The Great Wagon Road was the primary overland migration route used by tens of thousands of
Scots-Irish and German immigrants to travel south from Pennsylvania into the American backcountry during the
18th century. Stretching more than 800 miles from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia, it was originally a Native
American trail called the Warrior’s Path.
The road began in Philadelphia, crossed westward to Gettysburg, turned south through the
Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and entered North Carolina in Stokes County. It passed through the Moravian
settlements near present-day Winston-Salem, crossed the Yadkin River at Shallow Ford, and
continued south through Salisbury and Charlotte into South Carolina and Georgia.
Sherrill’s Path
Just south of the Yadkin River crossing, the Great Wagon Road forked into several branches. The central branch
was called Sherrill’s Path, blazed by Adam Sherrill and his eight sons in
1747 when they became the first European family to settle on the west bank of the Catawba
River. This path ran south and west directly through present-day Statesville, passing near
Fort Dobbs (built 1756), before reaching Sherrill’s Ford on the Catawba River.
The Hall Family’s Journey
In 1751, James Hall and his wife Prudence Roddy brought their family of nine
children from Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, traveling the Great Wagon Road south through the Shenandoah Valley
to reach the Fourth Creek Settlement in what is now Iredell County. They settled in
what would become Bethany Township. Their homestead was located approximately six miles northeast of Statesville—directly on the corridor
where Sherrill’s Path connected the Yadkin River crossings to Fort Dobbs and points south.
James Hall’s son, the Reverend James Hall Jr. (1744–1826), became a prominent
Presbyterian minister and educator. A Princeton graduate, he became the second minister of the Fourth Creek Meeting House (now the First Presbyterian Church of Statesville). He also founded Cleo’s Nursery
academy and later helped establish Ebenezer Academy at Bethany Presbyterian Church, where his nephew
Hugh Roddy Hall served as an educator.
A Road Through the Plantation?
A recent ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the Hall plantation has identified a buried
roadbed on the property. The Hall plantation’s location in Bethany Township—sitting squarely on the
route between the Yadkin River crossings and Statesville—places it directly along the path that
Sherrill’s Path would have followed. The Hall family themselves would have traveled this very road to
reach their new home in 1751, just four years after the Sherrills first blazed it.
Investigation is ongoing to determine whether this roadbed is part of Sherrill’s Path, one of the most
important colonial-era roads in the American South.
