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The First White TradersCradled between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the green Alleghenies lies the beautiful Valley of Virginia where my ancestors lived. The first white traders who ventured across the mountains brought back hardship tales so grim it took 100 years after Jamestown before colonists showed interest in westward movement.
Colonial surveyors usually gave up at the rugged Blue Ridge wall, though young George Washington did make it to Natural Bridge and left his initials G.W. carved in the cliff. After rattlesnakes 14 feet long were reported, Virginia's Governor Spotswood equipped his own exploring party in 1716 with, "wine, brandy, Irish usquebaugh, stout, rum, cherry punch, champagne, and cider" and reached the valley claiming it for George I.
Soon a flood of shakegut wagons came grinding down from the North, bypassing the Blue Ridge over Indian trails. These new settlers were different from the English-blooded Virginians. These were mainly Germans, and Scotch-Irish, sprinkled with Scots, Alsatians, Swiss, and Welsh. Desperate for land to support a family, they brought their long rifles and their will to work. The women could hew with an axe as good as "airy" man.
Sometimes they had to pull the plow. No barrels of fine china and silks on returning tobacco ships for these ladies.
While Tidewater Virginians considered tobacco the bewitching vegetable, the valley folk called it the chopping herbe of hell.
They disapproved of slavery. They quoted their bibles so often they were nick named (quoth he) Chohees. They could make do on bear meat and shucky beans, risk the panthers of the dark hills, and the horrors of Indian massacres.
The valley's limestone soil, once a seabed and yet holding fossilized shells, yielded lush crops. On the prairies the wild buffalo grass grew so high farmers could knot it over their saddles. The Chohees peppered their new world with little churches, and grist mills. They built many schools, and raised tremendous families. Even today the Valley of Virginia seems one huge kissincousin. When the War of the Revolution came along, some families sent off a dozen sons and grandsons. A hundred years later the valley reeled with the invasion during the Civil War. Because the area furnished food to Confederate troops, General Sheridan was ordered to burn it till it would be "a desert, so that crows flying over it will have to carry their own provender with them."
He did just that.
Though the cause was lost, still the land and the blue-purple mountains waited. Folks replanted. They restored their brick houses with the beautiful mantels and doors. They exhumed their family silver and placed it back on their walnut sideboards.
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