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Shenandoah Settlers

© Jeannine Dugan

The Shenandoah Valley is a 200-mile stretch of fertile land that runs from Harper's Ferry, West Virginia south to Lexington, Virginia. The Valley is bordered to the east by the Blue Ridge Mountains and on the west by the Appalachian Mountains. "Shenandoah" is an Algonquin word meaning "Daughter of the Stars" and before the 18th century, American Indian tribes called the Shenandoah Valley home. Among them were the Senedo Indians, who may have been caught in the crossfire of the Catawba and Delaware tribal wars. By the early 1700's, when the first European explorers entered the valley, there were no longer Native Americans living in the Valley. Several tribes used the Valley as hunting grounds, among them the Shawnee, Iroquois, Occoneechee, Monocans and Piscataways, but no tribes laid claim to the land.

John Lederer, a German doctor, is given the distinction of being the first European explorer in the Valley (although Jesuit priests may have entered the Shenandoah as early as 1632). Lederer explored the Valley between 1669 - 1670, being well treated by the Indian tribes that he encountered. On his third and final journey into the Shenandoah, an Englishman named Catlet, who stayed in the Valley to hunt and trap, accompanied Lederer. Cadwaller Jones, another Englishman, entered the Valley in 1673 and likewise stayed to set up hunting and trapping. In 1703, Louis Michelle, a Swiss explorer, journeyed into the Valley and, in 1715, Alexander Spotswood, governor of the Virginia Colony, claimed the Shenandoah Valley as a prize for England.

During the next 25 years, land in the Shenandoah Valley was bought or bestowed upon a few primary land owners. In 1725, John Van Meter entered the Valley and in 1730, his sons John and Isaac were granted a land patent of 40,000 acres in the lower Shenandoah. In 1732, a large portion of this land was sold to Joist Hite (Jost Heydt), a native of Alsace, who settled near present day Winchester, Virginia with 15 families of German immigrants. In 1736, Virginia Governor William Gooch gave 118,491 acres to William Beverly and later that same year, Benjamin Borden, an agent for Lord Fairfax, was granted half a million acres in the Valley. (Joist Hite and Lord Fairfax would enter into a legal dispute over this land that would last for 50 years.)

Regardless of who actually owned the land, immigrants were already found squatting on land in the Valley in the early 18th century. Lured into Virginia from Pennsylvania by the promise of cheap and abundant land, settlers followed a trail from Philadelphia down present-day I-81 on what would become known as the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road. (Prior to the Revolution all settlement took place east of the Appalachians since the English Government prohibited settlement west of this mountain chain.) The Wagon Road carried settlers from Pennsylvania down through Virginia and eventually into the Carolina Piedmont and Kentucky. In later years, Conestoga wagons would become a familiar site along the road but in the early years, settlement was accomplished under harsh conditions and travel was often accomplished on foot.

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