This long-used trail in Virginia ran from Conroy Island in the Potomac River to near the North Carolina border at Occaneechie State Park and was traveled over centuries by Susquehannock trading with other American Indians in the Carolinas and by Iroquois moving south before winter and north before summer. Its recorded history begins with the Virginia Act of 1662, which noted plain paths including this one east of the Catoctin and Bull Run Mountains. Thomas, 6th Lord Fairfax, began issuing land grants along it in 1727, and as valuable farmland drew settlers, white travelers increasingly used the route. It became known as the Carolina Road and also as Rogues Road because horse and cattle thieves made travel dangerous, leading the Virginia Assembly in 1742 to require livestock drovers to show a bill of sale on demand. As travel increased in the 18th century, taverns called ordinaries appeared every 10-20 miles, including West’s Ordinary, established before 1748 one mile south of here. In the 1772 Treaty of Albany, the Iroquois agreed not to migrate east of the Blue Ridge again, ending their use of the path. By 1779 the road appeared on a map, by the turn of the 19th century it had gained the name Old Carolina Road, and it appeared on a statewide map in 1827 and prominently on the 1853 Yardley Taylor map of Loudoun County. In August 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette traveled this road by carriage procession to nearby Oak Hill, where former president James Monroe lived, and crowds gathered along the way to cheer Lafayette and Monroe. Large plantations along the road helped secure its continued importance, and during the Civil War both Union and Confederate armies marched on it. During the July 6, 1864, fight at Mt. Zion Church, men of the 2nd Massachusetts and 13th New York cavalries fled south on this road pursued by Mosby’s Rangers. In the late 1930s, a New Deal WPA project built modern U.S. Route 15 just west of it, replacing the Carolina Road, though parts remained as rural byways and this section was left to local farm use. Today this stretch is maintained by the Mount Zion Cemetery of Aldie, Inc., the Piedmont Environmental Council, and NOVA Parks, and the Old Carolina Road is once again a footpath.