In the 1680s James Stuart Duke of York granted land on the Delaware River to William Penn who offered complete religious freedom to any sect that aknowledged God the Father. The new lanlord's tolerance extended also to Indians and settlers of New Sweden. From the Swenssoner (sons of Swen Gunnarson) Penn bought a tract of forested land between the Delaware and the Schulkill where British colonists burrowed into hills to live in improvised caves while they built Philadelphia of board and brick around the Swede's original log houses. The Friends were joined by other Quakers who fled from Puritan New England, and by Scots Presbyterians who had first fled to New Jersey from the Sturart monarchy and were now on the move again. Outside of Philidelphia, where log houses of Finns dominated the west bank of the Delaware from Wilmington to Chester, and the east bank from Salem to Pennsneck, marriage cultural exchange between British and Scandinavian was not uncommon; and many of the English were persuaded of the practicality of building with logs in a country covered with trees.
After the British introduced baking brick and burning lime, many Scandinavians built fine houses and lived the comfortable lives of English country squires. Others tasted the bitterness of dispossession as the British "bought large tracts of land for almost nothing." Ninety-one-year-old Nils Gustafson told Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm that his father sold an "estate" for "a cow, a sow, and a hundred pumpkins." Soon Finns were on the lookout for wider country and freedom enough to make a living from the woods. They found the country and the freedom in the borderland between Maryland and Pennsylvania, where civil government was slow to gain a foothold because of a dispute between the Penns and Calverts over where to draw the boundary, and where as late as the 1720s Irish immigrants kept surveyors at bay with threats of violence.
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| A house built on Crooked Run (present Cedarville, Va.) by Robert McKay, Jr. of Cecil County, Md. who followed his father to the Shenandoah in 1735. Beneath the clapboards is the original log house with chimneys on the gable ends, and two rooms up and down. The stone house was a nineteenth century addition built long after the pioneer period. |
The Finns' wanderlust proved infectious. By the 1730s many of their British neighbors—from the Delaware to the mouth of the Susquehanna—were ready to break for the interior. One of them was a Scots Quaker, Robert McKay, who moved in 1723 from East Jersey to one hundred fifty acres on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border.
By 1731 McKay was eyeing land west of the Blue Ridge where Virginia had already granted land to Pennsylvanians Alexander Ross and Morgan Bryan. McKay joined forces with Joist Hite, a German speculator who bought grants in the Valley of Virginia totaling forty-thousand acres from John and Isaac Van Meter. Together, Hite and McKay persuaded Virginia's Governor Gooch to let them have one hundred thousand additional acres in the forks of the Shenandoah provided they seeded the land with one hundred Pennsylvania families they said were ready to make homes on Virginia's frontier.
Virginia's land grant policy allowed one thousand acres per family. If you wanted one hundred thousand acres you had to promise one hundred families. By 1735, however, the partners had attracted only fifty-four heads of households, and therefore claimed only about half of what they set out to get. In the spring of 1732 McKay himself settled on Opequon Creek near Martinsburg, W.Va. before making off again for the South Fork of Shenandoah where in 1735 he was killing wolves.
Before 1732 the Shenandoah Valley had been virtually empty of humans except for wandering Indian hunters and a few Germans on the South Fork. Virginia's western flank was vulnerable to French Canadians whose trade and sympathy for Indian ways gained them valuable allies among native peoples. In 1730 Jacob Stover, from the south fork settlement, with the help of Quaker _____, exploited England's imperial anxieties, lobbying the crown for a separate colony to be ripped away from Virginia's "Backside" and settled with Pennsylvania Germans.
Gooch's hands were tied. As early as 1649, future British monarch Charles II had given eight British aristocrats all the land embraced by the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers without knowing for sure how far west the Potomac extended. In the 1730s only Thomas Lord Fairfax, inheritor from his mother of this vast domain, had the right to dispose of lands there. But Gooch notified British authorities that he would contintue issuing patents in the territory anyway, at least until its boundaries were better known. On October 28, 1730, when Scots Quaker Alexander Ross and Irishman Morgan Bryan dangled one hundred land-hungry families in front of Gooch, he took the bait, giving the entrepreneurs one hundred thousand acres west of "Opeckon" Creek and south of the river Cohongaroota that might yet prove to be the Potomac, the northern boundary of Fairfax land.
