Abingdon: Wolf Hills, the Great Road, and the First Western Town

Abingdon is often called the first English-speaking town incorporated in the watershed of the Mississippi River. Daniel Boone passed through here around seventeen sixty and called it Wolf Hills after a pack of wolves attacked his dogs. The Virginia Assembly incorporated it in seventeen seventy-eight, naming it, by the most common account, for the English home of Martha Washington's ancestors.

The location mattered because this stretch of what is now US Route Eleven was the Great Road, the principal highway that carried two hundred thousand settlers through the Appalachians toward Kentucky between seventeen seventy-five and eighteen ten. The entire twenty-block downtown is on the National Register of Historic Places. Black's Fort stood here in seventeen seventy-four as a refuge during Cherokee raids.

During the Civil War, the elegant Preston mansion that now operates as the Martha Washington Inn served as a hospital for both Union and Confederate wounded.