How Tryon's Campground Was Found: Study, Search and Serendipity in a Historic Research Project

trm

January 2010

Not knowing what you don't know helps -

The Trading Path Association (TPA) began operations in 1999 with an insight some maps and little else. Our insight was that, in the piedmont, the critical geopolitical choke-points, the geography that governed movement and the location of capital and people was and remains stream crossings. Southeastern streams are barriers, not avenues to the interior. Getting across them was a constant challenge, and the geological conditions needed for crossings were relatively limited. Find the crossing points, we said, and you will find the earliest transportation routes. As in the age of muscle powered transportation people lived as close to traffic as they could, find those routes and you will be sure to know the general location of the preponderance of southeastern archeology, prehistoric and historic. The insight excited some and bored others, but it gained us supporters.

Spurred on by enthusiastic supporters we sought ways to get paid to find the earliest routes in the Piedmont of the southeast. We hijacked other organization's events to advertise ours, we carried our one insight to every venue we could find, and we asked for local information on old sites. Email and phone calls picked-up, we began to build a file of reported roadbeds and stream crossings, and we tried to organize them by “authority” of their reporters; mainly how much history the reporters knew and how well they described their artifact.

Among the first responses were several calls from Alamance County, NC, and among those, in the winter of 1999 was a call from J.C. Lowe and some other very solid authorities interested in three different historic moments all concentrated on Great Alamance Creek between Alamance and Belmont, NC. There were folks interested in “Pyle's Defeat”, a Revolutionary War event of considerable significance, and some were enthused about The Battle of Alamance, the culminating battle of the War of the Regulation, a pre-Revolutionary War insurrection in the backcountry of England's American colonies. Finally, members of St. Paul's Lutheran Church, located on the south side of Great Alamance Creek, asked if we couldn't help protect their ancient land from a proposed highway bridge. Their church, they said, sat next to an early colonial camp on some springs just south of Great Alamance Creek. The TPA attended a public meeting about the proposed highway bridge, was impressed with the quality of local history research and engaged thoroughly in understanding crossings of Great Alamance Creek.

We began our search by playing with maps in the vicinity of these reported events and crossings. Extrapolating from experience carrying heavy packs afoot in the woods, in our map play we drew straight lines along known old routes in the vicinity of the terrain in question. Where modern road lines curved we continued straight lines. Highway 62 and Highway 49, two venerable, old routes cross Great Alamance at Alamance and Belmont respectively today, but we found that by straightening the modern roads their lines converged on a single point about half way between those towns. Good fortune smiled on our efforts and one day we met Mr. Lowe near “Little Buzzard Rock” on the bluffs above the south bank of Great Alamance Creek. From him we learned a thing or two.

Mr. Lowe imbibed local history with him mother's milk and as soon as he was old enough to attend his father out doors, he learned a wealth of local lore. Lowe's were among the influx of Germans from Pennsylvania who settled this country starting in the 1740s. Late in life he decided to see how much of what he'd learned he could document. He showed up at our meeting with a two inch thick dossier of duplicated maps and documents, and he walked me through the earliest history of that crossing on Great Alamance Creek. By the end of the day he had convinced me of 1) the authenticity of his findings, 2) that the crossing in question was the ford used not only by Governor Tryon but also by the settlers who camped by St. Paul's Church and by both armies during the Revolutionary War, and 3) that I had a long way to go to claim mastery about anybody's local history. Perhaps most importantly, he had somehow acquired a copy of an exceedingly rare 18^th century map drawn by Claude Joseph Sauthier (1736-1802), cartographer for Governor William Tryon, North Carolina governor (1765-1761). When Governor Tryon came up-country from New Bern in 1761 to subdue the Regulators, Sauthier attended him and drew maps along the way. Mr. Lowe's map was that drawn by Sauthier of Governor Tryon's campground the night before the Battle of Alamance and of the battlefield site about five miles away. Mr. Lowe's eye for terrain was as impeccable as his research and within minutes of our meeting he was pointing out terrain features shown on Sauthier's map but not readily visible on modern topographical maps. It was a moment of pure delight.

It is no exaggeration to say the Sauthier's map was in many ways more revealing than a United States Geologic Survey 7 minute representation of the land. To test Sauthier's accuracy we invited metal detectorists to a meeting on the site. We had them sweep across the areas labeled by Sauthier on his map. Whenever a metal detector “pinged” a piece of metal we put a flag in the ground. The detectorists were allowed to dig up every 10^th ping. On the ridge where Sauthier showed the infantry tent line, metal detectors revealed seven pings, six of which were lead splashes from when when Tryon's troops melted lead and poured rounds for the coming battle. The seventh was a .75 caliber ball, the caliber of a consignment of Dutch army surplus muskets recently received by the government at New Bern. Mr. Lowe's terrain was Tryon's terrain as recorded by Sauthier.

With the certainty provided by Mr. Lowe's research and Sauthier's map, in retrospect we can see a number of important supporting evidence. First, the road to Alamance battleground passed St. Paul's church as did the road used by the earliest settlers in the area. The springs next to St. Paul's undoubtedly once hosted newly arrived folk from Pennsylvania settling on the second Earl of Granville, John Carteret's (1690-1763} inexpensive piedmont lands while they waited to find their piece of the dream. Perhaps even more telling is the association of that crossing with one of the Revolutionary War's more pathetic, embarrassing, sanguinary events, Pyle's Defeat/Massacre/Hacking Match. It seems highly probable that Dr. John Pyle used this same trading path ford to cross Great Alamance Creek to join Lord Cornwallis in Hillsborough (1781), and it was just north of the ford that his four hundred men were attacked by Whig cavalry disguised as British troops.

Evidence plain on the Sauthier map presented by JC Lower and earmarks present on modern maps as well as landmarks visible to this day give solid evidence that the ford at the foot of Little Buzzard Rock is this most important old crossing.

[Maps to Follow]