07/04/2026
🇺🇸 Happy 250th, America! 🇺🇸
Good Morning, ! If you’d stood near the Big Lick in the colonial years, the first thing you’d notice was the smell—briny, mineral—and the mud cut with hoofprints. Deer and buffalo came to the licks. So did people. Before “Big Lick” was a town name, it was a place everybody knew because of the Valley beauty and the salt licks.
Life in the valley was mostly work. Settlements took time. Clearing land was no small task. Cabins went up with neighbors’ help. Gardens had to be guarded from deer. Corn had to make it. Fences had to stand. Over time, familiar surnames kept appearing around the lick and along the bottoms—**Evans**, **Tosh**, **Akers**, **Terry**, **Brown**, **Burke**, **Carvin**, **Rentfroe**, **Griffith**—families clearing land, raising children, and trying to get through winter with enough left in the crib and smokehouse.
The licks provided nutrition to the wildlife more than you think and were a natural stop. Drovers watered stock there. Hunters lingered. Travelers traded news a little at a time. There was no TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook, or instant communication. News came when it came.
The Great Wagon Road mattered, too. It carried families, wagons, livestock, tools, rumors, and ambitions down through the Shenandoah Valley into the Virginia and Carolina backcountry. Places like Big Lick were shaped by that movement—not as polished destinations, but as practical stops where travelers could water animals, repair what broke, trade what they had, and decide whether to keep going south or put down roots.
It was not a soft life. People lived on a rough edge—far from old centers, close to danger, in the wild, and dependent on neighbors whether they liked it or not.
When the Revolution came, it reached the backcountry through shortages, interruptions, confusion, militia musters, divided neighbors, raids, forts, lead shot, wagon roads, and the steady push of settlement. Southwest Virginia was not a quiet edge of the story. It was a hard, dangerous, and important frontier.
Even before independence was declared, frontier leaders signed the Fincastle Resolutions in January 1775, pledging resistance to British tyranny before the Declaration of Independence had even been written. The people here were far from the polished rooms where speeches were made, but not far from the argument over liberty.
The region mattered in practical ways. The lead mines near present-day Austinville in Wythe County supplied shot for Washington’s army and Patriot forces in the South. Here, the Revolution was not only ideals on paper. It was ammunition, horses, wagons, tools, food, and families keeping farms alive while the war took what it needed.
The danger was complicated. The Cherokee War of 1776 brought violence across the frontier as settlers pushed farther onto Cherokee land, and militias built forts across the New River Valley for protection. Communities were also split by Tory activity, with Loyalists and Patriots sometimes living uncomfortably close together. The backcountry could turn partisan fast—neighbor against neighbor, raid against raid, rumor against rumor.
By 1780, frontier strength helped shape the war farther south. The Overmountain Men—Patriot militia from the western settlements, including leaders such as William Campbell—gathered at Abingdon and marched south to Kings Mountain. Their victory over Loyalist forces helped break British momentum in the Southern campaign.
So I do not imagine the Revolution arriving here only as grand news from Philadelphia or Williamsburg. I imagine it coming down the road in worn boots, broken wagon wheels, hungry horses, nervous families, militia calls, and hard choices. Muster days pulled men from fields. Women and older children kept farms going. Wagons and worn-out soldiers appeared on the road. During the war, my family, who had immigrated from Germany in 1740s and settled in the Buchanan area, made wagon wheels and parts, as well as feeding soldiers and their horses as much as they could when they passed through the Botetourt County area.
Still, Big Lick remained Big Lick: a muddy, briny place where animals and people kept coming. On the Fourth of July, that is worth remembering. Independence was not only made in capitals. It was held together in places like our little Valley by ordinary families doing the hard, unglamorous work that kept things going while soldiers fought for true independence.
We know the famous heroes of the Revolutionary War and probably have our favorites. But the war was also helped by people who crossed an ocean for a cause that was not theirs by birth. My personal favorite is the Marquis de Lafayette.
Lafayette was barely more than a teenager when he came to America, bringing his rank, money, safety, and future with him. He did not come for a ribbon or a polished portrait. He came when the army was short on everything, learned the hard business of war, and stayed when the cause looked shaky.
Washington trusted him, and Lafayette earned that trust by sharing rough conditions, taking real risks, and caring deeply for the soldiers under him. Moving between American camps and French courts, he used his name like a tool, not a trophy, pressing France to stay invested in what often looked like a thin and reckless gamble.
Late in the war, especially in Virginia, Lafayette helped keep pressure on Cornwallis, bottle up British forces, and buy time until the larger net could be thrown. Yorktown was not one man’s victory, but Lafayette helped set the table for it—where French troops and French ships helped close the trap.
So today, alongside the local names who held on around Big Lick, General Washington, the Culper Spy Ring, and countless men, women, Black Americans, and others, it is worth tipping the hat to the young Frenchman who treated American independence not as a romantic idea, but as a duty. Lafayette risked himself to keep the American experiment alive.
And when the work feels messy or unfinished—as it always does—it helps to remember Lafayette’s words: “Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.”
May we honor that gift today not just with fireworks, but with steady resolve to widen the circle of freedom, kindness, pride, and love—neighbor by neighbor, year by year. Have a wonderful Independence Day, my fellow lovers of history! Love, ~BLHA
