Hums in the Valley
© Virginia Marin
- Long ago the grunt of buffalo and the bellow of elk echoed across this one-hundred and ten mile-long basin between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains. War whoops signaled clashes between eastern Indians and western braves, hot on the trail of buffalo, while at the same time coon-capped settlers were after a few buffalo of their own.
The Valley served as a great highway from North to South from Pennsylvania to Apeckon and followed in large measure a well marked Indian trail known as the Conestoga Path.
The road to Apeckon, gathering within itself various trails from the north and northeast, became a great thoroughfare not only into the Valley, but also through it to the west, the south and the southwest. Over it passed toilsomely but hopefully those who walked into achievement and into history--trappers and missionaries, farmers and herdsmen, explorers and prospectors.
Though the Valley's first white explorer, John Lederer, gazed on its fields and forests in silent awe, the next group of colonials to find it celebrated noisily. These were the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, who, booted and plumed, followed Governor Alexander Spotswood to a vantage point at Swift Run Gap in 1716.
Here, the pleasure-loving band drank to the King's health with champagne, and fired a volley; offered toasts to the Princess in Burgundy, followed by a volley; and then pledged, with claret, health and longevity to all the rest of the royal family. A volley followed.
More gunshots reverberated up and down the Valley in later years. Squirrel-hunting riflemen from Scotch-Irish and German settlements in the wooded southern areas marched off to the Revolution behind the legendary Daniel Morgan. George Washington, whose family owned land in the hilly northern valley reflected that his tattered army might fight the war from there, even if the British held the entire Atlantic Seaboard--"Let the British have the water if they must, but ne'r the Valley!" As it turned out, that tattered army kept both.
Later still, Civil War strategists realized the value of this mountain-rimmed bread basket. Guns thundered from Harpers Ferry to Staunton as the Northerners tried to seize the Valley. At first it was Stonewall Jackson who defended it from invasion. The former teacher at Lexington's Virginia Military Institute numbed the Union with his bewildering campaign of 1862.
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