December 12, 1806

Rockfish Gap

Fifteen miles east of Staunton, Virginia is a historic wind gap—a geologic landform where a steam had cut a notch or pass through a ridge but no longer has water running through it due to uplift. The travel corridor that passed through Rockfish Gap connects Richmond on the fall line between the Piedmont and Tidewater with Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley. The old road also passed by Lewis’s home at Locust Hill and Jefferson’s home at Monticello. In the 1700s, settlers purposely developed what had to be a well-used Monacan trail into what would become the Three Notched Road—so named from the three-chop blazes that once marked the route.^[1]See “three chopt road” in The Virginia Gazette, Thursday, 3 March 1768, Williamsburg, Virginia, p. 3.

In 1781, the “Paul Revere of the South” Jack Jouett (1754-1822) likely passed over Rockfish Gap on his 40-mile ride to tell Thomas Jefferson that Colonel Banastre Tarleton and his dragoons were coming. Jefferson and the Virginia legislators assembled at Monticello managed to escape. Shortly after, Rockfish Gap played a role in the maneuvers of Marquis de Lafayette and Lord Cornwallis leading up to the latter’s surrender at Yorktown.^[2]Nathaniel Mason Pawlett and Howard H. Newlon, Jr., “The Route of the Three Notch’d Road: A Preliminary Report” (Charlottesville: Virginia Highway & Transportation Research … Continue reading

To Lewis in December 1806, Rockfish Gap meant one thing: he was nearly home.