In 1682 the future king of England, James Stuart, granted all land west of Delaware River to Quaker William Penn, whose aim was to establish a colony free of the sectarian strife threatening to devour England. But Scandinavian colonists had been living on the land for over forty years. And it was one of their settlements, Wiccoa—a mostly forested tract between the Delaware and the Schulkill—that Penn chose as the site of Philadelphia. After packing off the orginial settlers, the Swensoner (sons of Swen Gunnarson), to double the amount of land in the interior, he sold their former holdings to Quakers from Britain, New Jersey, New England, and Scots Presbyterians who had fled to the Jersey coast from Stuart persecution. These first British colonists burrowed into makeshift caves to live while they built Philadelphia of board and brick around the Swedes' original log houses. Meanwhile, in the countryside where the log houses of Finns and Swedes dominated the landscape cultural exchange between Brits and Scandinavians was not uncommon; and many 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 remained on the Delaware, built fine houses and lived the comfortable lives of English country squires. Others less inclined to follow British ways tasted the bitterness of dispossession as their property values plummeted. 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 Scandinavians who resisted acculturation 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 Pennsylvania-Maryland 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 in 1735 on Crooked Run (present Cedarville, Va.) by Robert McKay, Jr. of Cecil County, Md. The original log house with chimneys on the gable ends has been covered with clapboard siding. The stone house was a nineteenth century addition. |
The Finns' slash-and-burn method of relocation proved as influential to the British as it had earlier to the Swedes. By the 1730s many of the British—from the Delaware to the mouth of the Susquehanna—were ready to break for the interior. One of them was Scots Quaker Robert McKay, who had 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 assured him 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 the partners had attracted fifty-four heads of households, and therefore claimed 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 Ezekiel Harland, 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 he would continue 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 Virginia not far from a plain log meeting house that in 1759 gave way to a stone building in present 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 commissioners—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 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, however. The Ross-Bryan grant continued to draw settlers from north of the Potomac, particularly from the northern terminus of the Delmarva Peninsula, where the English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, and Scandinavians had been squeezed together so tightly for so long they had essentially become one people. To these northerners the mountains that stood in their way were a "Blue Ridge," not an impenetrable chain of "Great Mountains," as they were called by inhabitants of the Virginia tidewater.
One of the hardy northern breed was Abraham Hollingsworth, an Irish Quaker who had associated all his life with woods-faring Scandinavians. In 1710 he married Ann Robinson of Scandinavian decent and moved from Mill Creek in Delaware to Elk Creek in Cecil County, Md. In 1726 he signed a list of witnesses at the Quaker marriage of Ann's brother George Robinson to Mary McKay (Robert McKay's daughter) in Pennsylvania. And in 1732 he built a cabin on and gave his name to Abram's Creek in present Winchester, Va. It was prime real estate, prized earlier by some wandering Shawnees who in the late seventeenth century established a village near Shawnee Springs.
It's quite possible Abraham explored the Valley prior to settlement. English hunters from Pennsylvania had been there at least since 1730 and probably earlier. On December 15, 1730 the Pennsylvania Gazette reported that "John Pemberton kill'd a Buffalo upon Shunadore River, which weigh'd after it was dress'd 1400 weight, and the Hide 300. There was one kill'd there some time before, which weigh'd 1800; and in those Parts 'tis said they frequently see ten or more of these Creatures together." According to family tradition Abraham's father, Thomas Hollingsworth, was killed by a buffalo in 1733 while on a hunt to the North Mountain, nine miles from his son's cabin.
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| A roof on a log house in Finland (above). Two rows of long clapboards were laid on purlins and held in place by the weight of horizontal poles that were stabilized by perpendicular logs place between. The bottom row of clapboards rests against a butting pole at the eaves. Finns carried this technique first into Sweden then to the Delaware Valley where it was adopted by English settlers. Below is an illustration of a backwoods cabin with a weight-on roof in Ohio. |
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Abraham's cabin likely resembled the ones of round logs "Cribb fashion & old" that Joshua Hempstead observed in 1749 only three miles west of Abraham's former home on Mill Creek. He 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 it made little sense to waste nails on a cabin that was only the first step toward a hewn log house with rafters and a shingled roof. Nevertheless, weight-on roofs continued to be the norm for quite a while. As one witness testified in an unrelated land dispute, a "shingled house" like one that he saw on Elk Branch of the Potomac was an "uncommon" sight in 1747. Abraham Hollingsworth died in 1748, seven years before his son Isaac replaced his father's log house with one of stone. But long after that date Samuel Kercheval—who was born in Clarke County Va. in 1767—recalled that cabins roofed with "split clapboards, and weight poles" were "pretty generally in use" during his lifetime. Such a roof might even come in handy if it needed to be knocked off from inside because it caught fire.
