By Matthew Cumberledge, GCHS Executive Director
Serenity, a term that can still adequately be used to describe the great natural beauty of Greene County and the entirety of the Upper Ohio Valley Region. In times past such a word would just merely begin to describe the rolling hills covered in a great, vast, and seemingly endless, forest. For most of the natural and geological history of this continent, the trappings of the modern world were a thing unknown. The native inhabitants of this land lived as a part of nature, not something separate from it as we do today. But, even as the natives understood their world, it was a very managed landscape.
It is not exactly known when humans first found their way into the Americas. The Clovis Culture, one of the earliest identifiable groups to inhabit the Western Hemisphere, was on the scene nearly thirteen thousand years ago. However, there are archaeological sites that seem to indicate that human activity in this hemisphere could date back well over twenty thousand years.
The first Americans were purely a hunter/gatherer people, though as the centuries came and went, agriculture became the primary means of survival. Villages, and in some cases large settlements and cities arose, but one thing never changed – the Native Americans were always a highly mobile people.
Looking at a map of the United States in the year 2020, you will see that there are hundreds of ways to get from point A to point B, our network of roads and highways is one of the most advanced systems of travel in the world, but our current roadways strongly echo the original network of highways that once traversed this continent.
When European settlers first arrived, they largely followed the woodland trails and pathways that had long been established by their Native American predecessors. As European population increased, so did the use of these ancient trails; they grew larger, expanded and formed the basis of our current highway infrastructure. Many of the roads we travel now are successors of these ancient paths, from some of our largest interstate highways, to simple back country roads; we are still following in the footsteps of the earliest Americans.
Perhaps best known in our region is the Warrior Trail. The Warrior Trail is an ancient path, according to the Warrior Trail Association, dating back well over 5000 years. The Trail begins at the Monongahela River near Greensboro Penna, and traverses Monongahela, Dunkard, Greene, Whiteley, Perry, Franklin, Wayne, Jackson and Aleppo Townships for 45 miles to the West Virginia Border. From there, it crosses through Marshall County West Virginia meeting the Ohio River at the mouth of Fish Creek, and significantly, the Warrior Trail links the Ohio and Monongahela Rivers on a pathway that never crosses any major water ways.
Early scholars of the Warrior Trail, specifically Dr. Paul R. “Prexy” Stewart of Waynesburg University did much of the groundwork researching and retracing the Warrior Trail. Dr. Stewart’s studies led him to believe that the trail ultimately crossed the Ohio River and was the primary route to Flint Ridge, Ohio, the site of a very ancient Flint Quarry that was important to Native American’s throughout history as a source of easily workable and beautiful flint.
Five thousand years takes us well back into the prehistory of North America to a time period known as the Archaic Period. The Native Americans of the Archaic Period weren’t settled in villages; they moved around seasonally from location to location staying close to food sources and following the migration patterns of wild game; they had not yet experimented with agriculture. Paths such as the Warrior Trail in this time period may have served as migration routes, but as population increased and people began to settle down into small hamlets, trails became the veins of a vast and ever expanding trade network that would be at its height during the Adena and Hopewell periods that began around 200BC.
If Dr. Stewart was indeed accurate, and the Warrior Trail connected the southwestern Pennsylvania region to Flint Ridge, Ohio, it would be the very path that brought many of the colorful flint arrowheads and projectile points that are found in archaeological sites all over the county. During Hopewell times, there was a large ceremonial complex of earthworks in Newark, Ohio, just west of Flint Ridge, that became the center of a vast trade network that exchanged goods and ideas from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River. It is very possible that our local Native American populations used the Warrior Trail to make pilgrimages to the ceremonial sites in Newark, Ohio.
The Warrior Trail would have been used by the Natives right up through contact with the first Europeans. After the Hopewell Culture declined, a group of people known as the Monongahela Culture populated our rolling hills and quiet streams in small permanent settlements and became the first agriculturalists in the Upper Ohio Valley. The Monongahela also would have used the trail as a main vein traveling east west through the region and connecting village to village and allowing for the continuation of trade.
It wasn’t until the early 20th century that the trail would finally be studied and recorded. Professor Andrew W. Waychoff, and Dr. Paul Rich Stewart began tracing the trail in the first quarter of the 20th century, mapping its path across the county. In October of 1965, a group of individuals led by W. Bertram Waychoff, an associate of Andrew Waychoff and Paul Stewart, formed the Warrior Trail Association to clear, mark and preserve the trail for posterity. Even now, over 55 years later, Warrior Trail Association volunteers have been walking the age old path keeping the trail clear, and updating the yellow markers that dot trees guiding the modern hiker along the path.
The Warrior Trail Association is based in a historic one room school house on Garards Fort Road, and there they hold monthly membership meetings, and meet to go for a hike in the beautiful rolling hills of Greene County, and care for an age old trail that is still in use millennia after the first foot falls blazoned it through virgin forest. For more information on the Warrior Trail, and the Warrior Trail Association, check out their Facebook page, and come to one of their monthly meetings and help preserve an important part of our prehistoric past!