While Joshua and Ellender were busy raising a family, Joshua was also busy farming. In 1810 he got the desire to move. He sold his property in North Carolina and decided to move South, to Mississippi.1 The next record we have for Joshua was in 1812, when he paid taxes in Marion County, Mississippi.
One to two years might seem like a long time to travel the approximately 1000 miles to their destination. After all, they would only have to average 2-3 miles a day. The problem is, the travel conditions were not the same as the travel conditions we would face today, even if we were walking straight through the woods. This is what Joshua’s walk in the woods was like:
The bulk of the wilderness … was composed of trees two to five feet in diameter. Not until a tree reached six to eight feet in diameter was it considered a large one. The earth beneath these huge growths was cumbered with fallen trees of all sizes and in all stages of decay. Up from the earth … sprang all manner of thickets … bound together by a snarl of vines tough as wires or as big as a man’s wrist.2
As you can see, it wasn’t quite as easy as hitching your horse to a wagon and taking off through the woods. There were roads being carved through the wilderness, but they were few and mostly 
horse paths, not big enough for a wagon to pass through. For the most part, the maintenance of these roads was the responsibility of the counties they ran through, making road conditions very unpredictable.
Of course you could always take a ship from a port nearby, for Joshua it would have been Wilmington, around the Florida peninsula to New Orleans. This would have been a long trip for a family of 9 with the oldest child being 12-13 years old.
Then there were the rivers. Water transportation was one of the first methods of getting from one place to another used in America.3 Traveling by water craft had its own set of dangers, but it also had many advantages over travel by land or by sea, especially for a young family.
I don’t have any proof of which mode of travel Joshua used to get his family to Mississippi. However, by examining the different ways of traveling and what was required for each, I can make an educated guess. Want to come along for the trip?
- A.B. Pruit, Abstracts of Deeds of Anson County, North Carolina: Books F, G, H2, L, &M (North Carolina:2002), 123. ↵
- Seymour Dunbar, A History of Travel in America, (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1915), 17-18. ↵
- Seymour Dunbar, A History of Travel in America, (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1915), 16. ↵
