THE INDIAN TRADING PATH AND COLONIAL SETTLEMENT DEVELOPMENT IN THE NORTH CAROLINA PIEDMONT Gladys Rebecca Dobbs A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Geography Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by: Dr. John Florin, Chair Dr. Thomas Whitmore Dr. Melinda Meade Dr. Peter Robinson Dr. Carole Crumley © 2006 Gladys Rebecca Dobbs ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT GLADYS REBECCA DOBBS: The Indian Trading Path and colonial settlement development in the North Carolina Piedmont (Under the direction of John Florin) This is a work of historical geography examining the role of an Indian-origin transportation route in the development of the colonial settlement system that emerged in the North Carolina Piedmont during the mid 18th century. This system has evolved in modern times into an important polycentric urban region, and the area's current inhabitants attribute this pattern to the Indian route, the Indian Trading Path. The relationship between the route and settlement development has not previously been tested, however. Previous work in settlement development geography has in fact treated the North American colonial landscape as a blank slate and failed to take account of landscape features left by an area's earlier occupants. This work comprised a process of transforming archival data—several thousand records from the earliest documented European settlement of the area—to geographic information in a GIS (geographic information system) and then to geographic knowledge through analysis of spatial and temporal pattern in the GIS. A two-scale model was used to explain the process by which the Indian Trading Path could affect emerging settlement patterns at the level of both town and regional system. While the model and results are geographically specific and not meant to apply to backcountry settlement in a general sense, the overall approach used can profitably be applied to other locations, both in terms of iii technical methodology and in terms of realistically assessing the role of indigenous landscape features in colonial outcomes. iv To strong women and strong-willed cats everywhere but most especially BJT Dobbs, 1930-1994 and Greta, 1988(?)-2006 And to THE PEOPLE OF NORTH CAROLINA v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The effort it takes to do doctoral research and write about it cannot be sustained without considerable support on several fronts. I have been fortunate to have an adviser (John Florin) and a Director of Graduate Studies (Tom Whitmore) who believed in me; I am honored to call both of these people friends. I am grateful to my family for the various kinds of support they have given me over the years, especially my father, Dan Dobbs (self- designated "one-man cheering squad"), and my sisters, Jean Dobbs and Kate Dobbs Ariail, and to the example of my mother, Jo (BJT) Dobbs, who received her PhD when I was in high school. It is my greatest sorrow that she is not here to see me receive mine. I also appreciate the quiet support of my brother, George Dobbs, over the years. The friends who have stuck by me, cheered me and cheered me on, comforted me, nudged me to keep working, given me relief when I couldn't work any more, fed me, got my car to the shop when it couldn’t work any more, helped me move…these are many but I especially want to mention Alice Dawson, Cheryl Warren, Roxie Oakes, Jinny Reid, Barbara Taylor, Ffionnan Brooke-Watson, and Annette Watlington. In my new location in Emporia, Kansas, I've had strong support from Joyce Thierer, Ann Birney, and Ellen Hansen, chair of the Department of Social Sciences at Emporia State University. Over and above these kinds of support, however, there are certain people without whom this dissertation literally could not have been written. Mary Ruvane, information scientist, built the database with which I captured the archival data and transformed them into vi geographic information; without her dedication to this task, in the service of a greater vision of public data "shareability," I would have been quickly swamped by a completely inadequate information storage and retrieval system. David Southern, an independent scholar of early Triangle-area roads and land grants, has been equally indispensable and selfless, providing clues, data, sources, perspectives, and ideas that I would otherwise have missed, and which have helped make this dissertation something beyond a mechanical examination of pattern. David is, in my book, an honorary geographer of high standing. Last but not least, Tom Magnuson of the Trading Path Association has provided inspiration, thoughts, and information since I first conceived of this project. I am proud to consider each of these people friends as well. I also wish to acknowledge funding from the Association of American Geographers; the Historical Geography Specialty Group of that organization; the Smith Research Grant at UNC-Chapel Hill; and the Royster Society of Fellows and the Center for the Study of the American South, both at UNC-Chapel Hill. vii PREFACE As an undergraduate geography major at UNC-Chapel Hill, I learned the name for a settlement pattern that every North Carolinian knows about, that string of cities and towns along I-85: the Piedmont Urban Crescent. Later, as a graduate student in the same department (same room and same professor, even), I had a moment that changed the direction of my studies and my life. The professor (John Florin, eventually to become my dissertation adviser) handed out a map of 19th century railroads in a class on the historical geography of the US and Canada. A glance showed me that the shape of the Piedmont Urban Crescent was already defined. I was transfixed. Did the railroad define the settlement pattern, then, or did it merely serve settlements already in existence? Yes and no, the professor replied. But he couldn't give me much more than that. It happened that this electrifying moment occurred in what I like to call my "history semester." In addition to the historical geography class, I was taking Ethnohistory with Dr. Carole Crumley and a readings course on American Indian history in North Carolina with Dr. Theda Perdue. It was this synergistic combination which set me on my path (no pun intended), for I realized from my readings that the Indian Trading Path had been of tremendous importance during the Contact Era and early colonial times, and the similarity of route between the Indian Trading Path as shown on old maps and the modern I-85 is impossible to miss. I was astonished to find that no scholar had ever seriously investigated this connection. Frustrated as I was with (and unsuited to) both humanistic qualitative viii research methods and quantitative ones, historical geography opened before me as a revelation, complete with dissertation topic. My original idea was to trace the development of the Piedmont Urban Crescent from the Contact Era, up through the railroad era, to I-85 and the present. Someday, I may do that project. In the short term, I found the depth of the colonial archive work required precluded that kind of temporal span for the dissertation, and even that the spatial scope I envisioned for the project was too ambitious. I had gotten the idea of using land grant records to tease out the role of the Trading Path from some sample documents on the Trading Path Association website (www.tradingpath.org). In these examples, the Path was shown and labeled, the drawings clear and the text readable. I imagined, naively, that there would be a whole string of similarly legible and explicit records which would define the Path all the way across the Piedmont, and that I need examine only that string and the grants immediately around it to accomplish my goals. Nothing could be further from the truth, on all counts, as the reader will shortly see. This work has been tremendously exciting and satisfying to me, tying together as it does my interests in human settlement patterns, indigenous peoples, the past, and my beloved North Carolina. To see neighborhoods emerge from the raw data, to glean some understanding of social processes in colonial North Carolina from working intimately with these thousands of documents, to read mentions of abandoned Indian fields, and finally to see centuries-old patterns brought out and made visible through the power of modern technology in the guise of Geographic Information Systems—these are the benefits of work that is often tedious and always lengthy. I am committed to the public sharing of data as an ideal, yet I ix feel almost sorry for those future researchers who, because they start from these data that I have now assembled, will not experience this process as I have. Now, on to the exciting story these records have to tell. x TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES .............................................................................................................XIII LIST OF FIGURES ...........................................................................................................XIV 1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1 THE PIEDMONT URBAN CRESCENT ........................................................................................ 1 THE INDIAN TRADING PATH .................................................................................................. 7 INVESTIGATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CRESCENT AND THE PATH......................