Rather than individually specifing each subdirectory in my plugins directory I want to be able to automatically load them, to that end I included the following to my .emacs file
You might investigate the role of the subdirs.el files during startup. It is a good way get subdirectories into your load-path.
subdirs.el
load-path
For example, much of the default load-path arises as a consequence of the files discovered by this command: find /usr -name subdirs.el
find /usr -name subdirs.el