The Great Wagon Road: From Philadelphia to the South [American Trails Series]

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973. First Edition, First Printing. Cloth. As new/near fine. A fine first edition (as new) in a very near fine dust jacket, jacket showing a minute tear top edge on back. xii, 292 pages, 4 unnumbered leaves of plates : illustrations, map ; 24 cm. Octavo. One of early America's main-traveled highways, the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road has long been in need of a historian to tell its fascinating story. In this eleventh volume of the American Trails Series, Parke Rouse, Jr., the author of several studies of colonial Virginia, chronicles the history of this great artery from its origins as the Appalachian Warriors' Path to its eclipse by railroads, turnpikes, and canals in the nineteenth century, and its revival (with a changed character) in the age of the automobile.Commencing in Philadelphia, the road ran west through Lancaster and York, thence down the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and on into the Carolina backcountry, terminating at Augusta, in South Carolina—a distance of approximately 800 miles. Rouse organizes his account of the road's history into four parts, treating, respectively, the Warriors' Path; the pre-Revolutionary history of the Wagon Road; The Wilderness Trail, which branched off at Big Lick (now Roanoke), Virginia, and continued west to Nashville; life along the road in the Revolutionary War era; and its subsequent history to the late nineteenth century.To tell the history of a highway is, of course, principally to record the scenes of human drama for which it served as a stage. Rouse is at his bestin performing this part of his task. He vividly evokes the saga of the immigrants, missionaries, frontiersmen, waggoners, drovers (North America's first cowboys), and others who streamed along the route. We are given glimpses of nascent Americans westering, fighting, and praying.The public houses and ordinaries at which the travelers refresh d themselves come in for entertaining treatment as well. At times, the focus shifts effectively from people en masse to particular individuals, among them Andrew Jackson, Daniel Boone, and the Rev. Francis Asbury, first Methodist bishop in the United States, depicted here in his earlier career as an itinerant evangelist.If the book has the best virtues of well-paced narrative history, and strong evocative capacity, it is not without its flaws. ...All things considered, however, Rouse has done an admirable job. The Great Wagon Road is enjoyable reading; and the ten pages of handsomelyreproduced illustrations embellish the text." -- Swarthmore College JEROME H. WOOD, JR.