In James Dodson’s newest book, The Road that Made America, he shares an encounter with historian Rev. Larry Wilson Johnson
photography by Bert Vanderveen

This month, WALTER contributor and author James “Jim” Dodson will publish The Road That Made America: A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey on the Great Wagon Road. The book gathers stories about the Great Wagon Road, a route from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Augusta, Georgia, that American settlers created in the 18th century. This road became a pathway toward the Southern frontier and the wilds east of the Appalachian mountains, then an entry point to explore western America. More than 100,000 settlers traveled this route to find land for their new home, and the road became a key supply line during the Revolutionary War. Dodson traveled this road over six years, connecting with experts of all sorts to learn the hidden stories of this fabled byway — including that of Abel Johnston, the Liberty Man. 

The following text is an excerpt from The Road That Made America: A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey on the Great Wagon Road. Click here for tickets to hear Dodson at WALTER Book Club.

He sits on a garden bench outside the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, [Virginia] gazing at pear trees in bloom, dressed in the green woodland hunting frock and tricorn hat of a Southern colonial militiaman. His large hands rest calmly on the knob of an elegantly carved walking stick.

After being off the road for weeks attending to my busy life and work, I’m spending this beautiful April morning walking the grounds of the historic Glen Burnie House, the restored home and grounds of Winchester’s founder, James Wood. As I approach, he remains as still as a statue, evidently lost in thought. “You look like a fellow waiting for the revolution to begin.”

He glances up with a half smile, white-haired, ruggedly handsome, intelligent pale blue eyes behind rimless spectacles. “I hear that quite often, friend.” He explains that he is waiting to meet a school group set to arrive for one of his presentations. I ask what kind.

“I tell the story of Liberty Man, Abel Johnston. He was my fourth-great-grandfather. A true American patriot during the American Revolution.” “Maybe I should join your class. I’d like to hear about that.” He pats the bench. “My group is running late. Take a seat.”

His name is Rev. Larry Wilson Johnson, an 80-year-old resident of nearby Warren County, and a retired bishop of the Anglican Church. Over the next 20 minutes, the story he spins is the kind of lovely surprise I am beginning to realize is commonplace along the Great Wagon Road. Best of all, it involves my own home state, North Carolina.

In 1777, a young farmer named Abel Johnston married a woman named Ann Johnson. Abel was 19, Ann just 17. They lived on a farm on the banks of Middle Creek in a township called Pleasant Grove on the coastal plains of eastern North Carolina, not far from present-day Raleigh, where they raised tobacco and cotton. At that moment, North Carolina was a hotbed of patriot rebellion. The year before, loyal Scottish Highlanders made a daring broadsword charge across a partially dismantled wooden bridge as hundreds of North Carolina patriots quietly waited in the woods with cannons and muskets poised. The loyalists were routed, marking the first significant victory for the patriot cause of the American

Revolution, effectively ending British authority in the colony. Not long after the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge, Abel Johnston joined the fight as a militia horseman, leaving home with his Brown Bess musket and a tomahawk that belonged to his father during the French and Indian War. Over the next six years he saw action in several key engagements across the Cape Fear region and Southern Theater under the command of notable generals Nathanael Greene and Daniel Morgan.

“The North Carolina militia fought all the way from Camden to Guilford Courthouse,” Larry Johnson explains, “including the key battles at Cowpens and Kings Mountain, ending General Charles Cornwallis’s plan to divide and destroy the Continental Army. Abel Johnston was right in the thick of it.”

As a son of Guilford County who learned the story of Britain’s failed Southern Campaign as a boy, I can’t resist interjecting: “They followed the Great Wagon Road to Guilford Courthouse.”
Liberty Man looks surprised. “Yes, they did, as a matter of fact. So, you know about the Great Wagon Road, do you?”

“Learning more every day.” I mention that I’m traveling its recovered path to Carolina, talking with folks like him who are caretakers of the old road’s stories. His blue eyes light up.
“What a marvelous idea! Part of my family also came down it to Carolina.”

