CHAPTER VI
ROADS AND BOUNDARIES
We have mentioned in the foregoing pages that an unusual feature in the settlement of these Stafford or Prince William backwoods, soon to be known as Loudoun, was not only the diversity of origin of the new population but that it came almost simultaneously from the north and the south and the west as well as from the Tidewater east. As the falls of the Potomac and Rappahannock blocked continuous water transport from the older settlements, the pioneers all were forced to come through the woodland trails and these trails or roads, if they could be then so called, now demand our attention.
What one might call the Appian Way of Piedmont, the longarum regina viarum as Statius calls the Roman road, was undoubtedly that aboriginal trail which, perhaps beginning as a buffalo path,[35] was followed habitually by the Indians in their north-south journeys to the earliest knowledge of the whites and appears in the records of the Colony at a very early date. The Carolina Road, as it is best known, became a great highway between the north and the south and if our surmise be correct that, in common with so many of our earliest colonial roads, it owes its origin to a beaten trail made by the heavier animals of the forest, it was probably used by the Manahoacks and their predecessor tribes long before the Susquehannocks frequented it in the latter half of the seventeenth century, not only on their trading journeys between the Dutch of Manhattan and the Carolina Indians, but in their war forays as well. The Iroquois of New York, as we have seen, followed their Susquehannock kindred to Piedmont and in Spotswood's day it was their ordinary and accustomed route. We think we get our first record of it among the Susquehannock "plain paths" noted in the Virginia Act of 1662 and it was sometimes referred to by that name. Later and from about 1686 until at least 1742, that part of the road between Brent Town and the Rappahannock was also known as the "Shenandoah Hunting Path," a name still occasionally heard; but the popular name was the Carolina Road with its no less popular descriptive appellation of "The Rogue's Road" due to the cattle and horse thieves who infested it throughout the eighteenth century. That these gentry misused the road only, rather than were residents of the country it traversed, was always maintained, and apparently with truth, by the Piedmont people; but so numerous had they become by 1742 that the Assembly passed an act[36] calling on those driving stock along the public highways to have in their possession a bill of sale of their cattle and horses to be exhibited to any justice of the peace when due demand therefor was made. Yet the rogues still continued to travel their road until the ebb and wane of its traffic in the early nineteenth century. Although the records fail to shew that highwaymen plied their trade on this or other Virginia roads, Loudoun folklore has held to a belief in their activities as witness the legend concerning Captain Harper, Loudoun's own Robin Hood:
"This portion through the present Loudoun of the old Carolina Road was then locally known as 'Rogue's Road' on account of the many bold robberies committed along its route by the famous gentleman highwayman of the day, Captain Harper, who regularly patrolled it and terrorized all those who lived adjacent to it until such was the fear of this dashing and bold highwayman, that women were afraid to venture out upon this road alone. A rather pretty story is related in this connection—a young Virginia maiden was walking this road alone one evening about twilight, hurrying from a visit to a neighbour, when a dashing cavalier rode up and reined his horse beside her. 'Are you not afraid to walk this road alone on account of Captain Harper and his band?' he asked. 'No' replied the maiden 'for I have always heard Captain Harper was a gentleman.' The dashing horseman looked at her a moment and then walked his horse beside her until she reached the gate leading to her home. And then raising his hat and bowing he said: 'Captain Harper bids you good night' and digging the rowels into his steed he vanished as he came."[37] The writer omits to mention the local tradition that Harper, though mercilessly robbing the rich, gave generously to the poor.
The Carolina Road entered Virginia at a point on the bank of the Potomac, above the mouth of Maryland's Monocacy, where Noland's Ferry sometime prior to 1756 became its connecting link with Maryland; thence it ran in a southeasterly direction somewhere along the present clay road to Christ Church just south of modern Lucketts; thence south, following closely the present Leesburg-Point of Rocks State Highway, through Leesburg over what is known as King Street (the King's Highway of yesteryear) and approximately along the present James Monroe Highway (Route 15 of the United States Highway System) to Verts' Corner, thence along what is still locally called the Carolina Road (or sometimes the Gleedsville Road) to Goose Creek at Oatlands. The present hard road from Verts' Corner to Oatlands, now the main road, was probably built and the old road's traffic at that point diverted about 1830 when the rough pavement of the road was undertaken. From Goose Creek at Oatlands the old road followed United States Route 15 as at present to the Little River Turnpike, now known as the Lee-Jackson National Highway, just east of the village of Aldie; crossing this, it followed what is now but a local and little used county road which, in its progress south of the county and under changing conditions, eventually crosses the other great rivers above their falls line and so on to North Carolina. Along its route the first church in Loudoun, Aubrey's little log "Chapel of Ease," was erected at the Big Spring; and later many of the mansions of the Loudoun gentlefolk, such as the Noland House, Rockland, Springwood, Selma, Raspberry Plain, Morven, Rokeby, Oatlands, Oak Hill, and others in due time came to be built and historic "Ordinaries" or taverns such as that known as West's and later as Lacey's and towns such as Leesburg and the nearby Aldie grew up. All through the eighteenth century the flow of its colorful traffic continued and developed in volume until the founding of the City of Washington, as the nation's Capital, drew to the east those travelling between the northern and southern States. And now, over a hundred years after the passing of its golden days of activity, there are rumoured plans to revive the old road as a main north and south highway and once again, in the not too distant future, we may see its old life restored, with motors and trucks speeding along its surface where the old-time foot and horse-travel and Indians and soldiers, missionaries and traders, drovers honest or otherwise, were wont slowly to pass.
Nor are the old mansions and towns the only surviving landmarks along its way. The famous Big Spring still rises in as steady volume as of yore; the Tuscarora and Goose Creeks, no longer needfully forded but now spanned by modern concrete bridges, still flow complacently in their old-time channels and between them, on the west side of the present road and two and a half miles south of Leesburg, still stand the old Indian mounds.
These mounds, for there are others scattered to the west of the one so noticeable from the highway, have always excited local interest but the present generation has all but forgotten their traditional story. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of the house of Mr. T. W. Gaines, on whose land rises the mound nearest the road, or perhaps over the land where the mounds themselves now stand, there was fought a hardly contested Indian battle at about the time the first of the white pioneers were coming into that neighbourhood. Many years ago the late Mrs. William H. Martin, then a bride recently come to Leesburg, with the assistance of the late Miss Lizzie Worsley, who gave a lifetime of study to the past of Leesburg and Loudoun, carefully gathered up what she then could of the old story which had been handed down from generation to generation and incorporated it in a gracefully written "History and Traditions of Greenway" which was published in the Record of Leesburg, then edited by her husband.
"Numberless were said to be dead warriors," wrote Mrs. Martin, "who found their last resting place so far from their native lands beneath the mounds that were easily distinguishable in the gloom of the thick forest. This battle had been between the Catawbas of the Carolinas and the Delawares.[38] An hereditary enmity existed between these two tribes, distant as they were, the one from the other. A large band of Delawares, pushing into the territory of the Catawbas had severely punished that tribe, and victorious, were travelling northward to their home. The Catawbas followed and unexpectedly fell upon them, having overtaken them at the Potomac. Terrible and swift was their revenge, yet such were the fighting qualities of the Delawares thus brought to bay, that the Catawbas were forced to retreat, without prisoners. But when the remaining Delaware warriors looked upon their dead they saw the flower of their tribe, stark in death, and too far to be carried to their own hunting grounds. So there they were buried...."[39]