“G” is for Great Wagon Road. The Great Wagon Road stretched for almost eight hundred miles from Philadelphia west to Lancaster and York Pennsylvania, and thence south through the Shenandoah Valley into the Carolina backcountry. The road diverged in South Carolina, with one artery going toward Camden and another toward Ninety Six and the road’s southern terminus at Augusta, Georgia. The road originated as an Indian trail, but after 1747, it became a route for German and Scots Irish immigrants moving south from Pennsylvania into the backcountry. This southern movement of thousands of settlers rapidly populated the Carolina backcountry. In the closing decades of the colonial era, the Great Wagon Road was among the most heavily traveled in British North America, making it one of the most important frontier movement trails in United States history.
“G” is for Great Wagon Road
