During its eighty-two-year history, the Warm Springs Turnpike carried many notable travelers. Daniel Boone used the road in old age when he visited the sons of his boyhood friend Henry Miller at Mossy Creek Ironworks south of Bridgewater, spending about two weeks with the younger Millers hunting and recalling earlier times. Tradition holds that Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay frequented Bridgewater inns while traveling between their homes in Tennessee and Kentucky and Washington, D.C. President Martin Van Buren traveled by coach to the springs to escape the summer heat in the Capitol, and Jerome Bonaparte, later named king of Spain by his brother Napoleon, also journeyed along the road to the springs. Betsy Patterson of Bordentown, New Jersey, who met Jerome Bonaparte at one of the resorts and nearly cost him the crown of Spain, also passed this way. In the 1840s, a young Jed Hotchkiss of New York walked this road and became tutor to the ironmaster’s children at Mossy Creek; later he became Thomas Jonathan Stonewall Jackson’s mapmaker during the War Between the States. Writer, illustrator, and Civil War officer David Hunter Strother, known as Porte Crayon, traveled the road while exploring western Virginia before the war. Stonewall Jackson moved along the road with his army on May 18, 1862, after the victory at McDowell in Highland County and camped that night in nearby fields after much of the day had been spent crossing the rain-swollen North River on a makeshift wagon bridge. Confederate General John D. Imboden’s Northwestern Brigade guarded the North River line on several occasions and moved along the road at various times during the Civil War, as did Confederate Major General Thomas L. Rosser’s cavalry division. The Southern partisan ranger company commanded by Missourian Charles Woodson received horses at Bridgewater in the summer of 1864, and several local boys enlisted in the unit. On September 30, 1864, General George Armstrong Custer forded the North River and rode through Bridgewater to his new command, the 3rd U.S. Cavalry Division, camped on the heights to the northeast. On October 2, 1864, a cavalry action occurred along the pike and in the fields where Jackson had camped in 1862. After the Civil War, Belle Boyd traveled the pike and lectured at the Bridgewater Opera House on her wartime exploits. Shenandoah Valley historian John W. Wayland later traveled the Warm Springs Turnpike scores of times while gathering material for his books and articles on Valley people and their culture.