If the English were inspired by Finnish building methods, they also made significant changes. Where Finns had built clay chimneys in a corner, the English built stone chimneys on the gable-ends. While Finns often cut gable-end doorways, the English only cut doorways under the eaves. Both daubed mud over cracks between the logs because the English followed the Finnish practice of using mud as an American alternative to 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 to another Cecil County emigrant, Isaac Parkins. But there was no town yet on Town Run. The court sat seventy miles due south on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge in Orange county—of which the Valley settlements were a part.
In the meantime other settlements sprang up around the Parkins and Hollingsworth cabins. Scots Presbyterian William Hoge moved from Big Elk Creek on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border to Hoge's Run near present Kernstown, Va., and his son-in-law, Scotsman Robert White, to the foot of the Great North Mountain near Hayfield. 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 ..."
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| Daniel Morgan in a fringed rifle frock or hunting shirt. Unlike most backwoodsmen he was an Episcopalian, but like most Quakers was an emigrant from the Delaware Valley. |
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, with 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."
In 1743 Orange County surveyor James Woods laid off "twenty six [half-acre] lots" on Town Run and divided twenty-two of them among "His Magesties' Justices ... for the use of the [new county of Frederick]." He 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 in Woods' home or in a log cabin thrown up for the purpose on his 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 accommodated 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. Nevertheless, a 12' x 12' cabin was still good enough for the Frederick county court until it was replaced by 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.
By 1748 there was at least one Winchester ordinary able to set "a good Dinner, Wine and Rum Punch in Pleanty" before sixteen-year-old George Washington who, as one of a company of surveyors for Lord Fairfax, retired to "a good Feather bed with clean Sheets," a world away from the accommodations he endured on Buck Marsh Run in the home of Isaac Pennington who lighted his way to a bed where, "not being so good a Woodsman" as his comrades, he stripped before lying down on some matted straw under a blanket crawling with lice and fleas. Pennington's father Abraham was a former Indian trader who for twenty years had moved steadily west from the Delaware to the Susquehanna to near present Brunswick, Md. on the Potomac, and finally to Wheat Spring Branch below the forks of the Shenandoah, long before Thomas Berry built a nearby tavern whose name Daniel Morgan—a backwoods roustabout and future Revolutionary general—helped change to Battletown with his fists.
In 1752 Fairfax himself took up residence west of the Blue Ridge in present Clarke Co., Va. His stuccoed mansion Greenway Court Manor wasn't much of a house by tidewater standards, but was an intimidating presence to young Samuel Kercheval who was "awed" by the "great folk" with "gold or silver" buckles set with "brilliant stones," convinced they were "more than man." By then, however, first-comers were drifting off to the Carolinas, and most Pennsylvania emigrants by-passed the Fairfax grant altogether. One reason for moving was because a deed of purchase from Morgan Bryan was no guarantee against having to buy the land a second time from Lord Fairfax to make sure of a title. Another reason was Fairfax couldn't resist behaving like the landlords settlers had crossed an ocean to escape.
When Owen Thomas died 1749 his wife was still childless. It was probably a good thing because her life was about to become even more difficult. Fairfax ordered new surveys of Owen and Isaac Thomas' land, arguing 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, and In 1755 Isaac Thomas sold his remaining land to James Haworth and packed off with the widow Thomas to South Carolina.
In the 1730s William Linville, whose Quaker parents John and Anne Linville had moved from Pennsylvania's Chichester Township to Conestoga Creek, then to the Ross-Bryan grant north of Winchester, apparently saw no future there once Fairfax assumed ownership. He and his wife Ellender (Eleanor) made a new home in present Rockingham County on Linville Creek, just south of the Fairfax property line that sliced the Valley in two from the Blue Ridge to the North Branch of the Potomac west of the Alleghenies.
