The Trading Road to the Catawba and Cherokee

This will be a narrated slideshow about the Trading Road shown on the 1733 Moseley Map of NC. There is no record of any court-ordered wagon roads in the backcountry at the time Moseley made his map, yet there it is, arcing like Interstate 85 across the Carolina Piedmont. Research into this peculiarity surfaced a good deal of information about when this road was pioneered, by whom, and why it was built. That information provides the core of the presentation and will open up possibilities for discussing who used it after it was built.

About the speaker: Tom Magnuson

Tom Magnuson was born and raised in Minnesota. He entered the Merchant Marine while in high school and worked summers on river and lake craft. After high school, he became a “blue-water” seaman for a year before trying college. Finding school, not to his liking he enlisted in the US Marine Corps and after four years in the Marine Corps (1965-1969) he married and returned to college. He earned his BA and MA in American History while employed as a research specialist in the integrated circuit industry. A short while later, while employed by the US Navy Special Projects Office, the Navy sent him to the Naval Post Graduate School where faculty convinced him to continue his research after completing his course of study. Thus, in 1978 Tom moved to North Carolina to study and work with that great military historian, Theodore Ropp, at Duke University. What started as an avocational interest in North Carolina’s culture and history eventually took over his life and led, in 1999, to his founding of the Trading Path Association as a means of preserving vestiges of that wonderful history threatened by urban sprawl.