The Great Road was one of the six sections of the Wilderness Road, the great migration route over the Cumberland Gap that carried Daniel Boone, thousands of settlers, and later travelers westward into Kentucky and beyond. In the Valley of Virginia, occupied for 10,000 years since glaciers retreated north, settlers in the 1730s blazed new routes and used existing paths to develop a main road along the Valley as European immigrants, especially Swiss-German and Scots-Irish, poured into Virginia and North Carolina. By 1748 the road ran to North Carolina, by the late eighteenth century it had been improved as a stage road though it remained difficult in many places, and by 1840 the Valley Turnpike, roughly corresponding to Rt. 11, had been built from Winchester to Harrisburg. Along this road, prosperous towns such as Winchester, Stephens City, and Middletown supported a rich craft tradition, while places in the Valley reflected the region’s settlement and cultural history, including the McCormick farm near Steele’s Tavern, birthplace of the mechanical reaper; Staunton, which grew from Augusta County’s first log courthouse built in 1745 and was laid out in 1749; and Augusta Stone Church at Fort Defiance, whose original log building was erected in 1740 and whose present stone structure was built in 1749 under the Rev. John Craig.