Alexander Ross was from West Nottingham Township near the Maryland border. In 1732 he settled in the Virginia valley west of a plain log meeting house that gave way in 1759 to a stone building in Clearbrook. Morgan Bryan took a roundabout way into the Valley, from Brandywine Creek where he lived in 1719-20, to Monocacy Creek, and perhaps briefly to Loudon County, Va. where he had surveys made in the Blue Ridge foothills. By 1734 he had established a mill west of the Blue Ridge near present Bedington, W.Va.
In 1736 two parties of commisioners—one for the Crown, the other for Lord Fairfax—returned from a fact-finding trip to the Alleghenies with news that the Cohongaroota was not a separate river, but was part of the Potomac above the mouth of the Shenandoah. The seventy mostly Quaker families in the Bryan-Ross grant, along with German and Swiss settlers on the south fork of the Shenandoah, suddenly found that they were squatters on someone else's land. But they had built cabins and made crops on it. They would be first to get killed on it if the French started shooting, a fact not lost on the Crown, who made sure the first-comers would be "quieted in their claims." To that end Lord Fairfax visited the valley twice, in 1736 and '37, to keep Virginia's frontier from hemoraging, and to spread the news he "would not have any poor man quit the place for want of land," and that anyone who held a title from Hite would "come off" well, provided the land was surveyed according to Virginia law.
But although Fairfax offered land at lower rates, the settlers got more for the three pounds per hundred acres they paid McKay and Hite. The partners let them go where they wanted, let them gerrymander boundaries to make the most of springs and fertile creek bottoms. Fairfax, however, insisted that settlers should be content with tracts that Virginia law said must be at least a third wide as they were long.
The shift in land ownership didn't change settlement patterns. The Ross-Bryan grant continued to draw settlers from north of the Potomac, particularly from the neck between the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay, where English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, and Scandinavians had been squeezed together so tightly they had become one people. To these northerners the mountains that stood in their way were a "Blue Ridge," not an inpenitrable chain of "Great Mountains," as they were called by inhabitants of the Virginia tidewater.
In 1732 an Irish Quaker, Abraham Hollingsworth of Cecil County, Md., bought land on Abram's Creek in what would be Frederick County, Va. and built his cabin in what would become Winchester. It was prime real estate, prized earlier by some wandering Shawnees who in the late seventeenth century established a village near Shawnee Springs. It isn't likely the wilderness held any terrors for either Abraham Hollingsworth or his cousin Stephen who moved to Opequon Creek in 1734. Both had associated all their lives with woods-faring Scandinavians. In 1710 Abraham married Ann Robinson who may have been of Scandinavian decent. Before coming to Virginia, the couple had moved from Delaware to Elk Creek in Cecil County, Md., and in 1726 signed a list of witnesses at the Quaker marriage of Ann's brother George Robinson to Mary McKay in Pennsylvania.
Abraham's cabin likely resembled the ones of round logs "Cribb fashion & old" that Joshua Hempstead observed in 1749 in Delaware, only three miles west of Abraham's former home on Mill Creek. Abraham probably used the Finnish method of placing poles on his roof to hold the boards in place not only because nails were expensive but because there was little sense in wasting nails on a temporary roof. In 1740 John Miles nailed a roof to the purlins of his cabin on Elk Branch of the Potomac before returning to Pennsylvania. Fifty-four years later, in a land dispute between Miles' daughter and Joist Hite's heirs, seventy-year-old John Wright testified that he remembered Miles' roof, and said that in 1747 "a shingled house was uncommon."
But if English cabins were like Finnish cabins in some ways, they differed in others. The English built stone chimneys on the gable-ends of their houses while Finns built clay chimneys in a corner. The English sawed doorways under the eaves while Finns cut them through gable ends. Both daubed mud over cracks between the logs because in the seventeenth century Finns couldn't find an American substitute for the moss they used in Sweden.
Abraham Hollingsworth's cabin east of Town Run was one of only "two small log cabins" an old woman told Samuel Kercheval she saw on the site of Winchester in 1738. The other cabin west of Town Run belonged Isaac Parkins, a Cecil County emigrant. But there was no town on Town Run until Orange County surveyor James Woods laid off "twenty six [half-acre] lots" in 1743 and divided twenty-two of them among "His Magesties' Justices ... for the use of the [new county of Frederick]." He also stipulated that each lot owner must build within two years a house at least "20 feet by 16" of "framed work or squared logs dovetailed" or the land would again become Woods' property. Builders hastily raised log cabins, and a decade saw the number of houses increase to about sixty; but in 1753 Moravians on their way to Carolina noted that most were "rather poorly built."
