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Thursday, 27 October 2005 |
History has divided the Piedmont’s peoples along racial and economic
lines. Thus there has been an unfortunate tendency for the Black, Red,
and White peoples of the Piedmont to emphasize conflict rather than
commonality in their histories. The story of the Trading Path, though,
is a story of commingling of peoples and cultures. As
Piedmont settlement preceded government by over one hundred years,
there is little evidence of this amalgamation in the historical record.
Only a handful of historical and anthropological monographs deal with
the subject, but all concur that some blending took place, though none
venture to estimate its scope or effect. It remains to be determined
who was in the Piedmont when, in what numbers, doing what.
What we know
already is that the Piedmont is as it is, in part, because the three
cultures blended. The Trading Path can illuminate that process of
fusion. In so doing it will bring pride to peoples long denied their
full share of historical respect and that pride of accomplishment may
aid in healing past hurts.
The Trading Path Association will preserve the richly historic Trading
Path as a national heritage treasure. The Trading Path was a corridor
of river crossings linked by roads and trails between the James River
colonial settlements and the Catawba, Cherokee and other Indian towns
in the Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia. It served Indian commerce
prior to European colonization, and it served as one of the principal
avenues for European penetration into the Piedmont of the Southeastern
United States. Indian and, later, European settlements occupied key
points along its course many of which persist to this day. Around them
and in towns long abandoned and erased from the map lie much of the
history of the Southeastern Piedmont. Preservation of the remnants of
the Trading Path will secure archaeologically important materials as
yet unstudied, create an unrivaled tool for education about the
Piedmont’s peoples and environment, and bring heritage tourism to
numerous economically bypassed rural communities in the Trading Path
Corridor. |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 14 November 2005 )
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