124 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
the Interests of the community, who, pleading most 
eloquently in the general assembly for an appropria- 
tion for a wagon-road over the mountains, uttered 
the wild prophecy that his children would live to see 
the day when a stage-coach with four horses would 
be seen in the west, and the driver's horn would 
wake the echoes of the mountains! The road was 
granted, and came up from the eastern foothills of 
North Carolina some miles north of the railroad that 
now runs from Saluda through the Pacolet Valley to 
Asheville. It crossed the Swannanoa Gap at the 
present "long tunnel" on the Southern Railroad, a 
few miles above Old Fort, where as early as 1770 a 
small fort had been built to keep back the Indians 
who frequently poured down from the gap upon the 
settlers below the mountains, and which to-day is a 
small village with a railroad station. This road fol- 
lowed down the Swannanoa Valley to the present 
site of Biltmore, crossed where Asheville now stands, 
and continued down the beautiful French Broad as 
far as Hot Springs, connecting the mountains with 
the western wilderness of Tennessee as well as with 
the better-settled eastern foothills. The first wagon 
passed from North Carolina to Tennessee in 1795, 
and the making of this, the first road in the moun- 
tains, is recorded as marking an epoch in the develop- 
ment of the country, and if the prophecy of Zebulon 
Baird was not fulfilled to the letter, as it probably 
was, one has only to look at the railway trains now 
passing many times daily over the route, broadly 
speaking, of that first wagon-road, to know that 
