Meet Our New Board Chairman, Bob Chapman III
You've prob
ably seen him on one of our hikes, and if not you sure will in the months to come.
Bob Chapman took the reins of the TPA Board of Directors July 10th. We are excited to have him aboard and in charge, and we look forward to Bob making things happen as he has done so many other places.
Bob is the founder of and partner in
Traditional Neighborhood Development Company, a firm on the leading edge of new urbanism. He has over 20 years of development experience. He was one of only 25 developers in the entire country invited to sign the
Charter of the New Urbanism in 1996. Bob serves on the Board of Directors of the
Historic Preservation Society of Durham. He was
founding chair of the North Carolina Smart Growth Alliance and has served
on the boards of the Duke School for Children, the Carolina Theater, St. Joseph’s Historic Foundation and the Duke Art Museum. It was Bob and a couple of friends who put together the 1976 folk festival in Durham that became the
Festival on the Eno. There would probably be no
West Point on the Eno were it not for his efforts. He gets things done.
We are grateful to Bob for the gift of time he has bestowed on the TPA, and we look forward to helping him bring the organization forward and the project to full fruition.
Over the next three month we will introduce the rest of the TPA officers and board members.
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Boone Country
The northwest corner of North Carolina was
Daniel Boone's stomping grounds, the land where he honed his woodland skills. We know he lived in
Davie County and then in
Wilkes County. And we believe it was from Wilkes County that
John Finley led Boone to
Cumberland Gap, the gateway to
Kentucky's blue grass country, that 'dark and bloody ground' that earned Boone at least his share of fame. His movements westward are now the theme of our study of movement in the mountains. We're mapping land and water gaps and fords and trying to decipher their interrelationships.
Each of the accompanying maps may be enlarged by clicking on them. They show the method and progress made thus far on the Boone Country project. The first image shows the first step; illuminating water to show where roads should go. The structure icons are two Boone cabin sites. The light blue points are likely horse fords over the Yadkin.
In the
Piedmont one can safely assert that pre-modern routes went from
ford to ford as streams were the primary obstacles to travel in that land. But in the
mountains the primary impediment to travel is the mountains. Wherever a ridge or mountain can be bypassed or wherever the climb over a ridge can be shortened by a low spot, a saddle or passages between high points, there the routes went. So we think that "
gaps" are the key to understanding travel in the mountains.
In the second image the red points are dry gaps, the green points are wet gaps, and the yellow point is a particularly spring field which could have been a major intersection for people afoot. The routes at this point are very basic straight lines. We find that most premodern roads deviate from the straight line only at unmanageable obstacles. Eventually the straight lines will be pulled and pushed around obstacles and take on a much more jagged appearance.
Gaps come in two forms;
wet and dry.
Wet gaps or, more commonly, water gaps are streams cutting through a ridge. For example, the
James River cuts a
water gap through the Blue Ridge at Lynchburg, and the north fork of Stoney/Stones Creek cuts a water gap through the
Occaneechee Hills alongside of Highway 70 east of Hillsborough.
Dry gaps are
saddles or, in some places, "
passes", offering a path of less resistance over an obstacle range, ridge or mountain. Wet gaps need enough space alongside and above the floods of the stream to allow parallel passage. Dry gaps need to have slopes gentle enough to allow controlled decent from the gap. Approaches to and from a gap used as a foot path can be extremely rugged because people are agile little beasts. Horses, though, need more space than people, and horses need firmer footing than people, so gap roads for horses will tend to be on a grades less steep than routes for people unhindered by horses. We have yet, though, to determine what the maximum allowable grade was for people and horses in the mountains. We expect it to be over the 5% allowed for wheeled vehicles but how much we don't know.
The next step in the process of finding will be, if and when time allows, to lay down hypothetical tracks on to other map layers, like LiDAR maps. Rubber sheeting some old maps over the hypothesized lines may also reveal some key points. But with a project the size of the Boone County project, this will require man hours not now available.
A body probably needs to trudge through the seemingly
endless ridge and valley country west of the Blue Ridge to get a sense of the economy of movement in pre-modern times. Vicarious travel on maps serves for now, though. The
routes proposed both cross high
on the
Yadkin River, the Holsten and Watauga, the Clinch River and
Powell River. Still, all four of these rivers appear daunting, but nothing is more daunting than the ridges between the rivers. Finding the best horse fords over each of the major obstacle streams will suggest which water gaps and dry gaps were employed, but will also be beyond mere map work so, maybe, this winter we'll find some way to underwrite a trip into the
routes to Cumberland Gap, the portal to the west shown to young Mr. Boone by the old frontiersman, John Findley.
So far we've noted two very likely
routes from Wilkesboro, NC to Cumberland Gap, TN, each about 200 miles long. Along them we've found about
125 gaps of one kind or another and learned, among a good many other things, that one road from Wilkesboro to Cumberland Gap met the
Warrior's Path near
Kingsport, TN,
the Cherokee treaty town on the Holston River. Given the distances involved and the terrain encountered, we now believe that a fast trip one way or the other along these routes would have taken a month to six weeks afoot. So, the long hunters probably went west in August-September, shot and trapped things from mid-October until March, and made it back to their buyers by May, in time to get a crop in the ground.
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Membership in the TPA: Now is a Really Good Time
At about this time each year we run out of rent money; call it the summer doldrums or, maybe, a season of want. Whatever it is called, it hurts.
If you haven't purchased a membership recently, please consider doing so. It won't hurt too much and it will help us keep the door open until business recovers.
To initiate or renew your membership in the TPA, we now offer the following three options:
Option 1: You can renew using your credit card via the Triangle Communities Foundation at:
www.trianglecf.org Option 2: You can click the "Donate Now" button on the right side of the screen, and that will take you to PayPal, a secure transaction site. You'll be asked a few questions to create an account so as to protect your sensitive information, and then you'll be able to donate using a credit card or other vehicle.
Option 3: The membership form can be
downloaded from the website and sent in to the address below with your payment.
Thanks for your continued support!
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