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| Greenway Court Manor west of the Blue Ridge, the residence of Thomas 6th Lord Fairfax from 1752 until his death in 1781. A Loyalist during the revolution, Fairfax was allowed to retain his plantation but lost his vast western holdings to Virginia in 1779. |
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| The limestone land office Fairfax had erected west of the Blue Ridge in 1759 to keep settlers from having to travel east to transact business at his cousin's Belvoir plantation. |
In 1744 William Linville's father-in-law (Morgan Bryan himself) settled near his daughter and her husband. But it was only a preliminary move. According to Leonhardt Grubb—founder of the Moravian settlement of 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—a three month ordeal in which Morgan Bryan at one point removed the wheels of his wagon and hauled it piecemeal to the top of a mountain. In 1766 Indians killed Linville and his son while on a hunt near Linville Falls, N. C.
Bryan forded the James river near where Moravians forded in 1749 to the music of wolves, and where there were "few houses and no bread." But when Leonhardt Grubb passed through in 1753 things had changed. Manxman Robert Looney, a Quaker who moved his family from Conestoga Township in Pennsylvania to the Fairfax grant, and before 1740 to Looney's Creek, was operating a ferry at Cherry Tree Bottom (Buchanan, Va.), and a mill that ground enough grain for Mrs. Looney to bake bread for Grubb and his companions. Looney's decision to moved from Looney's Creek to Cherry Tree Bottom may have been because a 1749 flood lifted up the bed in which his wife and two of their children slept and carried it about "until they woke up."
Other settlers added their tracks to Bryan's, and the French War added more; but although most Quakers were determined not to fight, many declined to join the southern exodus to the Carolina frontier after Braddock's defeat. In 1754 James Haworth (pronounced Hayworth), whose father crossed the ocean from Lancashire to Bucks County Pa., moved from Green Springs Run between Hunting Ridge and North Mountain to Isaac Thomas' remaining one hundred eighty-three acres on Isaac's Creek. The man who wrote the agreement by which Isaac Thomas transferred his property to Haworth was another Quaker, Jesse Pugh, who came in 1741 from Montgomery County, Pa. and bought Thomas Eades' land on Back Creek. 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.
Washington threatened to flog war-resisters but discovered they would rather be "whipped to death than bear arms, or lend us any assistance whatever upon the fort ..." Instead of carrying out his threats Washington released orthodox Quakers pending orders from Governor Dinwiddie.
For a while Quakers had more to fear from provincial 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 May 4, 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] them and his Fences."
A second Indian war in 1763 continued to test the Quakers' commitment to pacifism, and was still raging in 1764 when Indians attacked the settlements near John White's Fort (now Hayfield), killing Henry Clouser, a Mr. Lloyd, and capturing Clouser's daughters and the widow of Ellis Thomas. They took 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 Gainesboro awoke to a dog's barking. The family escaped while the dog kept up a ferocious rear guard action. The dog's barking was so fierce Pugh took a chance on returning for some forgotten money, suspecting perhaps that the intruders were robbers prowling the neighborhood disguised as Indians who seldom bothered with gold. Or maybe Pugh wasn't afraid, believing the Indians would spare his life because he was a peace-loving Friend, and his house a place of Quaker worship. Whatever the reason, Pugh and his family escaped and the house was spared.
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| The North Fork of Shenandoah rises in the Alleghenies (far left center) and pierces Little North Mountain at Brock's Gap before twisting north along the western base of Massanutten mountain (center)—known also as Buffalo, Peaked, and Three Top Mountain. The South Fork skirts the eastern base of Massanutten Mountain west of the Blue Ridge, and joins the main Shenandoah (top right) at Front Royal. |
Other Quakers had no compunctions about taking up arms. In 1765 the Hopewell Meeting disowned Richard Haworth (James Haworth's son) for "scouting after the Indians, bearing arms, and training in the militia." Unlike the Pughs, who occupied places of prominence in the community's economic and political life, 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 (widowed since 1757) traveled with kinsmen to the Bush River Monthly Meeting in Newberry County, S. C. while Richard remained and married in Frederick County. But in 1769 he too was off to New Garden Meeting in Alamance County, N. C. and later crossed the mountains into Tennessee where he died in 1811.