The Johnstons, he explains, were English settlers who arrived at Jamestown and filtered down to North Carolina in the early 1700s. “The German part of the family, however, followed the Great Wagon Road to Mecklenburg County [NC] in the 1740s, eventually settling in Cleveland County. They were named Huss. But it’s the Johnstons who populate my story.”

I apologize for the interruption. Liberty Man smiles. “No worries, I like it when the kids interrupt me. It means they are paying attention.” At war’s end, Private Johnston rode home, stopping to bathe himself in Middle Creek before presenting himself to his wife. He’d been gone more than half a decade, having left as a teenager and returned a seasoned soldier, with six years of warfare under his buckskins.

He resumed farming and “became a father of seven children whose own children would be named Nathanael Greene, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson Johnston in honor of the Founding Fathers and defenders of our freedom.” In recognition of his six years of service, North Carolina awarded Johnston one hundred pounds sterling and a pair of land grants totaling 300 acres each.

After her husband’s death in 1829, Ann Johnston never remarried, but lived to the ripe old age of 78.
“Unfortunately, she spent two decades after Abel’s death struggling to obtain her husband’s rightful pension,” her fourth-great-grandson explains. “She had testimony from veterans who’d served with Abel, men who by then were in their upper 80s, interrogated by a panel of three judges. After that the authorities insisted that she needed to provide a legal marriage certificate to prove they were married.

Problem was, in those days, official marriage certificates were quite rare, especially in the rural South. Important documents were spelled phonetically, which may explain why the T in ‘Johnston’ eventually got dropped. Ann found people in their 90s, however, who’d witnessed their marriage.” He pauses and shakes his head. “Unfortunately, she died before she could produce enough proof to satisfy the government.” It was the discovery of his ancestor’s unsuccessful quest, he tells me, that changed Larry Johnson’s life.

Some years ago, his daughter had phoned to say she was applying for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, and had been in contact with a genealogist who’d unearthed a mother lode of Johnston family connections going back to pre-revolutionary times. “She was so excited by this research and sent me a large package that I dropped on my home office desk and sadly left unopened for several weeks.”

Finally, on a snowy winter afternoon without much to do, Johnson decided to open the package to see what had gotten her so fired up. “I began reading the materials, all written by hand, and could not put it down! About three hours later, the hair was still standing up on my neck and there were tears in my eyes. It was a true awakening. I suddenly knew what I had to do.” In 2010, Johnson applied for his own membership in the Sons of the American Revolution and eventually became president of the local chapter near his home in Warren County, Virginia.

He also had the inspired idea to bring his ancestor Abel Johnston back to life as Liberty Man, an artistic resurrection that began by commissioning an Indiana firm specializing in authentic historical costumes to dress him as a backcountry North Carolina Revolutionary War militiaman. Not long afterward, a friend gave him a beautiful reproduction of a Brown Bess musket.

“That’s when I became Abel Johnston and created a program about the history of the war and our fight for freedom around his personal story,” Johnson explains. “Quite frankly, I had no idea if anyone today would even be interested. I just knew it was something I had to do. Fortunately, it caught on.”

The first Liberty Man program debuted in 2013 in the children’s room of the Page Public Library in Luray. “I set up a display of Revolutionary War battle flags and 80 items that a typical colonial militiaman would have used during service in the war. I also brought my 12 grandchildren there to make sure I had a live audience,” he remembers with a laugh. “I hid behind the bookshelves as they came in looking totally confused, completely ignoring the displays. The older ones, in fact, were checking their smartphones, clearly prepared to be bored. I heard one of them loudly complain, ‘Why are we here?’”

At that moment Liberty Man appeared with his Brown Bess in hand. “I’d like to welcome you all to the past,” he told the gathering. “I’m your fourth-great-grandfather from the Revolutionary War, Abel Johnston, 265 years old. I’ve come back to tell you what our family and many others like it did to gain our nation’s freedom.”

As he began his presentation, curious library patrons filtered in to fill the room’s empty seats. “I told them Abel’s story and explained how ordinary Americans came together to achieve our country’s freedom. I showed them copies of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights and talked about who wrote these incomparable documents and why they were still important today. Soon there was not a cell phone being used except for taking photos. That was the beginning of Liberty Man.”

