The Great Wagon Road
THE GREAT WAGON ROAD
Until a few years ago, when I thought about people coming to America, I pictured individuals and single families.
That was not the path for Mom's people from whom I inherited every dram of my Scottish DNA. For hundreds of years, her folk dwelled along the Scottish border in clans: Elliotts, Dunlaps, Grahams, Kerrs, Finleys, Kirkpatricks, and McClures. They farmed a little, but spent most of their time stealing English cattle. Every so often, they got slaughtered by invading English armies.
After the Jacobite Rebellion and the Battle of Culloden in 1746, many of my maternal ancestors fled in family groups to Northern Ireland to avoid being hanged.
Clustered around Londonderry for years, they suffered under English land taxes and slowly starved before making a run for it again in ships bound for Philadelphia. They then farmed in Pennsylvania still clustered with their Scottish clan neighbors until they mounted wagons bound down the Great Wagon Road for the wilderness of the newly opened Shenandoah Valley. There in Augusta County in a community called Tinkling Spring , they built their Presbyterian meeting houses, cleared their land, married off their children to other Scots, and transferred their wealth family to family.
In a last big migration chasing the prospect of free land in Cherokee territory in the Backcountry of South Carolina, they moved again... as families.
In Chester and York County, S.C. you will find them there today on this fourth day of January in the year of our Lord 2024 scattered on farms among old Presbyterian churches: Elliotts, Dunlaps, Kerrs, Finleys, Kirkpatricks and McClures.
