The Way of the Great Wagon Road

  The Blue Ridge Mountains

            Help me add to this story. I remember Arthur Godfrey being on the radio. A song he often sang was The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. There was music in those mountains from the earliest days of European settlement. That music was not just in Virginia. It spread around an area of is now several U.S. states. Quite a lot of that music spread into what is now North Carolina.

            I could well have called this piece The Lost Provinces, many others have. The settlers among those rolling hills beyond the ridges were largely separated from the colonies and then from the states. Many did not remember that they were there. Some of the people in that Blue Ridge country didn't keep up much on the rest of the country. They were "The Lost Provinces."

            But there is a lot more to the story, I still have some of it in mind. I remember being told that in a far western corner of what became the state of north Carolina is a rolling plateau separated from the rest of the state by the abrupt slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Families settled there. Some say that they became the heart of those provinces.

            For years the Provinces were isolated from much of the country and even the rest of North Carolina. The isolation was so great that most of their trade and communication was with the neighboring states of Tennessee and Virginia. i suspect that they did not feel their isolation so very much. I some way it is part of the road they chose and much like the road many others were choosing in those days.

            There were those who came before them, but many to the area throughout the 1700s and after. They became isolated rapidly from a rapidly changing world. They shared little of that world. No Arthur Godfrey on the radio. Many came by way of the Great Wagon Road of the Shenandoah Valley. They had no industry and a barely subsistence agriculture with few of the implements of agriculture. Early arrivals had good hunting. Some arrived with little more than a rifle and an ax. They did feel their independence, I have heard. They may have called it freedom.

            The Cherokee, Shawnee, and Creek had hunted the territory for centuries, it is said. The first recorded visits by Europeans occurred in 1752. Augustus Spangenberg, a Moravian Bishop from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and a handful of men entered the territory. The Bishop was impressed by the mountains. H seems not to have been guided well.

            Those who came, somehow had a great deal of music. Perhaps feelings of freedom and independence helped. They brought their musical culture from Germany, England, and elsewhere. Violins were not the first of the musical instruments to be popular. But in time violins were brought to the land, made there there, and played there. They were popularly called fiddles. They danced to the music of the fiddle.

        In 1799 the North Carolina General Assembly designated the high country as Ashe County, named for Samuel Ash, Revolutionary War patriot and three time governor of the state.

        After the Civil War, more instruments and many kinds of music came and was welcomed in the "Lost Provinces.

        There is much more to this story. The Cherokee, Welsh, and others could tell us that. Help me out and tell us what you can find out about The Blue Ridge Mountains and Lost Provinces territory.

            Thank you for reading.        

                                                                                Richard Sheehan