I'm not even kidding! Lawson's path took him right by where the Charlotte Motor Speedway sits now. He describes the rolling terrain of the day and perfectly captures the view from the speedway, at a natural crest where Route 29 and the road to Harrisburg meet. 

""Still passing along such Land as we had done for many days before, which was, Hills and Vallies, about 10 a Clock we reach'd the Top of one of these Mountains, which yielded us a fine Prospect of a very level Country, holding so , on all sides."

Which is exactly what you see from the Charlotte Motor Speedway: when you sit in the stands you get to see cloud shows and hills falling away beyond. I showed up on a Tuesday evening, which meant they had a bunch of small-scale racing going on, and I sat in the grandstand eating chips and drinking soda pop just as Lawson would have done, had he had the opportunity.

I had left Charlotte in the morning, dropped off by my friend Mike Graff of Charlotte Magazine. We talked about Charlotte's interesting history as a crossroads. As I mentioned last post, Lawson's group met an Indian trader there who was waiting for company before heading back northeast on the Trading Path, in this part of the world now more commonly known as Tryon Street, and where it crossed Trade, supposedly another trade route to the coast; their crossing is the highest point in the surrounding neighborhoods, which is why Charlotte still calls its downtown uptown, since residents had to walk uphill to get there.

Charlotte is the Carolinas' largest city and is really the only city with a big-city feel that Lawson would have passed, but even that doesn't last long. Ten minutes' walk from Trade and Tryon and you're in the North End, which welcomes you but offers mostly strip malls -- to say nothing of self-storage, vacant lots, and the homeless. 

But what you get above all walking along the old Trading Path (it turns into Route 29, satisfyingly known as the Old Concord-Salisbury Road, around, natch, Concord)? You get car stuff. Cheap car lots, car repair, car parts, car tires, car rentals, car inspection, and "credit doctors" who will help you into a car you probably can't pay for. There is so much buying, selling, and maintaining of cars along these major roads that I have consistently found it hard to believe the auto industry accounts for only 3.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. By the way -- I stumbled a few trips ago into the company in South Carolina that makes an enormous percentage of the giant signs you see all over the country at auto dealerships. I'll tell you all about them soon.

But: Nascar. Nobody needs to tell you Americans love cars, and the story of the growth of stock car racing is a remarkable tale of postwar American prosperity. So I found it delightful that Charlotte, at least, offers more than just parts and signs. The speedway was started in 1959 to cash in on the growing popularity of stock car racing, and construction went along just fine until the builders reached what Lawson probably could have told them, from walking the terrain, that they'd find: granite. "A half-million yards of solid granite," according to "Charlotte Motor Speedway: From Granite to Gold." That cost five times as much to cope with, and the speedway ran into the financial troubles that all enormous undertakings tend to have.

Anyhow, the region needed a speedway for the simple reason that stock car racing lives in central Carolina. You can find a million sources explaining how farmers growing corn learned that it was a lot cheaper to distill it and distribute it as whiskey than it was to transport and sell it as food, and how during Prohibition that meant delivering an illegal product. Which meant your car had to be faster than a police car but look perfectly normal. Add in that you needed cars that could rocket along straight stretches of highway but handle in both curving mountain roads during pickup and city streets during delivery and you've about covered every element of the racecars that fill the speedway.

The night was hot enough that I barely slept, and when I awoke at 5 a.m. I downed a couple Pop Tarts, policed the campsite, and headed north at 6. I'm usually on the trail around 9:15 a.m. under any circumstances: if I wake at 7, I dither, and if I wake at 8:30 I rush. Lawson's guides felt the same, "Indians never setting forward 'till the Sun is an Hour or two high, and hath exhall'd the Dew from the Earth." But this day it was scheduled to be in the high 90s, and the urban heat island effect was something Lawson and his guides never had to deal with. But according to the EPA, asphalt can be 50-90 degrees fahrenheit hotter than surrounding temperature. I was walking in terrain not just changed from Lawson's day -- I was walking in a climate that simply did not exist in his day. He complained of freezing cold, and when I awoke one day months ago and saw the thermometer at 10 degrees I felt we shared something. What an environment of asphalt, concrete, and clear-cutting would yield would have been beyond his imagination.  Having lived it, I can tell you the answer is mostly as simple as the one the delightful and excellent biologist and writer Rob Dunn suggests in this piece about heat-mapping his walk to work: plant more trees. I'm here to tell you: walking along a bare asphalt berm can be miserable, and even in the hottest weather simply ducking under a tree makes an enormous difference. The planet hates strip malls and parking lots. Plant trees.

So anyhow, along Lawson and I went, north from the speedway towards Concord. Charlotte grew from a crossroads town to a textile town to a banking town and now is a big banking city. Concord's little twin brother, Kannapolis, was home of Cannon Mills and known as Towel City. and the walk north of the speedway to Concord was a study. For a long time in the heat that even at 7 am was brutal I passed racing-related shops -- restoration parts, cams, engine shops. Then came a long stretch of what I call the Anthropocene Suburban -- long stretches of road between small fields raising cattle or pines, the roadside ditches swaying with Queen Anne's lace, daisies and black-eyed Susans, primrose, Scutellaria (any of various purple-flowered mints), and dandelions. 

