Antiques.(Shenandoah Valley of Virginia)

 
The interior parts of America afford the fairest prospect of advantage 
to settlers.... These parts of Virginia and the Carolinas are the 
paradise of America. 
Richard Champion, Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine, October 1787 

At the dawn of the eighteenth century the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia was just beginning to be encountered by Europeans. According to Francis (or Franz) Louis Michel, a young Swiss merchant on a scouting trip for a colony of his countrymen, a "considerable tract of wild and uncultivated deserts" lay along the lower stretches of the Shenandoah River. "There is good land," he observed, "where are great forest trees of oak, and where much game abounds." Beginning in the 1730s the valley formed part of the burgeoning frontier, with migrant streams drawn by offers made by colonial and imperial officials eager to position a defensive buffer of yeoman farm settlements between the Tidewater plantation regions of Virginia and the threats posed by French expansion and Indian warfare to the west. Scots-Irish and German settlers from Pennsylvania were joined by smaller numbers of men and women with English backgrounds, who pushed across the Blue Ridge Mountains from lower Virginia.

The mountains to either side, which hem in and give shape to the broad expanse of lowland, provided a natural corridor for the movement of people. Spilling down the Great Wagon Road that traversed the Valley of Virginia, the enormous flood of new settlers reached the Yadkin River valley of North Carolina before the end of the 1740s. As he watched the wagons roll through Wachovia in North Carolina, the Moravian leader Frederick William Marshall remarked: "The migrations of men are like the movements of a flock of sheep, where one goes the flock follows, without knowing why." Eventually measuring 735 miles long, the Great Wagon Road was "the most heavily traveled road in all America" during "the first great internal folk movement in American history," wrote Carl Bridenbaugh.

By 1800 the entire Valley of Virginia had become private property--divided and subdivided by surveys endorsed by the government and secured by deeds in local courthouses. Thriving ...