The word "tuckahoe" first appears on a map drawn by Captain John Smith in 1612, providing a Powhatan Indian word to describe an edible plant or fungus utilized by tribes in the tidewater area of the present Virginia and North Carolina. The use of the word to describe the aristocratic, affluent and politically powerful class of low-country Virginia/Carolina planters probably originated in the decades prior to the Revolutionary War (ca 1740-1770). It was during this period that the Great Wagon Road, originating in Pennsylvania, and the Valley Pike, transiting the lower Shenandoah Valley, became a major highway funneling a steady stream of poor, largely Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania German families south and west into upland Virginia (later into upcountry North and South Carolina and eventually into Tennessee and Kentucky) in search of cheap land. These early up-country settlers shared little of the ethnic, social or religious roots of the low-country, which had been founded and developed by English-Anglican colonists over the previous 100-plus years.