The first Frederick court convened in 1743, perhaps in Woods' home, perhaps in a log cabin thrown up for the purpose on Woods' property. At this first session the justices ordered Sheriff Thomas Rutherford to "build a twelve-foot square log house, logg'd above and below, to secure his prisoners." The actual builder, innkeeper Duncan O'Gullion, wasn't paid until 1748 when lawbreakers were being accomodated in a new "square log house." The old round log cabin—so wretched that the sheriff was "not to be held responsible for escapes"—went on sale in October.
By 1748 there was at least one ordinary able to set "a good Dinner, Wine and Rum Punch in Pleanty" before surveyors for Lord Fairfax, including sixteen-year-old George Washington who retired to "a good Feather bed with clean Sheets." A twelve foot square cabin was still good enough for the Frederick county court until John Hardin from Redbud Run finished a thirty-two by twenty-one foot log building with glazed windows that let sunlight into a plastered courtroom. In 1752 the crossroads hamlet acquired the official name Winchester, although locals continued to use its unofficial name Frederickstown.
In the decade before Woods laid off his lots, other settlements sprang up around the Parkins and Hollingsworth cabins. Scots Presbyterian William Hoge from Big Elk Creek on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border came to settle Hoge's Run near present Kernstown. His son-in-law, Scotsman Robert White, settled at the foot of the Great North Mountain near Hayfield. And to the north Thomas Babb, Jr., who in 1729 had married Sarah Foulke in Old Swede's Church in New Castle County, Del., settled on Babb's Run.
A little below the forks of the Shenandoah former Indian trader Abraham Pennington halted on Wheat Spring Branch in present Clarke County Va. after a twenty year ramble from the Delaware, with stops along the way on the Susquehanna, and on the Potomac near present Brunswick, Md. His son Isaac settled on the head of Buck Marsh Run long before Thomas Berry built a tavern on the site of Berryville, and before New Jersey Welshman Daniel Morgan, a backwoods roustabout, rifleman, and future Revolutionary general, helped change the tavern's name to Battletown with his fists. In 1748 Isaac Pennington played host to George Washington, lighting his way to a room where, "not being so good a Woodsman" as his comrades, Washington stripped before bedding down on some matted straw under a blanket crawling with lice and fleas.
In the hills west of North Mountain Welshmen Owen Thomas, near present Gore, Va., and Isaac Thomas, above where Isaac's Creek joins Back Creek, hacked homes out of a towering hardwood forest. On December 19, 1734 Owen and Sarah Thomas, and their neighbor Thomas Eades came down from the hills as guests in Isaac Parkins' cabin, witnesses to an exchange of wedding vows between George, son of Abraham Hollingsworth, and Hannah, daughter of Robert McKay.
After the wedding Eades and the Thomases took the path from the grassland back to the deep woods where axmen had made so little progress by 1737 that Owen put his name to a road petition complaining that hill folk could "scarce get bread for [their] children for want of land clear'd." It was a good thing Sarah was childless when her husband died in 1749, because life was about to become even more difficult for her and her neighbor Isaac Thomas.
Fairfax ordered new surveys of Sarah's and Isaac's land. He argued the old surveys were longer and narrower than Virginia law allowed, taking up too much of the bottom land along Back and Isaac's Creeks. Fairfax reclaimed the excess acreage and sold it to an absentee. In 1755 Isaac Thomas sold his remaining land to Quaker James Haworth and packed off with Sarah Thomas to South Carolina.
In 1734 Benjamin Borden—a Quaker from Freehold Township, Monmouth County, N.J.—settled on Borden Marsh Run near where Lord Fairfax later built a backwoods manse. But, unlike Fairfax, Borden was a plain settler of limited means and education, a Justice of the Peace who begged the indulgence of "the Cort of Orrange County in Verginie" in 1735 for not attending "last Cort [because] all my house kind was poor a coming to this country ... If I should not com next Cort I desire the favour of the Cort to excuse me tell I have got better settleed ..."
Three years later Borden devised a democratic plan to give away "cabin rights" in a grant he obtained in the forks of James and Maury Rivers, and soon filled it with Irish home-seekers. Fairfax, however, by behaving like the landlords settlers had crossed an ocean to escape, spurred an emigration from Frederick County.
