Beaten Paths

What We Can Tell From Unmarked Gravestones Recently a neighbor described a "slave cemetery" she'd found. When asked how she had identified it as a slave cemetery, she said the stones were (all but one or two) unmarked. This belief is totally anachronistic. Blank stones, head and foot stones with no inscriptions are not the earmarks solely of slave graves in the South. First, illiteracy was the norm for all three prevalent races in the antebellum South, enslaved and free and, second, some religions disapproved of the use of grave marking. Even amongst sects that took pride in their literacy, inscribed stones could be controversial. Varieties of Quakers and Baptists, alike, have gone through moments of discomfort with grave markings. Many genealogy sites on the internet carry a warning or observation along these lines: "There was a period when Quakers were discouraged from marking their graves. An old Quaker Burying Ground may look as if it is only partially fi...

Some Notes Taken After Canoeing on the Eno River As rivers go, the Eno isn't much. It is not long and, except in spate, it is not deep, it is not rapid, nor broad. It is a rather typical stream of the southeastern piedmont of North America; high banked under steep but low valley walls, too shallow for commercial navigation but with sufficient basin capture to produce prodigious spates after a summer downpour . Until the advent of modern bridge materials (steel and then concrete) that could lift a bridge above these floods, the river alternated between being merely a dangerous impediment to travel to being an absolute barrier to movement. Yet, like most streams in the Piedmont of the Appalachians, the Eno powered numerous pre-modern industries, and its fords channeled movement for thousands of years. Having located a light watercraft, I determined to see what vest iges could be seen of transportation and industrial impacts on the Eno above, near and below Hillsborough, NC. [In...

The Other Choke-Points in the Piedmont Though it is true that stream fords are the most common and generally governing geopolitical choke-points in the piedmont of the southeast, saddle gaps and water gaps too attract and capture routes. A good example is the saddle gap south of Occaneechi Mountain, where I-85 passes, near Hills borough, NC. [In the image to the right, highest land is represented as white. ] The Occaneechi Mountains border the Eno River south of Hillsborough, NC. In fact the river, flowing generally north to south west of Hillsborough hits the west end of these volcanic remnants and turns over 90 degrees and heads east of northeast for about seven miles. It then cuts through a soft spot in the Occaneechi hills and heads east and then south to pass behind the Occaneechi chain for a ways before turning once again east. Porters, pack horsemen, wagoners and highway engineers all have had to cope with this peculiar geology. Coming at the Eno east of the Occaneechi ...

"Gaps" are to mountainous terrain what fords are in the piedmont. They are the critical "chokepoints" through which traffic must pass. Like fords, some gaps are better than others; easier to get to, easier to get through, safer. So, calculating the earmarks of critical gaps is important. Any suggestions to that end will be appreciated. Working on a presentation about Daniel Boone's routes to the Cumberland Gap gave me the opportunity to consider gaps, and I mapped over one hundred and fifty of them along his likely routes. Here are the observations made, thus far: 1. Many, perhaps most mountain gaps are unnamed as such on USGS topographical maps. 2. Gaps come in two varieties; "saddle gaps" and "water gaps" . Of these two, water gaps (if they can be safely navigated by water or by foot, horse, or other conveyance) are preferred as they require less climbing than do saddle gaps. A water gap that occurs off the line of march between...

Old Mill Seats and Fords and Dubious Archaeology Mills are important to the TPA for two reasons. First, they're important because they are so darned amusing, and second they are important for, as a rule, they identify a ford location and we like to know about fords. Lately we've been spending a good deal of time looking at mill remnants and trying to understand a bit more about the residue of water powered industry in our colonial southeast. Mills amuse in different ways. Molinary technology fans are interested only in the machinery of milling which is, by the way, a fascinating study by itself. Other folks are interested in the rusticity of standing mills, the nostalgic, outer appearance of mills. Yet others are captivated by the hydrology of water powered mills. From the TPA standpoint, though mill and machinery are wonderfully engaging, hydrology is our thing. This derives from the fact that there seems to be a strong correlation between the conditions needed fo...

A Visit to Maddocks Mill and Hart Ford? [Click any of the images to see an enlarged version] " Old Mattocks Mill" , the site where Regulators planned the plans that went awry and led to the Battle of Alamance is just west-northwest of Hillsborough, NC near the confluence of McGowans Creek and the Eno River, on the southwest corner of that intersection. It is likely that the dam powering the mill crossed the Eno a few yards downstream from the confluence and, depending on the length of the head race, that would put the mill a few yards plus some below the confluence. The site is now under "Corporation Lake", an Orange-Alamance water source, and invisible. A worker at the nearby water processing plant said that during low water the dam can be seen in the lake bottom. It is said that the lake is almost completely silted up so, if they ever dredge the silt out of the lake, maybe we'll get a more precise location and a chance to map this important historic site....

This essay considers violent opposition to technological change in surface cargo carriage. It is geographically limited to consideration of change in England's southeaster North American colonies. Land cargo carriage technology changed two or three times during the colonial era in the southeast. Not unlike change in our own time, each change bred violent resistance to change. Sometimes it was government violence directed at malefactors of small wealth (e.g. the imposition of market economy values on frontiers people that produced at least a part of the War of the Regulation), and other times it was the violence of displaced workers directed at the technology that displaced them. Actually, the first change to be considered isn't really a technological change at all but was, rather, a sociological and political change in who traded with whom. In earliest colonial times, say from 1585 through the First Powhatan War (1622) English colonists competed with one another with no r...