Ingles Ferry: The Crossing Mary Draper Ingles Crawled Home To

There is a small parking area near the New River here where a historical marker recalls one of the most astonishing survival stories of colonial America. This is where William and Mary Draper Ingles operated their ferry crossing, and it was to this spot that Mary returned after an ordeal that should have killed her several times over.

On July thirtieth, seventeen fifty-five, a Shawnee raiding party struck the settlement at Draper's Meadow, a few miles to the north near present-day Blacksburg. They killed several people and carried off Mary Ingles, twenty-three years old and nursing an infant, along with her two young sons and her sister-in-law. The captives were marched across the mountains to Shawnee towns near what is now Chillicothe, Ohio. Mary's infant died. Her sons were separated from her and sent to live among different bands. She was set to work sewing shirts for French traders.

In October seventeen fifty-five she and an older Dutch woman escaped and turned east. They had no food, no map, and no real plan. They followed the Ohio River, then the Kanawha, then the New River upstream through its gorge. The Dutch woman, maddened by hunger, tried to kill Mary in the mountains. Mary fled alone. She ate tree bark. She slept in hollow logs. She was naked and white-haired, her body reduced to almost nothing, when she stumbled into a frontier homestead on the New River in late November seventeen fifty-five. She weighed barely seventy pounds. A settler recognized her and brought word to her husband William, who found her at a fort downstream. She was twenty-three years old and had walked approximately six hundred miles in forty-two days.

William established the ferry here on the New River around seventeen sixty-two. Future king Louis Philippe of France used this crossing. Thousands of settlers bound for Kentucky passed over it on the Great Road. The ferry ran until nineteen forty-eight. Mary Draper Ingles lived on this land until eighteen fifteen, long enough to see her lost sons come home, and the nation she had outlasted the wilderness to reach.