One of the emmigrants was William Linville, who in the 1730s settled with his wife Eleanor just south of the Fairfax line that cut the Valley in two, stretching from the North Branch of the Potomac to Conway River east of the Blue Ridge. The Linvilles settled in present Rockingham County on a creek that still bears their name. William probably saw no future on the Fairfax land north of present Winchester where his parents John and Ann settled after moving from the heart of seventeenth century Finnish settlement in Pennsylvania's Chester Township.
In 1744 William Linville's father-in-law—Morgan Bryan himself—settled near his daughter and her husband. According to Moravian Leonhardt Grubb, who founded Bethabara (Winston-Salem, N.C.), Morgan Bryan and William Linville were the first to take wagons from the 'Shanidore' to the 'Etkin' [Yadkin]" in 1748. It took them three months to get there. At one point Bryan even removed the wheels of his wagon and hauled it "peacemeal" to the top of a mountain.
Bryan wasn't ferried over James River as Moravian Lenohardt Grubb was in 1753 by Manxman Robert Looney, a Quaker from Conestoga Township, Pa. who prior to 1740 took his family from the Fairfax grant and established a mill on Looney's Creek. Bryan forded the river near where Moravians forded it in 1749 to the music of wolves, and where they found "few houses and no bread." When Grubb passed through in 1753 things had changed. Not only did Looney operate a ferry at Cherry Tree Botton (Buchanan, Va.), there was grain enough for Mrs. Looney to bake bread for the Moravians. Looney's decision to moved to Cherry Tree Bottom may have been influenced in part by a 1749 flood that lifted the bed in which his wife and two of their children slept, and carried it about "until they woke up."
Other settlers soon added their tracks to Bryan's, and the French War added more. But many Quakers in the lower valley clung to their patches of ground despite the danger. In 1754 James Haworth (pronounced Hayworth)—who had moved from Bucks County, Pa. to Green Springs Run between Hunting Ridge and North Mountain—moved once more, just a few miles to one hundred eighty-three acres on Isaac's Creek. The man who wrote the agreement by which Isaac Thomas transferred the property to Haworth was Welshman Jesse Pugh who came in 1741 from Montgomery County, Pa. and bought land on Back Creek from Thomas Eades. By 1755 Eades had moved into a cave on Cacapon River, where Indians followed his children as they fetched in the cows and captured the entire family.
Most Quakers were determined not to fight. And some like Pugh risked Eades' fate rather than put the Blue Ridge between themselves and danger. Washington threatened war-resisters with flogging, but he soon discovered they would rather be "whipped to death than bear arms, or lend us any assistance whatever upon the fort ..." Instead of flogging, Washington thought it best to release orthodox Quakers pending orders from Governor Dinwiddie.
It seemed for a while as if Quakers had more to fear from provinical militia than from the French and Indians. A year went by after war commenced and Indians hadn't touched Jesse Pugh's house which doubled as an inn on Braddock's road between Winchester and Fort Cumberland. But on ___, 1756 a detachment of Virginia militia under Henry Woodward "killed his Fowls, pulled down one of his Houses for firewood; [and] turned the Horses into his meadow and corn," destroying crops and fences.
In 1763 a second Indian war tested the Quakers' commitment to pacifism, and was still raging in 1764 when Indians attacked settlements near John White's Fort (Hayfield), killing Henry Clouser and a Mr. Lloyd, capturing Clouser's daughters and the widow of Ellis Thomas, and taking two scalps from the fractured skull of Lloyd's daughter, Esther, who recovered. That night the family of Thomas Pugh (Jesse's son) near what became Pughtown (Gainesboro) awoke to a dog's barking. The family escaped while the dog kept up a ferocious rear guard action. Nevertheless, Pugh returned for some money he had forgotten, suspecting perhaps that the intruders were outlaws prowling the neighborhood disguised as Indians, whose quest for plunder seldom included gold. Or maybe Pugh wasn't intimidated by Indians, believing they would spare his life because he was a peace-loving Friend, and his house because it was a place of Quaker worship.
Other Quakers had no compunctions about taking up arms. In 1765 the Hopewell Meeting disowned Richard Haworth for "scouting after the Indians, bearing arms, and training in the militia." Unlike the Pughs, who were public men involved in the settlement's religious and political affairs, the Haworths were backwoodsmen who left their bones under rough, unworded stones that marked their way through Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana. In the 1760s Richard's mother Sarah Haworth traveled with kinsmen to the Bush River Monthly Meeting in Newberry County, S.C. Richard Haworth remained in Frederick County and married, but in 1769 he was off to New Garden Meeting in Alamance County, N.C. and later crossed the mountains into Tennessee where he died in 1811.
