BY MARK WINEKA
SALISBURY POST

Ann Brownlee wears a floppy blue hat, heavy winter coat and woolen gloves against the morning chill.

Consider it the uniform of a crusader. For almost two years, Brownlee has worked quietly in the corners of libraries and courthouses, looking for documents that give flesh to what she considers Rowan County’s meatiest historic site.

Her research also has put her in the field, trampling over poison ivy and through branches to find traces of a history that she knows is hidden somewhere under her feet.

On this morning, Brownlee plans to meet friend Terry Dedmon, whose boat will take them on the Yadkin River to the heart of her obsession.

“There are times I become completely consumed by it,” Brownlee admits.

Brownlee devotes much of her waking hours and personal Web site to Trading Ford, the Yadkin River crossing that she and Dedmon believe played one of the most pivotal roles in the Revolutionary War.

But there’s an urgency to Brownlee’s research these days. She fears that an important historic site — maybe Rowan County’s most important — will be compromised again by a new Duke Power generating facility on the Rowan County side of the Yadkin.

The N.C. Utilities Commission will hold a hearing in Raleigh Nov. 8 on Duke Power’s proposal to build a $300 million, eight-unit combustion turbine generating plant next to the existing Buck Steam plant near Spencer.

If it is ever approved and built, the new facility would use natural gas to generate 640 megawatts of electricity.

Duke Power considers the hearing one more step in its efforts to obtain all the permits necessary for that site, though the company has yet to decide whether it will proceed with construction, possibly by 2004.

Brownlee will hold her own public meeting at 7 p.m. Monday in the Stanback Room of the Rowan Public Library to discuss the importance of Trading Ford and other historic features in this area.

At her meeting, she hopes to rally others to her cause to protect what’s left of the Trading Ford area. She also plans to attend the Utilities Commission meeting in person Nov. 8.

“I don’t see this as an ‘either or’ thing,” Brownlee says. “I’m just asking that they (considerations for protecting the Trading Ford area) be included in the process.”

Brownlee and Dedmon are both disappointed on this particular morning when they realize the Yadkin River is too low to risk a trip to the old ford.

This whole Trading Ford area is closely associated with the old Indian Trading Path that extended from present-day Virginia to Georgia. Historians have written of Indian cultures in this area in 1567, 1670 and 1701. They believe a Spanish fort occupied a spot near the ford in 1567.

Early explorers John Lederer and John Lawson spoke of the ford in their 1670 and 1701 travels, respectively.

Brownlee says opinions differ, but the ford may have been a crossing for the Great Wagon Road at one time. It was definitely one of two major fords for the Yadkin River during Colonial times — the other being farther north at Shallow Ford.

Here, before bridges spanned the Yadkin, horses and wagons found water shallow enough to cross the Yadkin.

Trading Ford was located at the farthest tip of a large island just east of today’s Interstate 85 bridge.

“A lot of people think the Trading Path and Trading Ford are the same,” Dedmon says. “They’re not.”

The island provides the best evidence of how the path and ford were linked, but different.

Before white man’s arrival, Indians crossed the river by canoe and the island by foot. They didn’t need a ford because they didn’t have wagons or horses. Dedmon and Brownlee found a portion of the old Trading Path going across the island.

“Without a doubt, we found the trading path the Indians used,” says Dedmon, who believes Indians were crossing the island at this spot long before Columbus discovered America. “It makes the hair on the back of your neck kind of tingle a little bit.”

Early white settlers looked just east of this traditional trading path for a spot to ford the river. The tip of the island proved to be a good, shallow spot, Dedmon explains.

In 1755, North Carolina Governor Arthur Dobbs wrote to England about the “large, beautiful” Yadkin River and getting across it at Trading Ford.

“It was at this time fordable, scarce coming to the horses’ bellies,” Dobbs wrote.

Benson Lossing sketched a picture of Trading Ford on a cold January morning in 1849 for his book, “The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution.” Under the sketch, he referred to stakes in the river east of the island’s point.

“The river is usually fordable between the island and the stakes seen in the picture; below that point, the water is deep,” Lossing wrote.

Brownlee’s own path to Trading Ford started in 1994 when she wanted to find out more about Henry Francis, one of her ancestors and the only Whig killed at a fairly insignificant battle at Shallow Ford. He was shot through the head.

