Doing a quick look for a refresher on exactly where the Roan Highlands lie (answer: closer to Bristol and Boone than Asheville), I was also struck again by how little sense the colonial political boundaries make. We’re looking at the corners of five different states, within the relatively small area shown here. The red marker is for a little town on the Tennessee side of the border with NC, which runs along the ridgeline of Roan Mountain (and the Unakas more generally).

It still makes so much more sense to look at things in terms of topography and river drainages, and the travel routes related to that geography. Not to mention historical events and geopolitical relationships–which are just never going to be understandable in terms of political boundaries which didn’t even exist until recently. (Which I sometimes have to think the people in charge are counting on with how they’re presenting what info they’ve chosen, but hey. Reminded again of another map I had to comment on a while back.)

Anyway, with this particular map area, to great extent it still makes more sense to think in terms of existing pre-Colonial travel and trade routes tying the whole place together–and connecting up other areas. With a lot of the major roads/rail lines/etc. following sections of that, because of course they would. Also town sites getting taken over, but hey.

That’s no less relevant (or historically important) than the Roman-built road network here in the UK which were the only decent roads for centuries and went on to form the backbone of the modern highway system. lncluding right in front of our house. But, of course that doesn’t get talked about much in the US. I kind of wish I could find my copy of Alan Briceland’s Westward from Virginia: The Exploration of the Virginia-Carolina Frontier, 1650-1710 right now, but it’s still packed up in a box somewhere. (And I see my rating from 5 years ago is the only one on Goodreads 😅) It goes into some detail for that exact area, and I didn’t even know how much of the current infrastructure got built up from what was already there. Of course that doesn’t just apply to this particular region, it’s just the one I know the most about.

I grew up in Bluefield (on the WV side–the gold star at that zoom level), then Radford (VA). Which was right at a major hub, with multiple other major route branches within 50 miles. (Roanoke/Salem is just off that map view, to the NE.) Including easy access right down the Blue Ridge to what’s now Cherokee National Forest and the Roan Highlands, yeah. Where I-81 parallels the main route down there now. Besides the longterm trade routes toward the Chesapeake, Great Lakes, Gulf of Mexico, up toward Maine, etc. But sure, the geographical isolation and backwardness! 🙄

Anyway, I had to think of that again too, with the distance there looking like nothing from where I’m sitting now. It never really was that much, in more ways than one.