One reason for moving was because buying land from Morgan Bryan was no guarantee against having to buy it again from Lord Fairfax to make sure of a title. In 1749 Fairfax himself took up residence west of the Blue Ridge in a post-and-beam house while workmen built a stuccoed mansion with a wide gallery and dormer windows for the reception of gentlemen guests.
Greenway Court Manor wasn't much of a house by tidewater standards, but was an intimidating presence to backwoodsmen. As a child in Clarke County, Samuel Kercheval was "awed" by these "great folk" with their "gold or silver" buckles that were set with "brilliant stones," believing they were "more than man." A decade passed before Fairfax added a limestone land office to keep settlers from having to transact business east of the mountains at his cousin's Belvoir plantation. By then first-comers were drifting off to the Carolinas, and most Pennsylvania emigrants by-passed the Fairfax grant altogether.
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One settler who joined the southern trek was Elisha Walling, born in 1703 to English and Welsh parents in southern Jersey. He left the British-Scandinavian settlement of Cohansey Creek about the year 1730 and settled on the Potomac near the mouth of Monocacy Creek. In 1745 he set out yet again, seeking new land on the Shenandoah. His brother William settled beside an "elk trail" that followed the north fork of the Shenandoah though Brock's Gap, west of Adam Rader's cabin (Timberville, Va.); but Elisha and his family continued along the Great Road, eventually crossing the Blue Ridge at Maggody Gap, settling in the foothills along Smith River near present Martinsville, Va.
John Redd of Henry County, Va. remembered Walling's son, young Elisha, as "a man with darke skin," "square bilt," with "rather cours fetures," who "never cultivated the soil" and "knew vary little about any thing els besides hunting." He always returned "with his horses ladin with skins and furs." In 1761 Elisha, Jr. led a party of hunters through Cumberland Gap, beating Boone to Kentucky by eight years, and like Boone, "followed up hunting as long as he was able," dying "on the fronteers of Misoura at a very advanced adge."
At about the time Elisha, Jr. was born (c.1734), Sarah Morgan Boone gave birth to Daniel on Owatin Creek near the Schuylkill, in a log house her husband built German-style over a spring that ran through an arch in the stone cellar. Germans may have initiated the boy into the mysteries of the rifle, and neighboring Finns and Swedes from Manatawny Creek may have helped with his apprenticeship as a woodsman and hunter. It's unlikely his father—a weaver, dairy farmer, and blacksmith—could have provided such instruction.
About 1750 Daniel's father, Squire Boone, moved the family out of Exeter Township in Berks County, Pa. to the comparative freedom of Linville Creek in the Virginia Valley where he need not answer meddling questions about why he let his children marry outside the faith. But the Boones were only passing through. By 1752 they had settled on Dutchman's Creek near Mocksville, N.C., neighbors to Morgan Bryan. And in 1756 Squire Boone, justice of Anson County, presided over his son Daniel's marriage to Bryan's granddaughter, Rebecca.
In 1765 John Lincoln, a former neighbor of Squire Boone's in Berks County, settled with his family near where the Boones had lived on Linville Creek. John Lincoln's brother had married a cousin of Daniel Boone's in Pennsylvania; and his son Abraham helped burn Cherokee towns in 1776. In 1778 Captain Abraham Lincoln survived on wild roots and rawhide when Shawnees laid siege to Fort Laurens on the Tuscarawas River in Ohio. In 1782 Abraham settled on Long Run in present Jefferson County, Ky. where Indians killed him in 1786. His son Josiah ran to Hughes' Station for help while another son, Mordecai, centered the bead of his rifle on a "silver pendant" near the heart of the Indian who was trying to scalp his father. Mordecai killed the warrior and saved his youngest brother Thomas who grew up to marry Nancy Hanks, mother of President Lincoln.
But while dissenters from the north were settling the Shenandoah, the vast majority of coastal Virginians were either too timid to cross the mountains, too fastidious to settle among dissenters, or both. Settlers from New Virginia and Pennsylvania were not so particular, however, and chopped trees, hewed and notched logs, and built cabins in great leaps south and east of the Blue Ridge.
