The Old Road
Where once marched Regulators, 'lo¬
ries, Patriots, and a tired Confeder¬
ate Army there nou is merely Prog¬
ress.
By PAUL KOEPKE
(Excerpted Irom "Two-Moon Pond", to be published next month by John F. Blair)
Twenty years ago Paul Koepke
and his wife " forsook the dubi¬
ous advantages of city life" and
moved to Two-Moon Pond, a
five-acre plot with a one-acre
pond, located in Durham
County. N.C. If life since then
has been less idyllic than was ex¬
pected. it has afforded substance
for a highly entertaining collec¬
tion of stories, written with rare
wit and elegance. This chapter
concerns the remarkable rural
road on which Two- Moon Pond
is located. — Pd.
If G. K. Chesterton had it right, it
was the rolling English drunkard who
made the rolling English road, and if
the old. original portion of Cornwallis
Road we came to live on was not
strictly English, geographically
speaking, it met all the other require¬
ments for it was laid out by an En¬
glishman, and as previously noted, roll
it most definitely did.
As for its maker, it was not General
Cornwallis, as many suppose, but
rather William Tryon, the British colo¬
nial governor of North Carolina from
1765 to 1771. Whether he was a rolling
drunkard or not cannot be definitively
stated, but certainly he was a Briton of
his time with sufficient means to afford
as much port, hock, sherry, and bran-
dywine as was needed to offset bore¬
dom and the lack of central healing.
If he did in fact have a glass too much
on occasion, he doubtless had his rea¬
sons. After all, there he was. olT in the
boondocks of colonial America, far
from the London fleshpots. trying to
keep the King's peace from being vio¬
lated by. in his opinion, as scurvy a
pack of rebellious rascals as one shall
see in a summer's day.
They called themselves Regulators,
and they lived mainly in the western
part of the colony. In rebellion against
oppressive government policies and
practices, they committed acts of vio-
THE STATE. JUNE 1903
lence against government officials and
property in Hillsborough, and in early
1771 Governor Tryon raised almost
one thousand militia at forty shillings a
head to move against them.
He found, however, that there was
only a bridle path connecting Raleigh,
where the existing road ended, with
Hillsborough and so ordered a road to
be made to accommodate the troops
and wagons. This was done, and he
named it the Ramsgate Road.
Tryon and his troops finally reached
Hillsborough in the spring of 1771 and
pressed on to Alamance Creek. There
they confronted and defeated two
thousand undisciplined and roistering
Regulators on May 10 and took fifteen
prisoners. One was summarily shot by
way of intimidation, and the remaining
fourteen were marched to Hills¬
borough and tried. Six were found
guilty, and the court, contrary to mod¬
ern practice, decided that, rather than
suspend the sentence, they would sus¬
pend the Regulators. In Hillsborough,
in the June of 1771. the six were duly
hanged.
And so. out of upheaval and
bloodshed, the rolling Ramsgate Road
was born and proved a boon to the
farmers and landowners of the area.
But in addition to the obvious benefits
they bring, roads also have a tendency
to draw traffic and trouble as horse
droppings draw flies. Such was the
case when, in February of 1781. after
the Battle of Cowpens and a fruitless
pursuit of General Greene’s army to
the Dan River. General Cornwallis and
his badly mauled and ill-provisioned
troops fell back on their primary sup¬
ply base at Hillsborough. Here it was
discovered that the provisions prom¬
ised by the loyalists (who were pre¬
dominant in the area) had not been de¬
livered. and the cupboard was bare. As
a result, foraging parties were sent out.
and there is no doubt that the
Ramsgate Road provided them with
easy access to such supplies as were
available. It is no wonder that the Tory
farmers cursed as they saw their oxen
and even their draft horses being led
off to the regimental cookpots and
their goods and chattels pillaged by the
swarm of camp followers, male and
female, who straggled in the army's
train. It was then that the inhabitants
began to mutter about "the Cornwallis
Road." and the name became firmly
fixed through common usage as yet
another tessera in the mosaic of local
tradition.
Poul Koepke on the bonks ot Two-Moon Pond which
has, he soys, "but one 900I in life ond thot is to
become
о
nice, soggy mo«sh when it grows up "
After the Battle of Guilford Court¬
house was concluded and the world
turned upside down at Yorktown. the
tide of loyalist-patriot rancor gradually
ebbed, and the old road once again
bore the traffic of rural tranquility.
Dusty and rutted in summer, frozen
and rutted in winter, and a glutinous
gumbo the rest of the time, it lay
quietly outside the mainstream of
events for eighty-four years until, in
April of 1865. it again found itself
briefly a minor artery in the throbbing
corpus of organized violence. After the
Battle of Bentonvillc on March 16 of
that year. General Johnston and his
tattered and weary Confederate army
retreated north to Hillsborough. Once
again foot soldiers trudged, wagons
creaked, caissons rumbled, and driv¬
ers swore on the Cornwallis Road.
Sherman moved to occupy Raleigh and
sent his advance to Durham Station. It
was to be the final face-off of the blue
and gray. Events moved swiftly. Lee
surrendered at Appomattox on April 9;
Lincoln was assassinated on April 14;
and negotiations for the final Confed¬
erate surrender began on Easter Mon¬
day. April 17.
11
