Indigenous Routes and Settler Town Formation in the Southern Colonial Backcountry: Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Land Records with GIS

During the middle third of the eighteenth century, backcountry regions in the Southern colonies under English control experienced an explosion of European settlement and urbanization.  While that phenomenon has been studied extensively in the Shenandoah Valley, this paper focuses on the process as it occurred in the North Carolina Piedmont.  European settlement in frontier areas such as this is usually described and researched as if the landscape were a blank slate, and the Europeans the first to inscribe their culture upon that slate.  In actuality, the land was already inscribed with numerous landscape features, which in turn affected the spatial choices of settlers and thus helped form the landscapes we see today.  In this paper, I look specifically at the influence of an indigenous-origin road, the Indian Trading Path, on settlers' land choices and the emergence of towns in the Piedmont.  I first present a theoretically informed model of how initial conditions which include such a route might promote frontier town development, then report the results of a GIS-based analysis of the region that today includes the Triangle area of North Carolina, using landgrant documents from 1748-1763 to map out settler choices in the first documented wave of colonization.  The spatial and temporal analysis of the landgrant data strongly suggests that the Indian Trading Path influenced both rural density and the development of an historically important town on the route, Hillsborough, well before the emergence of any other towns in the study area.