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| Black's Tavern, built of logs about 1746 just south of Jarman's Gap in the Blue Ridge. Jarman's Gap was then known as Woods' Gap because Pennsylvania Irishman Michael Woods traveled through it from the Shenandoah Valley to settle in the Piedmont in 1734. |
As early as 1734 Irishman Michael Woods led kinsmen and neighbors from Paxtang (Harrisburg), Pa. up the Shenandoah Valley and east to Mechum's River in the Virginia piedmont, which was as wild then as the Shenandoah. Four years later Irishman John Caldwell agreed to bring two hundred male adult Presbyterians and their families to Richard Kennon's land between Turnip and Cub Creeks in Brunswick (present Charlotte) County, Va. These settlers, who had been living in Pennsylvania since 1726, came legally to Virginia; but there was always a large floating population of squatters, such as those driven south by the hard winter of 1739-40, who were never recorded in a county deed book.
By 1755 Caldwell's colony took in in huge numbers of illegal immigrants who scurried east and south from beyond the Blue Ridge and along the Carolina Road as part of a mass migration swept along on a wave of hysteria following Braddock's defeat, a blow to British imperialism that ironically meant a boom for safer regions east of the mountains. In 1755 Presbyterian minister Samuel Davies tallied the results of the frontier's calamity when he reported large congregations in Charlotte County, "2,000 hearers and about 200 communicants [at the sacrament in the wilderness]."
Soon it was impossible for native Virginians in the foothills to avoid these "mixed people ... from Pennsylvania," as William Byrd called them. And many Episcopalians were impressed by the efficiency with which the northern strangers built homes of logs "laid horizontally in pens." Experience soon taught Episcopalians what Presbyterians and Quakers already knew—and what Jefferson later wrote—log homes were "warmer in winter, and cooler in summer, than the more expensive constructions of scantling and plank."
| Reconstruction of a small lowland farm at the Yorktown Victory Center. The house and tobacco barn are constructed of boards nailed to wooden frames. The house has a brick chimney, but the inside walls are not yet plastered with lime. Near the mountains and farther west logs that were corner-notched and hewn flat inside and out were the standard building material for all social classes because the settlers continued building with logs like their ancestors from Pennsylvania, Delaware, and eastern Maryland. |
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James Robertson, founder of Nashville, was born in eastern Virginia in 1742 and moved with his family from the Roanoke in present Mecklenberg County, to Sixpound Creek in present Warren County, N.C., to Neuse River in present Wake County. But his family never made it much beyond the fall line. He didn't have any contact with the frontier until 1768 when he went land hunting in East Tennessee—and then he got lost. But he definitely did not want to be associated with the lowland culture of "Old" Virginia, and may have been the source of a fictitous story, which his widow Charlotte and his children Felix and Lavinia later perpetuated, that his grandfather was a Scotsman who immigrated to Ireland, and that his father John immigrated from Ireland to Philadelphia.
Records show, however, that although his father may have been Scots he was born in Prince George (present Dinwiddie) County in the Virginia tidewater; and he was a Baptist, not a Presbyterian. Whatever Robertson knew about his heritage, he succeeded in becoming indistinguishable from his Cohee neighbors on the Wautauga River in East Tennessee. He was a Cohee in temperament if not by birth, "plain, and blunt spoken," living even after pioneer days in what "polite" society called "the Old Vulgar style," wearing moccasins and hunting bear, whose meat he preferred to any other. He had more in common with his friend Griffith Rutherford who had moved from New Jersey to Halifax County, and later to North Carolina and Tennessee, than with fellow Cumberland settlers Anthony Bledsoe, a religious Episcopalian vain enough to cover his baldness with a wig, and Marylander James Winchester, who was "not a man of the woods, but efficient in everything else."
In the opinion of most backwoodsmen, flatlanders—known as Tuckahoes—didn't count for much on the frontier. One such example was "light—vain—assuming—good humored—jocular" William Cocke of Amelia County, who "tried to be a lawyer [and] made a poor hand of it," but was "swift on foot, and pretty much of a man to fight fisticuffs." It was probably his temper as well as his education that got him elected Captain of militia near his home on Renfro Creek of Holston. Whatever the reason, he commanded one of four militia companies that marched in two columns from Amos Eaton's fort on July 20, 1776 after spies reported seeing three hundred Cherokees on Long Island of Holston (Kingsport, Tenn.). When Lyman Draper suggested to David Campbell that the lawyer's warlike rhetoric may have persuaded the other commanders to take the field, he scoffed, "Capt. Cocke came ... from low down in old Virginia and was not the man whose opinions would in any way influence the conduct of John Cambpell [and the other captains,] experienced indian fighters [who] knew what they were about when approaching indians ..."
