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| 1745-1776: The Colonial Period: Exits Off the Great Wagon Road |
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| Several
historical sources indicate that Native American trails laid the foundation
for the Great Wagon Road, which was known as the main highway of the
colonial back country. Running from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to
Augusta, Georgia, this significant road included present-day Stokes,
Forsyth, and Davidson
counties among its earliest exits. Unlike eastern North Carolina,
many of the Northwest Piedmont's early settlers came down the Great
Wagon Road from the North. These early settlers trickled into our region beginning in the 1740s. Settlement was sparse and mostly consisted of scattered groups of extended kinfolk. Family groups settled along both sides of the Yadkin River and in the area between present-day Germanton and Walnut Cove. Our region's proximity to the Great Wagon Road opened it to perhaps a wider variety of Europeans, not the just the Scotch-Irish so often associated with the American South. German, Swiss, Welsh, French Huguenots, and other Europeans certainly made their way down the Great Wagon Road to become some of the early settlers of our region. Germans played an equal if not greater role in the settlement of the area. In addition to the German Wachovia settlement in present-day Forsyth County, Germans were also some of the first settlers of Stokes, Davidson, and Davie counties. Written records of music for groups other than the Moravians do not emerge until well after the American Revolution. In all likelihood, the music of most of the non-Moravian settlers who came down the Great Wagon Road concentrated on the fiddle, as did music in other parts of the South. In fact, in the New World, the fiddle was everywhere. According to historian Bill Malone, |
 1775 Map of Great Wagon Road in Our Area |
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"The fiddle came with the earliest colonists,
was soon mastered by nearly every folk group in North America, from
the French inhabitants of Acadia to the blacks of the south."
2 A social dance, be it a formal plantation quadrille or a rural frolic, was the primary venue for early North American fiddlers. |
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