“There are headless horseman stories up there that we think might be him,” Brownlee says with a laugh.

Brownlee eventually connected with the Carolina Back Country Alliance, a loose-knit group interested in preserving, interpreting and promoting public use and knowledge of Revolutionary War sites. Because no one else was doing it, Brownlee offered to find out what should could about Trading Ford.

Besides the evidence of Indians, Spanish explorations and colonization linked to Trading Ford or the Trading Path, Brownlee came to realize the significance of Trading Ford to the eventual victory of the Continental Army against the British.

The area was home to a Revolutionary War camp under the command of Gen. Jethro Sumner in 1780.

In 1781, Gen. Nathaneal Greene, joined by Gen. Daniel Morgan, spent Feb. 2 in Salisbury before moving out supplies and troops to Trading Ford. The Yadkin River was swollen to make fording the river impossible, but Greene had arranged for boats to ferry his men and supplies to the other side.

By the end of the day on Feb. 3, Greene had moved 1,800 men to the far shore, except for about 100 Virginia riflemen, a similar N.C. contingent and a few wagons. They took cover behind trees about a half-mile from Trading Ford and turned back a vanguard of about 800 British hot on Greene’s trail.

After exchanging two or three rounds, the Americans abandoned their position and the wagons and crossed the Yadkin about 2 miles downstream. They lost two men in the skirmish. The British, historians believe, lost 10 to 12.

On Feb. 4, as Morgan and the Continentals moved out toward Guilford Courthouse, Lord Charles Cornwallis’ main army — 2,100 men strong — reached Trading Ford. The British could not cross the river without boats, so they placed artillery on one of the bluffs of a series of hills called the “Heights of Gowerie.”

The British shelled the other bank as Greene tended to correspondence. He finally left the same evening, fearing that the river might fall enough to allow Cornwallis to ford, but also knowing that he had gained some valuable time.

Had Cornwallis’ troops been able to cross the river that day and catch Greene’s force, the British most surely would have scored a major victory — maybe a deciding one.

“The fact that Cornwallis could not get across this river here made the difference in the Revolutionary War,” Dedmon claims. “If he could have gotten across, he would have wiped Greene out.”

“We all might be saluting the Queen,” Brownlee adds.

Instead, Cornwallis stayed in Salisbury until Feb. 6 before striking out northward for the crossing at Shallow Ford — a 40-mile detour. Historians often neglect the importance of what didn’t happen at Trading Ford, Dedmon and Brownlee say.

“They skip this — they don’t even mention it,” Dedmon says. “If you really read it, really study it, this made all the difference.”

Dedmon, a resident of Cooleemee, is researching the road Cornwallis took from Salisbury to Shallow Ford. So far, he has found two to three miles of the old road in parts of Rowan and Davie counties.

As part of her Trading Ford research, Brownlee also has tried to locate parts of the old trading path, besides what she found on the island. Buck Steam Plant (built in 1926) and Norfolk Southern’s more modern hump station at Linwood destroyed some trading path approaches on both sides of the Yadkin, according to Brownlee.

She acknowledges that a new Duke plant may not endanger historic features, but it still could be a visual intrusion on a very important historic site. Brownlee also worries about the impact a new Interstate 85 bridge over the Yadkin, scheduled for construction in 2008, will have on Trading Ford.

Her research of courthouse records and some stomping through the woods have given Brownlee a good sense of where the old trading path went between Spencer and Trading Ford. She found what she believes is part of the old trail off Hinkle Lane near I-85.

Old deeds on both sides of the trail — shown on maps as an intermittent creek — mention a crossing of the old trading path. What Brownlee has discovered on the ground seems to be a likely connecting line.

“In spite of all the bad things people have tried to do to it, there’s still some of it left,” Brownlee says of the old Trading Path. “I didn’t know I was going to find this much.”

A 1929 monument to Trading Ford sits on a small sliver of land off Old Salisbury Road on the Davidson County side of the river.

It resembles a crumbling stone fireplace, standing 8 feet high and 6 feet wide. Its bronze tablet, noting the significance of Trading Ford to Gen. Greene and the Revolutionary War, is barely readable. Vandals have left their mark with some white paint.

The monument and Trading Ford have been overlooked for a long time.

Brownlee, for one, hopes to change that.

Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263, or e-mail him at mwineka@salisburypost.com  .