During the battle Cocke and a few of his men were cut off from the rest of their company, but instead of trying to re-group in the face of an on-rushing enemy, they ran to Eaton's where Cocke collected a few more men and started back. He must have been mortified when his small party met the victorious Holston men, including most of his own company, returning to the fort with four slightly wounded, and others with holes in their clothes, but also with eighteen Cherokee scalps as trophies. There was an inquiry into Cocke's conduct. He pleaded it was impossible to rejoin the fight. He even claimed to have shot one of the Cherokees while on the run, even went back with the judges to show them the spot, and "they found the Indian accordingly." But it was useless, and Cocke was forever after branded as "slack-twisted" by the mountaineers.
But frontiersmen never looked down even on a Tuckahoe if he proved himself worthy of respect. In 1778, when nineteen-year-old Daniel Trabue from near Richmond crossed the mountains to Kentucky as assistant to his brother James, a commissary officer for the Virginia militia, he often felt "chikinhearted" at the sight of Indian sign, and "wished [he] was back in Old Virginia." It wasn't long, however, before Trabue's bravery and woodsmanship won over the Cohees as surely as his "first-rate bull Dog ... that would seize any Ox or bull or horse [in Old Virginia]," and soon learned to tackle bear in Kentucky. He "become to be one of the best hunting Dogs at [Logan's] fort," said Trabue. Every hunter wanted him in his pack "when they was a going out."
Nevertheless, class animosities persisted, and verbal barbs had the power to hurt, as when a young Irishman—who contended "with the other young men ... from old Virginia about words and customs"—quit Trabue's company of salt-makers after they mercilessly plagued him about being chased by a buffalo, and about his Cohee way of saying "O Lard" for "O Lord." "He had nothing against me," Trabue said, "but would not go with such fools as these boys weare." Trabue was equally disgusted when his "tuckeyho boys" wouldn't go hunting with him at night in the snow but sat complaining by the fire. "One of them said he would return to Old Virginia as quick as he could and them that liked Kentucky might enjoy it ..."
But despite being accepted by the backwoodsmen, Trabue was at heart a Tuckahoe who, even in the wilderness, preferred "shews" to moccasins, and on a journey east was glad to get coffee at a New River tavern, having endured hominy, "mush and the sowerest milk I have ever tasted" in the cabins of simple folk. Episcopal minister Charles Woodmason blamed Irish barbarism for the Cohees' fondness for buttermilk and clabber (curdled milk), and traveled the South Carolina backwoods with his own stash of "Chocolate—Tea, or Coffee." In the Valley of Virginia Presbyterian Philip Fithian likewise lamented the absence of coffee and chocolate among the things he "allow'd to be needful in polite life," but saw nothing barbarous about it. He enthusiastically reported "plenty of rich Milk in large Basons & Noggins," and "supped & breakfasted on buttered Paste, of wheat Meal" at the home of Mr. Rhea, "a stiff Quo-He" who lived on Calfpasture River. It was "almost Treason against the Country to mention [tea]," Fithian said, "much more to drink it—nor any superfluous, vaporous, Nick-Nack ..."
Pennsylvanian Joseph Dodderidge echoed Fithian's sentiments. "A genuine backwoodsman," he said, "would have thought himself disgraced by showing a fondness for" such "slops" as tea or coffee. In Kentucky a Cohee named Sullivan traded blows with one of Trabue's Tuckahoes over whether coffee and tea made a better breakfast than fried hominy. In the wilderness, where woodsmanship was worth more than fine clothes or manners, Sullivan stood up for his way of life against the tea-drinkers whom plebian backwoods society derided as "people of quality, who do not labor."
The real reasons for conflict rose to the surface on a September Sunday in 1785, in the mountains between Winchester and Redstone (Brownsville), Pa., when "two young men Dressed [in] their sermon-sunday clothes" stopped Daniel Trabue's party of "5 or 6 white men" and twice the number of slaves from driving wagons to the Monongahela for a flatboat voyage to Kentucky. The men insisted Trabue appear before a backwoods magistrate for violating local laws against toiling on the Sabbath. Trabue was about to obey the summons when one of the black men spoke up, "'I spose you is sich good fokes hear you will let us all stay ... and won't charge any thing for it.'" One of the men "cursed the negro" and threatened to knock him in the head. But Trabue wasn't in the mood to take any lip from yokels. He commanded his slaves "to Drive on," upon which they "cracked their whips and ... broake out in laughter" at the confusion of the two white men.
