It is an axiom among historians that great cities grow where rivers and seas meet. America was blessed with several such locations; Boston, New York City, Baltimore and, most especially, Philidelphia. The City of Brotherly Love, as Philidelphia is known, enjoyed the most rapid growth of all colonial communities in the eighteenth century. From a population of 13,000 in 1740 to 40,000 by 1776, it was the largest city in the British Empire save for London.

William Penn had founded Pennsylvania for his fellow Quakers. He also opened the colony to all other religious beliefs. Soon, the Quaker population was increased by Amish, Mennionite, Waldensian and Moravian Anabaptist emigrants. Most of these emigrants spoke a dialect that, today, is known as Pennsylvania Dutch. They settled around Phildelphia and Lancaster. The Quakers welcomed them for they all shared a common religious moral base.

By the eighteenth century, however, Philidelpha had become a very cosmopolitan city. In 1752 there were 120 licensed taverns serving all tastes and social levels. It was being called the Paris of the West. Morality was under attack.

Among the newly arriving emigrants were the Scots-Irish from Ulster. There was perhaps no more fortunate emigration movement, for America, than these Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Baptist and other non-Anglican Protestant Scots. Driven from the highlands and lowlands of Scotland by famine to Ireland, and by famine from Ireland to America, The Scots-Irish were a rugged, driven, independent people willing to face the frontier as families and individuals. In New England, they served on the front lines in Indian wars and the wars with France. In Pennsylvania, they found a complementary people in the Quakers. Each needed, and welcomed, what the other brought.

They shared, among other things, an adversion to the immorality they saw growing in Philidelpha and the coming clash with France. They turned their eyes towards the interior and the south in search of a land where they could live in peace.

How they reached their new paradise is via the Great Wagon Road.

 The Great Warrior's Path led from the Iroquois Confederacy around the Great Lakes through what later becamePhilidelphia to Lancaster and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to York, to Gettysburg, into the western Maryland around what is now known as Hagerstown, across the Potomac River at Evan Watkins Ferry following the narrow path across the "back country" or "up country" or "Piedmont" to Winchester through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia to Harrisburg, Staunton, Lexington, Roanoke to Salem, North Carolina, to Salisbury, where it was joined by the east-west Catawba and Cherokee Indian Trading Path at the Trading Ford across the Yadkin River, in Rowan, North Carolina, thence to Charlotte and Rock Hill, South Carolina where it branches to take two routes to Augusta, and Savannah, Georgia.

The amalgamated forces of the peaceful Quakers and Mennonites and the vigorous Scots-Irish, seeking to reduce their direct contact with British authority, began to push south from Berks County in Pennsylvania through western Maryland into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. When the British presence was felt to be still too strong, they continued into the valleys of the Orange, Haw and Yadkin Rivers in North Carolina.

The Scots-Irish who poured into America from Ulster were middle class farmers and craftsmen. Wherever they settled they started schools, churches and preached. As pioneers, the Scots-Irish proved their mettle and arrived when the Colonists needed them. There was little mingling of the people of different nationalities even with people in the communities. The Scots who was transplanted in the Colonies did not intermarry with the English or the Irish catholic. When they came to the Colonies and established their early churches, the Scots did not intermarry with the English or the Palatine neighbors for two generations. But, as the records of the Boones, Bryans, Morgans, Mendenhalls, Grubbs, Brackins, Mills and others show, intermarriage strengthened the pioneer spirit.

Riding along the Great Wagon Road in the decade before the American Revolution, visitors from Europe expressed amazement at the rapid growth of the interior. Stretched from Philadelphia to Georgia were endless farms, punctuated by an occasional fort, tavern, or village. By 1765 the Wagon Road was cleared for horse drawn vehicles. To maintain the road, County Courts appointed overseers and viewers, who were responsible for keeping up the segments of throughfare at the County expense. Packhorse trains vied with wagons as carriers of frontiers goods; a rider on the lead horse led as many ten to twelve horses in procession, the belled bridle of each being attached to the saddle of the preceding horse, each horse being equipped to carry up to six hundred pounds. Besides wagon and packhorse drivers, the Great Wagon Road was swamped in the summer with drivers smelling like a barnyard, leading and driving livestock to market, aided by shepherd dogs. Entire families road horseback along the road to settle a new farm or found a new church.

The "Great Trek" each year would begin after the fall harvest so they would have food to last through the winter. During the first years, they walked, leading five or six pack animals laden with supplies: tools, seed, fabric. In places, the famous path they trod was only three or four feet wide. The wilderness literally crept right up to their feet and brushed their faces as they walked. In later years they marched alongside oxen as these oversized beasts pulled two-wheeled carts heaped to overflowing, crossing rivers that licked high about their animals' flanks and often soaked every single, individual piece of their worldly possessions. Finally, when the path had been worn clear by thousands and thousands of previous travelers, they rode in wagons that, themselves, grew as the path widened into an honest to goodness road. These Pennsylvania- German-built wagons (<-Conestogas) at their largest would be twenty-six feet long, eleven feet high and some could bear loads up to ten tons. It took five or six pairs of horses to pull them. These big vehicles, the eighteen wheelers of their day, were called "Liners" and "Tramps." Ships would later gain their nicknames. No matter if they walked or rode, in the mid afternoon, they stopped to take care of the animals, prepare food, and put up the defense for the night. The cries of wolves in the distance and the pop of twigs just outside of the firelight sounded danger. Bands of Indians in the early days, bands of thieves later,, chased away deep sleep-no matter how tiring the day, how bone-weary the traveler. The fastest loaded wagon could go about five miles a day. The trip took a minimum of two months. Wagons broke down, rivers flooded, supplies gave out, and there was sickness but no doctors. Wagons were repaired, floods ceded, the wilderness supplied, and the sick were buried or stumbled on. This is the first great interior migration in our nation's history. And our family was part of it.