Nearing Concord, however, I started running into empty textile mills advertising for tenants, though downtown Concord shows the combination of Charlotte-suburban growth mixed with small-town empty office blues. I ate a delicious sandwich at Ellie's, where Lobo, my waitperson, knew that the Trading Path worked its way through Concord. I love when people know that. Lobo also sent me to the First Presbyterian Memorial Gardens in Concord, which she said would be like visiting the gardens at Biltmore in Asheville. She was right! The church has owned the property since 1810, but the main church building moved, and by the 1930s the graveyard was neglected. In the 1930s the Williams family began restoring it, and 

miles that day before 11 a.m., but also because I wanted to go to Kannapolis as well, though Lawson did not. In Kannapolis -- another onetime textile town trying to figure out what's next -- they're building a research campus and working to build on the success of North Carolina's Research Triangle Park between Raleigh and Durham (Lawson walked by; I live there and will walk by soon enough). Most important to me, though, after starting my trip in downtown Charlotte, where lies the Nascar Hall of Fame, and sleeping at the speedway, was the Earnhardt statue. 

One has surely heard of Dale Earnhardt, the Kannapolis native sone who became a legendary stock car racer, perhaps the best of all time. He died in a wreck at Daytona in 2001, but long before that the taciturn, stubborn competitor had become a symbol for the rural, Southern fans of Nascar's early explosive growth. When he died, though not everyone in mainstream culture understood this, in the South and across Nascar America it was like Elvis had died. Earnhardt's father, Ralph, was a racer -- racing was his way out of the Kannapolis textile mills he worked in. Earnhardt too was uneducated and headed for the mills, but his racing gave him a way out. His success on the track became a touchstone for generations of Carolinians, and his death broke hearts.

So in Kannapolis, if you go to downtown Kannapolis, you won't find a huge amount -- on the redevelopment scale it's behind Concord and nowhere near Charlotte -- but you will find a statue of Dale Earnhardt, in a little plaza built for that purpose. It's part of the Dale Trail, a collection of Earnhardt touchstones you can visit. You can visit Ralph's grave, the family's old neighborhood, roads named after Earnhardt, "Idiot Circle," the cruising area of Kannapolis, and of course the plaza, which has not just the 9-foot bronze statue but a granite monument and a circle of benches. You can also drive to race shops and stores and such, but you get the idea.  Lawson walked through here, describing the place to the world for the first time; no statue. Washington came through here on his tour of the South, solidifying the nation in the aftermath of the adoption of the Constitution. No statue.

Earnhardt drove race cars, and he gets a statue. I say this not in criticism but in description. You want to understand the South? Look at who the people raise up. In Camden, South Carolina, you see an awful lot of the Indian chief King Hagler, and you know why: he was a local.  Washington rode through; Lawson walked through. But Earnhardt was a local. Earnhardt Carolina loves. Let's hope they come to love Lawson as much.

James Petiver, the man to whom Lawson sent his botanical specimens from Carolina, was an apothecary -- what we would call a pharmacist but was actually in the early 1700s some combination of a pharmacist, a doctor, a scientist, and a museum director. 

Hans Sloane, whose collection founded the British Museum, was a physician who had apprenticed as an apothecary. Petiver, who had dozens of corresponding collectors and whose contribution made up more than a third of Sloane's final collection, was an apothecary, "at the White Cross, near Long Lane in Aldersgate Street." The apothecary was where people went for help with their health, for information on their world. 

You may have already sort of known this, but once you start following the flow of information -- and botanical specimens -- in the old days, it amazes you. I went to the Natural History Museum to see the results of the flow of information through Petiver and Sloane's apothecary habits, and I went to Long Lane and Aldersgate Street in London to see where Petiver's apothecary once stood. It's a pretty boring intersection now. 

On the other hand, I also traveled to the Chelsea Physic Garden, right on the banks of the Thames. There I found myself in a place I would never have known of had I not traced up from Lawson to Petiver and Sloane. Founded in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, the Chelsea Physic Garden is, besides  the Oxford Botanical Garden, founded in 1621, the oldest botanical garden in England. Its guide describes it as "at its peak, during the 1700s, the most important centre for plant exchange on the planet."

So, kinda cool place.

His profits funded his continued collection. (Long after his death a chocolatier took possession of his milk chocolate recipe and also did rather well with it. You may have heard of Cadbury's.) His home became famous among collectors.

Sloane wrote up his travels in Jamaica, in a 1696 catalog and a richly illustrated full Natural History published in 1707 and 1725.

But again -- that whole notion of collecting, of bringing to you the wonders of the age, of learning and displaying the secrets of nature, was the big takeaway for me. Sloane's house was visited as something of an invitation-only museum in his lifetime, and some of those specimens remain on display in the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum, spookily floating in jars. 

And I couldn't help noticing that we've retained that adoration of the apothecary as a place of mystery and wonder as I visited the rest of London. If you go to the Making of Harry Potter Studio Tour (and you should!), you'll get to walk down the original set for the famous Diagon Alley. And there, among the quidditch shops and wand shops, among all the fancy and wonder, you'll find two examples of only one kind of business: Apothecaries, with Mr. Mulpepper competing -- right next door! -- with Slug & Jiggers, both with windows full of jars, potions, and specimens that could have come right from the Darwin Centre. We went to the Museum of London as well (also recommended!), where the Victorian Walk allows you to wander a London street from the late nineteenth century. 

Yep. Apothecary. Turns out that once stuff is cool, it just stays cool. Ancient specimens, animals in spirit, a garden full of the plants of the world -- and hot chocolate.

Lawson was onto something.