The Trading Path
Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina
Marker Inscription
Trading Path. Colonial trading route, dating from the seventeenth century, from Petersburg, Virginia, to the Catawba Indians in Carolina, passed nearby.
Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
The Story
The Trading Path, dating from the 1600s, linked Petersburg, Virginia, to the Catawba people of the Carolina Piedmont. Along it moved traders, packhorses, and the goods that bound Native nations to distant colonial markets. Following routes long used by Indigenous travelers, the path passed nearby and helped funnel settlers into the region.
Why it matters
As the main colonial trade artery of the Piedmont, the Trading Path shaped both Native economies and the settlement pattern of the Carolinas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1600s, the Carolina Piedmont was Native country, laced with long-established routes that connected villages, hunting grounds, and river crossings. When European traders began pushing inland from the Virginia colony, they followed these older ways, and a network of overland paths took shape between the settled coast and the interior.
One of the most important ran from Petersburg, Virginia, southward to the Catawba people of the Carolina Piedmont. Petersburg sat at the fall line, a natural gathering point where goods were staged before the long journey inland, and from there the route reached deep into the backcountry.
This was a frontier of trade rather than towns. The relationship between the colony and the Catawba nation was carried along this path, and the goods, animals, and people who moved through here gave the interior its first sustained ties to the wider Atlantic world. The route passed through this very region on its way to Catawba country.
People & events
The people who gave this path its life were the traders driving packhorses south from Petersburg and the Catawba who met them to trade. European cloth, tools, and manufactured goods traveled inland; deerskins and other products of the hunt traveled back toward colonial markets. It was a demanding, repeated exchange that depended on relationships built over many journeys.
The Catawba were central to the story. As hunters and trading partners, they shaped the commerce that flowed along the route, and the goods that came up the path changed the texture of daily life in their communities. The trade brought opportunity, but it also tied the nation ever more tightly to forces reaching in from outside.
Where traders led, others eventually followed. The knowledge of the route spread, and the same path that carried deerskins and cloth began to guide settlers into the region. A road built for commerce slowly became a road of settlement.
Its place in the American story
This route belongs to a broad American pattern: the colonial economy reaching inland along Indigenous trails, drawing Native nations into distant markets through the deerskin trade. The line from Petersburg to Catawba country shows how a coastal colony's commerce could stretch hundreds of miles into the continent.
It also marks the hinge between two eras. Trading paths were often the first lasting European presence in interior regions, and they opened the way for the settlement that followed. For the Catawba and their neighbors, the arrival of that settlement — carried in part along this very route — reshaped their world profoundly.
A single trade artery of the Piedmont thus stands for the larger story of contact and change in colonial America: trade first, then settlers, and lasting consequences for the Native nations whose land the path crossed.
If you visit
The marker points to something you can't quite see: the trace of an old colonial route that passed nearby on its way to Catawba country. Come ready to imagine rather than to photograph, because the real sight here is a road that has faded back into the landscape.
Around you now is a busy modern setting, which makes the contrast worth pausing over. Picture packhorse trains instead of traffic, and consider how a route chosen for practical travel three centuries ago helped set the pattern for the region that grew up afterward.
As part of a Piedmont road trip, this stop pairs well with the other Trading Path markers scattered across the region. Track them down and you can follow, in spirit, a route that once linked Virginia to the Native nations of the Carolinas — a reminder that today's roads often run atop far older ones.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Trading Path
Concord, NC
The Trading Path was a colonial overland route that took shape in the 1600s, carrying traders and goods south from the Virginia settlements toward the Catawba and Waxhaw peoples of the Carolina Piedmont. Much of it followed far older Indigenous trails. This artery of deerskins, cloth, and manufactured wares helped open the backcountry to European settlement, and it passed near this spot.
The Trading Path
Waxhaw, NC
Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Trading Path ran from Petersburg, Virginia, deep into the Carolina backcountry to reach the Waxhaw people. Traders drove packhorses along the route, exchanging European goods for deerskins and building the earliest commercial ties between colony and Native nations. The path passed nearby, threading through country that would soon fill with settlers.
Red Hill
Concord, NC
Red Hill was the home and tavern of John and Martin Pheifer, a hospitable stop in the Cabarrus County backcountry where travelers of note broke their journeys. Its guests reportedly included royal Governor William Tryon and, later, President George Washington during his 1791 Southern Tour. Taverns like Red Hill were the inns, courtrooms, and news exchanges of their day.
R. Gregg Cherry
Gastonia, NC
R. Gregg Cherry served as governor of North Carolina from 1945 to 1949, guiding the state through the transition from World War II to peacetime. A former legislator, he championed better roads and rural electrification that modernized life for farm families across the state. His grave lies three miles southeast.