Home  Publications Piedmont Papers The Trading Path in Alamance County, a Beginning |
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The Trading Path in Alamance County, a Beginning |
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Thursday, 27 October 2005 |
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Page 1 of 5 The following essays suggest some starting-points for locating,
studying and preserving the Trading Path routes and stream crossings in
the Alamance County area. Portions are extracted from chapter 1,
“Places and People” in Carole Watterson Troxler and William Murray
Vincent, Shuttle & Plow: A History of Alamance County, North
Carolina (Alamance County Historical Association 1999) with permission
of the latter for read-only presentation.
Link here to 18th century maps by Moseley, Fry & Jefferson,Collet and Mouzon to accompany the essays.
1. East-west Pattern of the Trading Path Network in Alamance County
copyright 1999 Alamance County Historical Association
The route of the major Trading Path between Indians in east central
Virginia and those west of the Yadkin River can be envisioned easily
against today’s transportation network in Alamance County, for it
formed its basis. With the coming of the railroad in the 1850s, tracks
from Hillsborough well into South Carolina maintained the general
course of the greater Trading Path. Also, the route is shadowed today
by the course that Interstate 85 takes through much of Virginia and
North Carolina. The Trading Path also shows in local roadways.
The eighteenth century terms “Indian Trading Path” and “Trading Path”
referred to more than one route, because Indians and their trade
patterns shifted during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In
Alamance County, the name “Trading Path” usually referred to a segment
leading from the Siouan settlement at Achoneechy Town (northwest of
present-day Hillsborough) westward to today’s Mebane, fording the Haw
River at the present town of Haw River, then passing through today’s
Graham. The path forded Great Alamance Creek west of Bellemont, then
went westward past Alamance Battleground and into Guilford County. In
addition, the terms “western Trading Path” and “lower Trading Path”
referred to a leg that left Achoneechy Town in a southwestward course.
It forded the Haw River where Alamance Creek flows into the river, just
south of present Swepsonville. The lower Trading Path continued
southwestward through today’s northern Albright Township, then crossed
Patterson Township diagonally. In addition to these routes that
European settlers called “Trading Paths,” a very important road and
ford that Native Americans established at Saxapahaw connected what
became southern Alamance County with Achoneechy Town and the greater
trading area.
For the first Europeans then, penetration of the Alamance County area
was made possible by three well-established routes westward from the
Achoneechy settlements. The routes oriented newcomers at the places
where they crossed the Haw River, known today as Haw River,
Swepsonville, and Saxapahaw. It is of some significance that the
northernmost fording place took on a European name in the first half of
the eighteenth century: “Pine Ford” or “Piney Ford,” an area better
known later as “Trollinger’s” and “Haw River.” Its location on the main
Trading Path made it the most frequented and familiar crossing of the
Haw River for outsiders. Whatever name Native Americans called the
place was lost. The term that English speakers used for the ford
indicated a prevalence of pine trees at the site, a feature remarkable
enough to provide a name. A strong growth of pines reflected the fact
that the land adjacent to the ford had been kept clear of forest
growth, presumably by farming, until some 30 to 60 years before the
name “Pine Ford” came to be used. Pines require about 30 years to take
over cleared land in the natural vegetative progression, and they in
turn yield dominance to hardwoods after another 30 or so years. The
earliest recorded use of the name “Pine Ford” for the crossing is 1752,
when Orange County was created; by then the name was in common use. By
contrast, the adjacent “Haw Fields” between the Eno and Haw rivers was
described as “fields” and “old fields” or grasslands in the 1720s,
remarkably clear of trees of any sort. Such word usage suggests that
farming was relinquished within view of the ford as the crossings
increased. Maps made in 1733 and 1751 suggest that the Pine Ford
crossing came to surpass the one at the confluence of the Haw and
Alamance Creek during that time. The Edward Moseley 1733 map shows the
Trading Path crossing the river at the confluence, but the Trading Path
crosses the Haw upstream near the mouth of Back Creek in the 1751 map
made by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson. Otherwise, the Trading Path
route is the same, and the difference may reflect no more than the
interests of the map makers. The perception of a northward shift of
what newcomers considered the main route of the Trading Path near the
Haw River, however, is reflected in the way Earl Granville’s land
office described the land they surveyed in 1756 for Jacob Henry
Trollinger. The surveyor reported the tract as being on the west side
of the Haw River, “astride the New Trading Path.”[1] Public gathering
and camping at the crossing continued longer on the east bank than on
the west. Indians continued using the east side of the river at Pine
Ford into the nineteenth century.[2]
Just as the “Pine Ford” vicinity became known as “Trollinger’s,” the
ford where the “lower” Trading Path crossed the Haw near the mouth of
the Alamance came to be named for a series of mill owners near the
site: John Armstrong, Archibald DeBow Murphey, Thomas Ruffin, and
finally George Swepson. Saxapahaw, by contrast, kept its Native
American name. Although the people from whom the name derived are known
generally as “Sissipahaw,” the sound of the name survived remarkably
well from the time a Spanish traveler spelled out the sound of the
river’s name as “Sauxpa” in 1567.[3] Perhaps Saxapahaw in the south,
like Ossipee and Altamahaw in the north, maintained its Indian name as
a fording place on the Haw River because it was outside the main
traffic flow of the east-west Trading Paths.
The general courses of several Alamance County roads and streets still
closely reflect the Trading Paths and no doubt incorporate stretches of
them, particularly at the higher elevations of the original roads.
These include Boywood Road, much of Mount Herman-Rock Creek Road, and
much of NC 119 northeast of Swepsonville for the “lower” Trading Path.
The route of the main Trading Path is reflected in portions of
Mebane-Rogers Road and Bason Road between Mebane and Haw River and in
NC 49 in Haw River and north Graham. Relatively level terrain and urban
changes in Graham and Burlington challenge attempts to site the Trading
Path there, but the eastern part of Hanford Road and Monroe Holt Road
retain portions of the route between Interstate 85/40 and Alamance
Creek. South of Alamance Creek, church and cemetery locations that were
accessed by the Trading Path in the eighteenth century indicate that
the Bellemont-Alamance Road westward from Sinking Quarter Creek
incorporates a stretch of the Trading Path, as does a portion of NC 62
westward from its intersection with the Bellemont-Alamance Road. The
road from Saxapahaw toward Achoneechy Town is approximated by part of
the Salem Church-Mt. Willing Road in Thompson Township.[4]
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