The Wilderness Trail
March of 1775 was one of the most historically significant months in the history of Virginia—indeed, in the history of our nation. Most students of American history probably remember it as the month when Patrick Henry delivered his rallying “Liberty or Death” speech in St. John’s Church, Richmond on March 23. But just a few days before that speech was delivered, out on the frontier in and around the southwestern mountains of Virginia, another chapter in the fight for Independence was unfolding. At a place called Sycamore Shoals, in what is now East Tennessee, the details of the purchase of the land known now as Kentucky was being negotiated between the Cherokee Indians and the Transylvania Land Company. At the Long Island trading grounds in what is now Kingsport, TN, a well-known woodsman named Daniel Boone was waiting for word from the land company that the purchase had been accomplished so that he could immediately leave to blaze—mark—a trail for others to follow into the land that had just been purchased. He met up with most of the thirty axmen hired to help him at the Anderson Blockhouse which was under construction at the time just outside the Holston Settlement (Kingsport). Over the next twenty years, the Anderson Blockhouse became the stepping off point for 250,000 to 300,000 people who walked that famous path, now known as the Wilderness Trail, through the Cumberland Gap and on into the heartland of America. The Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail Association is dedicated to preserving that historic trail and to documenting the stories of the brave men and women—settlers, Native People, and African slaves—whose footsteps led West to the establishment of this great nation.