Trabue's tacit approval of his slave's disrespect for free white men seemed to confirm what the poorest members of frontier society feared, that their status would suffer as large numbers of slaves were imported by planters from down the country to clear the land for a fraction of what it cost to hire free men. And when the threat of Indian attack ended, woodsmen who had successfully demanded generous terms from landlords for risking their lives to hunt game and fight Indians either had to remain locked in poverty where they were, or find other frontiers where they could employ their unique talents.
Daniel Trabue was from Manakin Town, fifteen miles above Richmond, Va., where his grandfather, a Huguenot, settled about 1700 in a post-and-frame house that was weatherboarded outside and "lathed and filled with mortar" inside. "Unused to hunting," the Huguenots soon raised "cattle and hogs aplenty," and after a couple of generations were indistinguishable from the predominately English and Episcopalian tobacco planters around them.
But Episcopalians who ventured into the upper Piedmont lived on the edges of a Cohee culture that spilled through the mountain gaps from New Virginia. In 1728 Abraham Bledsoe of Northumberland County—the easternmost county in Virginia's Northern Neck—patented land on Rapidan River in the piedmont. By 1734 his son Thomas Bledsoe was on the tax list of Orange County, which at that time stretched as far west as the Mississippi, embracing German and Irish settlements on the Shenandoah.
On court days Thomas and his brother Abraham, Jr. no doubt came into contact with settlers from beyond the mountains, and may have been enticed west by the money to be made in the deerskin trade. Abraham, Jr. became a noted hunter, and in 1756 scouted down Sandy Creek for an ill-fated campaign against the Shawnee in Ohio. In 1758 Virginia's government allowed him a scalp bounty of twelve pounds for killing two Indians before he himself was killed in the campaign to capture Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh).
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| Deerskin was a common a medium of exchange on the frontier, as tobacco was in the tidewater. Hides were worth more in summer when deer's coats were thin and red. The skins decreased in value as cold weather caused the hair to fade into "short blue" and "long gray" coats that took firmer root in the hide. A horse load of one hundred half-dressed skins (about two hundred pounds) was worth from eighty to one hundred dollars. |
Abraham's brother, widower Thomas Bledsoe, was swept up in the southern migration and set down in 1748 at the foot of the Blue Ridge in what became Patrick County. There he married Susanna Fulkerson, whose unkind treatment of her step-sons, Anthony, Isaac, and Abraham III, caused them to leave home when Anthony was just fifteen. According to Anthony's daughter Sally, her father made the acquaintance of "a gentleman ... who took a liking to him and persuaded him to go to school to him [for two years], and if he ever got able he might pay for it ... then at 17 [Anthony] went into the mercantile establishment of Mr. McDaniel, and remained 7 years ... till he was 24—1757."
In 1758 the brothers crossed the mountains to Fort Chiswell in present Wythe County where Anthony became "a business man ... not a gunman." Isaac and Abraham, however, were expert woodsmen and hunters who spent seven months in 1769-70, and twenty months in 1771-2, hunting throughout Kentucky and Tennessee with Cohees Henry Skaggs, Joseph Drake, James Knox, and others. Between hunts Abraham was appointed constable "for that Precinct he lives in upon Reed Creek [Wythe County]," and in 1772 he moved to the north fork of Holston's River, east of Moccasin Gap in what later became Scott County, Va.
In 1785 Isaac Bledsoe settled east of Nashville, Tenn. at a buffalo lick he discovered in 1770 and there built what his niece Sally Shelby described as "a large old fashioned Virginia double house, with a passage between." William Hall, who lived in Bledsoe's Station in the summer of 1788, called the house a "a large double cabin," its unfloored passage forming the entrance of "a regular stockade [that] compactly enclosed" the cabins of other settlers. The two log pens of Bledsoe's house must have had mud-and-stick chimneys, because "Indians prowling about the place found a hole in the back of one chimney" big enough to poke through a gun and shoot schoolmaster George Hamilton in the chin as we was singing "at the top of his voice." "The Indians then cut down one of the window shutters with their tomahawks" but Mr. Hugh Rogan "raised a musket well loaded and put it out at the window and fired among them which induced them to leave that position."
