Into Augusta County
After hearing of the fertile land toward the mountains, settlers began to move west to settle on available and less expensive fertile lands. By 1720 the Piedmont Region of Virginia had been settled. Larger tracts of land were claimed. Counties like Spotsylvania and Orange were formed. Large plantation owners controlled much of the land east of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
South from Pennsylvania and Maryland
Thousands of immigrants came to America during the 18th century for Europe through the ports of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Baltimore, Maryland. Land in Pennsylvania and Maryland east of the Allegheny Mountains was very expensive and not always readily available. Settlers feared crossing the Allegheny Mountains because of the vast presents of Native Americans living to the west. After hearing of the fertile land toward the south in the Valley of Virginia in the Virginia Colony, settlers began to move south from Pennsylvania and Maryland to settle on available and less expensive fertile lands.
Settlers learned of the great valley west of the Blue Ridge Mountains from the Native American and from the explorers who had ventured beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. Before 1725, settlers crossed the mountains from eastern Virginia or came down the wagon road from Pennsylvania and Maryland and registered their claims for land in the valley with the Orange County Court prior to Augusta County being formed in 1738 from Orange County.
Forming Augusta County
Based on today’s maps, the size of this new Augusta County would have been more than 100,000 square miles. During the early colonial era, the English Crown had instructed Governor Spotswood to sell land in Virginia using the treasury rights system.
The treasury right system allowed a settler to purchase a limited number of small fifty-acre parcels of land for five shillings per parcel, from the Crown.
These very small transactions were not a model that would satisfy the settlers’ demand for land, or the Crown desire for rapid settlement. This system was very cumbersome to be managed and was soon abandoned.
Influential colonists saw an opportunity. They recognized the financial benefits of acquiring very large tracts of land west of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Augusta County, from the Crown.
At the same time, the Crown saw the financial value of having the land occupied and recognized that men with a financial incentive would work to attract settlers to buy their land.
Augusta County The Beginning
By 1700, settlers were permanently established in Piedmont Virginia. Settlers pushed westward all the way to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Groups such as Bland and Wood in 1650, John Lederer in 1669, and Bates and Fallon in 1672 explored beyond the Blue Ridge mountains. In the 1690’s, the colonial Virginia governance began to subdivide the large Virginia counties, in an attempt to create new counties with a locally functional governance that could send representation to a central governance in Williamsburg to work with the governors of Virginia.
Governor Spotswood and his Knights of the Golden Horseshoe in 1718, had explored land at the top and to the west of the Blue Ridge Mountains only to find settlers had reached the Augusta County region from central Pennsylvania and from the east. In 1721, Spotsylvania County was established having been created from Essex, King and Queen, and King William counties which created a large county whose western boundary ended at the foot of the mountains.
There simply was not enough land for everyone to have a parcel in eastern Pennsylvania and Eastern Virginia. The Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, and the hostile Native Americans in those mountains acted as a barrier to settler migration to the west. Settlers from the east of the Shenandoah Valley’s fertile land and the rivers.
By the 1720’s, settler migration to Augusta County was occurring. To avoid the natural barriers, settlers came to the Valley of Virginia by way of trail from Pennsylvania to Virginia that gained the name the Great Wagon Road. Settlers from Eastern Virginia came across natural passages in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a primary route crossing the mountain just north of what is today I-64.
Early settlers coming to Virginia from Pennsylvania were Palatinate German Protestant immigrants or Germanic people who were Lutheran or Brethren from the Rhine Region of Europe. They were fluent in German and practiced their Germanic culture, skills and customs. Even a larger group of settlers were Scots and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians that came from Ulster, Ireland through Pennsylvania or through Maryland and many English people came from eastern Virginia. They settled on land granted to William Beverley and Benjamin Borden in what is today Augusta County. Some of these early settlers were second generation family members.
African-Americans in Augusta County
By 1770 when Augusta County settlement was rapidly growing many of the settlers were from Eastern Virginia. First and second generation African- Americans made up nearly one-third of the population in eastern Virginia. White settlers coming to Augusta County brought with them Africa-American slave families and free-born African-American families. By the 1860, the time of the Civil War, the African-American population in Augusta County was more than twenty percent.
Page developed by Gordon Barlow gordon@amaty.com