Bloomingdale Rd. (Great Warrior’s Path)
You are traveling on the ancient Great Warriors Path, the most significant Indian and pioneer trail in the Eastern United States. The Eastern end began in a fanned out pattern in numerous places in the Northeastern United States in the land of the Iroquois and Delaware. It came down the Great Valley of Virginia and passed through Cumberland Gap and on to the Blue Grass region of Kentucky and to the Ohio Country of the Shawnee. US 11W approximated its route down Reedy Creek from Abingdon and Bristol, until the present Bloomingdale Road branches off to the north of the modern road, only to reconverge near the mouth of Reedy Creek just upstream from the Netherland Inn.
Feeder trails from North Carolina fed into it near Kingsport, and a variation on the trail down the Great Valley of Virginia, the Blue Grass Trail, joins in after coming from its origin in Fincastle, Virginia. This trail followed the North Fork of the Holston from its source to join the Wilderness Trail at the Blockhouse.
The main trail to Kentucky branched off a little to the east, with the road you are currently on continuing into the land of the Overhill Cherokee in East and Central Tennessee. In 1750 Dr. Thomas Walker led an expedition from Albemarle County, Virginia, (near Charlottesville) to explore the region on into Kentucky on behalf of the Royal Company, which had just gotten a royal charter for 800,000 acres in the area. He missed the turnoff from this road, near present Arcadia, and thus missed the first of the passes through the Allegheny Mountains on the trail to the west. He continued down this road to present Rogersville, Tennessee, where he cut across country before he regained the trail on Powell’s River in Lee County, Virginia.
In 1769 Joseph Martin led a group of settlers in a race for land sponsored by Dr. Walker and the Royal Land Company. He, also, missed the turn to the north off of this road by the Wilderness Road, or the Warrior’s Path. Like Walker before him, he rambled around lost in the Valley of the Clinch before he regained Powell Valley, where he became its first settler.