🛤️The Land Under the City

1. ↳ Trade and Tryon — the Square. When you leave, walk south on Tryon and understand the street itself as the exhibit.

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   Independence Square (Trade & Tryon)

   Two Native American trading paths crossed at what is now the corner of Trade and Tryon — an east-west route that was part of the network later called the Great Trading Path, and the north-south route that settlers coming down the Great Wagon Road would follow — and a small trading settlement grew up at this crossroads before Charlotte was formally founded. The Great Trading Path, also called the Occaneechi Path and dated in our records to about 1700, ran roughly 800 miles from Petersburg, Virginia through the Piedmont toward the Catawba and Waxhaw villages below Charlotte. Thomas Polk built his house at the crossing in 1755, and when the town was platted in 1767 the east-west path became Trade Street and the Wagon Road became Tryon. Nothing at this corner marks any of that older story. The crossing itself is the artifact — and the walk you're about to take down Tryon is the tour.

   Full details, hours & sources for Independence Square (Trade & Tryon) →

2. ↳ South Tryon Street at Morehead Street — straight down Tryon from the Square, about twelve minutes.

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   Trading Path (NC highway marker L-36)

   • 🏖️ History stop — Site only — the building is gone

   The one physical marker this city has for the route its main street follows. State highway marker L-36 (cast 1957) reads: 'Colonial trading route, dating from the seventeenth century, from Petersburg, Virginia, to the Catawba Indians in Carolina, passed nearby.' 'Passed nearby' is as precise as the record gets, and this guide adds nothing to it. The state's own essay for the marker says Virginia traders carried guns, gunpowder, knives, jewelry, blankets, and hatchets down this route to exchange with the Catawba and other Piedmont tribes, and that the explorer John Lawson traveled a segment of it around 1700. You just walked six-tenths of a mile of the same alignment. That is the whole tour's honest method: the road survived; almost nothing else did.

   Full details, hours & sources for Trading Path (NC highway marker L-36) →

3. ↳ 3500 Shamrock Drive — this leg is a drive, about fifteen minutes east. Rock House tours run on a docent schedule; check the museum's hours before you go.

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   Hezekiah Alexander Rock House (Charlotte Museum of History)

   The oldest surviving home in Mecklenburg County is a settler's stone house from about 1774 — which is itself the honest measure of what's left standing here: the county's oldest building postdates the trading paths by generations. It sits on the Charlotte Museum of History's campus, and the museum's published articles are where this region's deep history is held: the Catawba inhabited the Piedmont for at least 6,000 years, calling themselves 'yeh is-WAH h'reh' — people of the river; colonial-era estimates put their population between 15,000 and 25,000; by 1728 disease and conflict had cut it to roughly 1,400, and the smallpox epidemics of 1738 and 1759 reduced it further still. The Catawba Nation's own history records that its first contact with Europeans came when de Soto's expedition marched through the Piedmont in 1540, looking for gold. The Nation is not a past-tense subject — it is present-day, across the river in South Carolina, and its story is its own to tell: catawba.com is where to read it, and the Nation's Cultural Center near Rock Hill is the day-trip this tour ends by pointing to.

   Full details, hours & sources for Hezekiah Alexander Rock House (Charlotte Museum of History) →

   Quiz yourself: What does 'yeh is-WAH h'reh' — the Catawba people's name for themselves — mean?

   1. People of the hills
   2. People of the river
   3. Keepers of the path
   4. People of the tall pines

   Answer: People of the river

   'People of the river' — the name the Catawba Nation carries for itself, as recorded in the Nation's and the Charlotte Museum of History's published materials. The river is the Catawba, and the Nation lives beside it today.

The whole route on one line — the beads sit where the ground puts them, not where a layout would like them.