Tom Magnuson, a NC Humanities fellow and Davidson County historian with a wealth of knowledge about trading paths in the area, will be speaking on Saturday, November 8th at the Denton Town Hall at 2pm. Magnuson hopes to provide Denton residents with some insight into how the role that their community played in the trade of goods in the early days. For more information about this event, please contact Barbara Hogan, 336-859-4269.

More info on Tom Magnuson and his work, from the NC Humanities Speakers Bureau Catalog:
Trading paths were a system of centuries-old trails and river crossings linking the Chesapeake Bay region and Catawba, Cherokee and other American Indian towns in the Carolinas and Georgia. During England's first contact with Native Americans between 1585 and 1750, a substantial population of Indians, Europeans, and Africans in the southeast blended cultures and populations to produce many of the characteristics we now call southern. Quakers, former indentured servants and runaway slaves, whole families outlawed in Virginia, and opportunists of all stripes found a place in Carolina. The trading paths served to join these cultures, and areas surrounding the paths were meccas of settlement for both American Indians and Europeans. Later roads were constructed along these same routes. Thus, it is highly probable that much of our history and most of our stories start on a road, are at least in part about a road, and depend on a road. As a result, finding old trading paths is synonymous with finding the material remainders of our earliest history which remains largely a mystery. In this program, Tom Magnuson describes the process and the importance of finding, recording, and preserving these early roads.