The Great Wagon Road

My latest book hits the stores July 1

IN HONOR OF THE Fourth of July next week, this morning I hung the Betsy Ross American flag used by Washington’s Continental troops. It was only one of two “souvenirs” I gathered during my nearly six-year odyssey on the Great Wagon Road, America’s first immigrant highway that brought tens of thousands of European settlers to new lives in the vast, Colonial backcountry of North America across the 18th Century.

The only other souvenir I brought home from my long journey was a granite rock I picked up on the long-abandoned road in Piedmont North Carolina. It sits on my desk to this day.

The voices of the fifty or so folks who found their way into my story — I call them the flame keepers of the Great Wagon Road saga, beloved historians and unforgettable custodians and passionate characters of the “Road That Made America” — are the true gifts of the journey, I trip I’d dreamt of making since I was knee high to a historical roadside marker. having discovered that all three wings of his ancestral family — Scottish, German and English ancestors — came down the road in the mid-1700s to Maryland and North Carolina. There’s a good chance yours may well have done the same thing.

In my case, what began as a simple road adventure with my elderly dog Mulligan, grew into a very personal pilgrimage of the heart.

I hope you’ll join me on the journey.

Here’s a bit more on my odyssey courtesy of Walter Magazine.