THE ROAD THAT MADE AMERICA

An amiable amble along Appalachian-fronting blue highways.

“The Great Wagon Road is probably the least known historic road in America,” writes Dodson, better known for books on golf than on the nation’s past. Yet, as he writes in this pleasingly informal travelogue, he comes by his passion for the GWR naturally, having been inducted by a scholarly father in the pleasures of visiting historical places. An aficionado of Revolutionary War history, Dodson hits on plenty of battles along his path, which stretches from Pennsylvania and down the Shenandoah Valley into the Carolinas and Georgia. Like so many historic roads, the GWR began as a Native trail, but it soon came to serve as a conduit for moving new waves of immigrants out of crowded cities like Philadelphia into unsettled places. On that score, Dodson serves up an apposite quote from Benjamin Franklin, who, in an intemperate moment, railed, “Why should Pennsylvania, funded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of us Anglifying them?” Many of Dodson’s historical subjects are those Germans, many others Scots-Irish, while his modern interlocutors come from all over, with one generous-minded local historian remarking, “The good news…is that many of the migrants we see coming here from Central and South America are hardworking folks eager to make a living.” Dodson touches on other current controversies, including efforts to remove Confederate statues from Southern historical sites and, of more specialist interest, the exact routes of the GWR’s numerous spurs. He writes with a light hand, talking with everyone who comes across his path and capturing some apt ideas, including one observation that in the colonial American melting pot, “the English built the houses, the Germans built the barns, and the Scots-Irish built the stills.”

Armchair travelers will enjoy Dodson’s wanderings—and may even be inspired to explore the road on their own.