Lincoln—whose grandfather settled on a homestead just off the Wagon Road north of Harrisonburg, Virginia—gave his Gettysburg Address from the Soldiers’ National Cemetery overlooking an early branch of the Great Wagon Road.
Half a dozen of America’s presidents, in fact, grew up on or near it, including a young George Washington, who began his military service as an Indian scout along the road and later lost—then won—his first elected office in the settlement of Winchester. Thomas Jefferson, whose daddy, Peter Jefferson, helped William & Mary mathematician Joshua Fry survey and officially name the “Great Waggon Road” on a map from Philadelphia to North Carolina’s Yadkin River in 1753, traveled the road extensively throughout his life, and even owned the spectacular Natural Bridge that the Great Wagon Road traversed.
Fellow Virginian James Madison, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, and Woodrow Wilson each had birthright connections, while Zachary Taylor and Andrew Johnson traveled it extensively throughout their early careers in service to war and government.
Equally important to the evolving narrative of a young nation were legendary folk figures like Daniel Boone, who at age sixteen followed the Wagon Road with his family to North Carolina’s fertile Yadkin Valley, and later took the road back to Big Lick (today’s Roanoke) before blazing the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap to the unsettled territories of Kentucky and Ohio; likewise, icons Meriwether Lewis, David Crockett, Molly Pitcher, Susanna Wright, General Daniel Morgan, General Nathanael Greene, Francis Marion, Sam Houston, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, “Light-Horse” Harry Lee, and his son Robert E. Lee were part of the romantic saga of the Great Wagon Road.
*
From the outset of my adventure, the leading question—echoing the one I put to my father by the Haw River in 1966—was whether the original path of the road of my ancestors could somehow be determined after the Great Road effectively accomplished its own vanishing act with the coming of the railroads and ever-expanding towns that created new and improved highways for a nation on the move.
During the early days of my physical recovery, this question was answered by a pair of sources from my own backyard.
The first was an old friend and distinguished Southern historian and expert on North Carolina’s historic backcountry roads named Charles Rodenbough, who invited me to lunch after hearing from a mutual friend about my planned Wagon Road odyssey.
It was Charlie who pointed out that interest in the Great Wagon Road had grown dramatically in recent years thanks to the work of a small army of colonial historians, state archaeologists, Southern genealogists, state and local historical associations, preservationists, museum curators, and even everyday history nuts like me. “As a result,” said he, “the original path of the road has been pretty well determined and you can follow it. It’s probably the most important—but least known—old road in America, one that shaped the values and culture of this country. There are people along the road today who are keeping its stories alive. How exciting that you plan to find them and listen to those stories.”
But he had one caveat: “Keep in mind that the Great Wagon Road didn’t travel in a straight line. It also had several branches, which might be confusing. Don’t be surprised if you get lost just like many of the road’s original travelers undoubtedly did. That will probably be half the fun.”
It was Charlie who also showed me a copy of the 1753 Frye-Jefferson map that delineated the original path of the road to upper North Carolina, and explained that if I started my “pilgrimage”—his word—by venturing up Sandy Ridge Road just west of Greensboro to the Virginia line, I would eventually come to a small meadow by the South Mayo River where, as he put it, “you will see the spot where your Scottish ancestors crossed into North Carolina.”
A few days later, as winter slipped into spring, on a cold afternoon threatening snow, my dog Mulligan and I drove up Sandy Ridge Road to the Virginia state line and found the spot Charlie had described. Ice glittered in the South Mayo River’s shallows. Wading ahead of me across a slippery shelf of submerged rock, Mully, my aging flat-haired retriever, dropped her nose and charged up the far bank, while I found myself staring at a wide gully ascending the bare winter woods, clearly the sunken remains of a forgotten road. A shiver ran through me that had little to do with the cold of the afternoon. In my imagination, I almost heard the creaking hinges and grinding complaints of farm wagons inching across the shallow fording spot.
I followed Mully a quarter of a mile up that darkened leaf-strewn gully before turning back in a sudden downpour of sleet, feeling the road’s gravitational pull like never before.
Several weeks later, my colleague on the staff of O. Henry magazine, senior editor Nancy Oakley, walked into my office and placed an item from the magazine’s events calendar on my desk. “Talk about the hand of providence,” she said with a grin.
It was an announcement from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) in Old Salem of an upcoming one-day seminar on the furniture and decorative arts of the Great Wagon Road.
Nancy promptly put me in touch with her friend Robert Leath, MESDA’s director of collections, who graciously invited me to sit in on the seminar with a half dozen experts on Southern furniture and decorative arts, several of whom proved to be incomparable sources up and down the Wagon Road, including Alexandra Kirtley of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who gave me her card and invited me to come see her when I arrived in Philly to start my journey down the road.
Without a doubt, these generous folks, who appeared serendipitously during my summer-long recovery, fired up my imagination and set me on the road of my ancestors with high expectations.
__________________________________
From The Road That Made America: A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey on the Great Wagon Road by James Dodson. Copyright © 2025. Available from Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