Nobody personified backwoods rootlessness more than Job Hobbs who at the robust age of one hundred told his story to a Revolutionary pension examiner. He was born in 1759 in the Fairfax grant on the south bank of the Potomac in present Berkeley county, W. Va. to a father, Vinson Hobbs, who came from Dorset in England. As a child he was taken to the North Fork of Holston. But that was only the beginning of his journey.
Following a 1777 stint in the militia and a "scrimmage" in which two Indians were killed and seven captives recovered, Hobbs moved once more with his parents in 1780 to Turkey Cove in Powell’s Valley. He lived there ten years. "I then moved to Madison County, Kentucky. I remained there 4 years. I then moved to Knox County, Tenn, remained there 3 years, then moved to Montgomery County, Tenn, rem there 4 years, then moved to [Daviess] County, Kentucky from there to Spencer County, Indiana, remained 14 years from there I moved to Illinois, Clay County remained there 4 years thence to Marion County 4 years and from there to Washington Co Arks. I do not recollect the time I remained in Washington County. I now reside in Madison County, Arkansas and have about 12 or 15 year." He had not seen any of his family since his brother Ezekiel paid him a visit forty years earlier. When asked why he left Virginia he replied with understatement, "Because I wanted to emigrate to a new country."
Perhaps lack of education unfitted men like Hobbs for participation in civilized society and kept them on the move. Both he and William Linville were illiterate. Or maybe the lives they chose had less to do with avoidance and more to do with their inclinations. Quite often these backwoodsmen were professional hunters. And although they never constituted a majority of backwoods society, backwoods society followed their moccasin prints to avoid being swallowed by the class-conscious society to the east. It is certain their rambling would have been impossible if not for an unacknowledged debt to Scandinavian pioneering methods that allowed them to follow the frontier as long as there was one.
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| In 1748 Moravian Matthias Gottschalk reported elk were "numerous in those mountains" near Brock's Gap through which the North Fork of Shenandoah flows. About the year 1745 William Walling settled near Brock's Gap on a creek that bore his name. |
Elisha Walling was born in 1703 to English and Welsh parents just before or after they moved from New England to southern Jersey. As a young man Elisha left the British-Scandinavian settlement of Cohansey Creek and settled about the year 1730 on the Potomac near the mouth of Monocacy Creek where his wife Mary gave birth to a son, also named Elisha. In 1745 Elisha, Sr. and his brother William were moving again, on the hunt for land south of the Fairfax domain. William stopped on the north fork of Shenandoah beside an "elk trail" through Brock's Gap that led to a salt lick west of Adam Rader's cabin (now Timberville), but Elisha kept to the Great Road, crossing the Blue Ridge at Maggody Gap, settling in the foothills along Smith River near present Martinsville, Va. where his young son grew to manhood.
John Redd of Henry County, Va. met Elisha, Jr. in 1774. He told Lyman Draper that Walling was then about forty, and remembered him 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." According to Redd he always returned "with his horses ladin with skins and furs." In 1761 he 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."
Near the time Elisha, Jr. was born (c.1734), Sarah Morgan Boone gave birth to her son Daniel on Owatin Creek near the Schuylkill River, 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, Squire Boone—a weaver, dairy farmer, and blacksmith—could have provided such instruction.
About 1750 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 his children married 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.
By 1768 John Lincoln—whose brother married one of Daniel Boone's Pennsylvania cousins—had moved from Berks County to Linville Creek. One of his sons, Abraham Lincoln, a captain of Augusta County militia, helped burn Cherokee towns in 1776, and in 1778 survived on wild roots and moccasin hide with his men in Ohio when Shawnees laid siege to Fort Laurens on the Tuscarawas River. In 1782 Abraham settled in Kentucky, on Long Run in present Jefferson County, and in May of 1786 he was shot and killed by Indians. His son Josiah ran to Hughes' Station for help while another son, Mordecai, ran for the rifle in the cabin and laid aim on a "silver pendant" that dangled near the heart of an Indian reaching for the youngest brother, Thomas, who stood over his father's body. The Indian warrior fell dead and Thomas grew up to marry Nancy Hanks, mother of President Lincoln.