Word quickly spread, and soon the innovative program was in demand. Veterans and school groups, civic and historical organizations, church groups and book clubs across the region wanted to learn more about Liberty Man, everyone from assisted-living residents to preschoolers before nap time. As a teaching device, Johnson began bringing along a replica of the Declaration of Independence and inviting his audiences to sign it. As a pastor, he also brought the sacraments to veterans and shut-ins along with meditations based on Bible verse John 15:13—“No greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Though he is now officially retired as bishop of the Virginia Anglican Church, I learn that Johnson is still performing Liberty Man many times a year, including a recent star turn at the 246th anniversary of Valley Forge. He’s also featured on a YouTube channel and distributes DVDs of his programs to audiences promoting democracy’s story at the grassroots level, a Johnny Appleseed of American liberty.
I wonder, as we sit together, why he thinks audiences young and old are so drawn to Liberty Man.

“Because his is a timeless story, one that every American can relate to one way or another. Each of us wants to know where we came from. From our earliest days America was a rootless society, always on the move — the very reason for the Wagon Road you’re traveling! But human beings need roots to achieve a true sense of their identity. I think there is a yearning for that identity among all Americans these days. The world is so unsettled. This country is so bitterly divided. I think my presentations simply educate and maybe even inspire tolerance in folks once they know that most of us came from someplace else to find new life and liberty in the American wilderness.” […]

Larry Johnson grew up in a small town in Harnett County, working in the tobacco and cotton fields just like his revolutionary ancestor. At 19, he enlisted in the military to fight as a marine. “When I got out of service in 1960, like a lot of kids in America, I basically had no idea what to do with my life or how to get there.” After attending Campbell College on a basketball scholarship and moving on to the University of North Carolina to earn dual degrees in history and chemistry, Johnson’s first job was working in a pilot program for the Raleigh public school system designed to stem the city’s high dropout rate.

With no guidelines on how to proceed, Johnson based his teaching on the principles of discipline and self-respect he learned in the Marine Corps. After a year, his work caught the eye of Governor Terry Sanford, a trailblazing figure in the development of North Carolina’s progressive public education system.

“One day out of the blue Governor Sanford asked me to come see him at the state capital. So, I dressed up all my kids, coat and ties and shoes polished, and took them with me to meet the governor. The governor’s security people were alarmed to see a bunch of former juvenile delinquents descending on them. But Sanford was an 82nd Airborne vet. He loved it. He and the kids really hit it off.”

A few days later, Johnson received a call from the state superintendent of education asking if he could install his innovative program in every school district across the Old North State. They tripled his salary and made him the industrial coordinator for a groundbreaking program that established working apprenticeship programs in 115 public schools across the state. It became the basis for a cooperative education curriculum that helped inspire the creation of North Carolina’s highly regarded community college system, today one of the leading in the nation.

Two years later, he was summoned to Washington, D.C., by the secretary of education and tasked with overseeing a national vocational tech program for 49 states. Over the next two decades, Johnson’s cooperative education system enrolled more than 5 million kids in life-changing programs.

Soon after, California Gov. Ronald Reagan tapped him to write the vocational training policies manual for his presidential administration.

In the midst of all of this, Johnson earned a master of education degree from NC State and a doctorate in divinity in the Anglican Church.

“After that,” he says with a gentle smile, “I suppose Liberty Man might have been inevitable, a case of ‘once a teacher, always a teacher.’ I often think back to that slow winter day when I finally read the genealogical report on our family roots that my daughter sent me. The timing was perfect, God-sent, I think. Liberty Man has given me many years of joy — and hopefully to others as well.”

As he says this, a yellow school bus is drawing up in front of the museum. Moments later, a stream of kids begins trooping off, chattering like magpies. “I think your next audience has arrived,” I point out.

“Very good,” he says, rising on his walking stick. “You were almost as good a listener as the kids,” he adds with a wink. 

This article originally appeared in the July 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.