"From their initial stronghold in south central Pennsylvania, the Borderlanders spread south down the mountains on an ancient 800-mile long Indian trail that came to be known as the Great Wagon Road. This crude passage led out of Lancaster and York, through Hagerstown (in what is now the western panhandle of Maryland), down the length of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, and through the highlands of North Carolina to terminate in what is now Augusta, Georgia. Tens of thousands of Borderlanders and their herds migrated along this trail to new land in the rugged, barely explored Southern upcountry. As Ulster and the Scottish Marches emptied between 1730 and 1750, the population of North Carolina doubled, and then doubled again by 1770. Southwestern Virginia was growing at 9 percent a year, and in the South Carolina backcountry in the 1760s, almost the entire population had come from Pennsylvania or interior Virginia. The Borderlanders may have technically moved into colonies controlled by Tidewater gentry and the great planters of the Deep South, but in cultural terms their Appalachian nation effectively cut Tidewater off from the interior, blocking the West Indian slaveocracy from advancing into the southern uplands. Not until after the revolution would they control any formal governments; places called Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia did not yet exist."
Source: Colin Woodard. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2011.
Source: Colin Woodard. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2011.