Three successive generations of Pennsylvania Quakers—Linvilles, Boones, and Lincolns—had come to Linville Creek and seen it progress from a wild frontier to a peaceful backwater. Yet the Blue Ridge remained a barrier to settlement from the east, a rampart guarding a Protestant preserve that inhabitants audaciously referred to as New Virginia. It seemed that with few exceptions coastal Episcopalians were too timid to cross the mountains, too fastidious to settle among dissenters, or both. Settlers from New Virginia and Pennsylvania, however, were not so particular. Beginning in the 1730s they pushed into the Piedmont through the mountain gaps, chopping trees, hewing and notching logs, and building cabins in great leaps south and east of the Blue Ridge.
As early as 1734 Irishman Michael Woods led kinsmen and neighbors from the Paxtang settlement in Pennsylvania up the Shenandoah Valley and east to Mechum's River in the western piedmont, a country as wild then as the Shenandoah. Farther east in 1738 landowner Richard Kennon welcomed Irishman John Caldwell and two hundred Presbyterian families from Pennsylvania—where they had lived since 1726—to his land between Turnip and Cub Creeks in present Charlotte County, Va. And other speculators enticed northern Protestants to their own holdings; but these were only the legal settlers. Many more came as squatters like those driven south by the hard winter of 1739-40, and were never recorded in a county deed book.
By 1755 Caldwell's colony took in huge numbers of illegal immigrants who scurried east of the Blue Ridge and south along the Carolina Road (Highway 15) as part of a mass migration swept along on a wave of hysteria following Braddock's defeat, a blow to British imperialism that meant a population 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," and learned from experience what Presbyterians and Quakers already knew, that 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. Such houses were fewer nearer the mountains where settlers from west of the Blue Ridge had introduced houses of corner-notched logs hewn flat inside and out like those built by their ancestors in Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley. |
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James Robertson, the founder of Nashville, was born in eastern Virginia in 1742, and was taken as an infant by his parents to the Roanoke in present Mecklenberg County Va., and as an adolescent to Sixpound Creek in Warren (then Orange) County, N.C., then to Neuse River near the furture site of Raleigh where in 1761 his father died. As a young man Robertson hadn't travled much beyond the fall line, and would not have any real contact with the frontier until 1768 when he went land hunting in East Tennessee. Even then he was not experienced enough in the woods to keep from getting lost. Nevertheless, he strenuously resisted association with the lowland culture of "Old" Virginia, and probably concocted the fiction, later perpetuated by his widow Charlotte and his children Felix and Lavinia, that his grandfather immigrated from Scotland to Ireland, and his father from Ireland to Philadelphia.
In spite of what he believed or wished, records show that Robertson's father was born in Prince George (now Dinwiddie) County in the Virginia tidewater, and was a Baptist, not a Presbyterian. Whatever Robertson knew about his heritage, he succeeded in making himself indistinguishable from his Cohee neighbors on the Wautauga River in East Tennessee; and 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, and genuine Cohee, Griffith Rutherford—born on the sea to Irish parents who moved from New Jersey to Halifax County Va. and later to western North Carolina—than with fellow Cumberland settlers Anthony Bledsoe, a religious Episcopalian vain enough to cover his baldness with a wig, or 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. His baptism of fire came on July 20, 1776 when he commanded one of four militia companies marching in two columns from Amos Eaton's fort on Reedy Creek after spies reported seeing three hundred Cherokees on Long Island of Holston (Kingsport, Tenn.). When Lyman Draper suggested to David Campbell that Cocke's warlike rhetoric may have persuaded his father, John Campbell, and 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 ... 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 his appeals were 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 after enduring 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." Likewise, in the Valley of Virginia Presbyterian Philip Fithian 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. Fithian said it was "almost Treason against the Country to mention [tea], much more to drink it—nor any superfluous, vaporous, Nick-Nack ..."
Pennsylvanian Joseph Dodderidge echoed these sentiments, saying "a genuine backwoodsman 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 plebeian backwoods society derided as "people of quality, who do not labor."
The real reasons for conflict rose to the surface one day in 1785, on a September Sunday 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 as many 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 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 born in 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 Andrew Lewis' 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 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 where 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 Henry Skaggs, Joseph Drake, James Knox, and other Cohees. 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."
