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Early Colonial Period1649Forty-two
years after British colonists first landed at the site they named
Jamestown, the British monarch-in-exile Charles II felt it necessary
to be generous. His father, King Charles I, had recently been beheaded
for, among other complaints, defying parliament, and religious zealotry
that included having the noses and ears cut off subjects who refused
to join the Anglican Church. Now young Charles had been forced by
the victorious Puritan Roundheads to take sanctuary in Scotland
and then France. He would wait 11 more years for the Restoration
of the Monarchy, but in the meantime he promised a large land grant
in Virginia, later known as the Northern Neck Proprietary, to six
noblemen friends because of their support of the Crown in those
troubled times. One hundred fifty years later, people living on
Terrapin Neck near Shepherds Town, Virginia, would have cause to
regret this generosity. It is
unknown when the Virginia colonists first heard of the new proprietary,
but no doubt the Virginians were dismayed at the prospect of losing
control of yet another large tract of land, having already been
forced to give up the northern portion of the Chesapeake Bay country
to the Calverts and Lord Baltimore. The new Northern Neck Proprietary
seems to have generated fewer violent sparks, perhaps because most
of the land lay to the unknown west beyond the tidewater settlements,
and there was not an immediate influx of new governing authorities
marking boundaries and clamoring for resources. The relatively small
number of settlers in Virginia generally stayed close to their tidewater
plantations for many years because of fear of Indians, and the threat
was real - some 350 colonists were killed by Indians in the Virginia
colony in 1641 alone (Couper 1952). 1660Charles
II returned triumphantly to England as King after the death of Oliver
Cromwell. Many of his loyal followers had lost much of their property
while he was in exile and responded by moving to one of the colonies
across the Atlantic, but at least several were grateful for having
been granted large tracts of land in the New World as partial compensation. 1685Joist Hite was born in Bonfeld, Germany, son of a local butcher
and a member of the Protestant church (Jones et. al 1979). 1690By this
year deaths and marriages had transferred the bulk of the Northern
Neck Proprietary in Virginia into one family of the British peerage,
Lord Fairfax (who had acquired it through marriage to a Culpeper).
Lord and Lady Fairfax lived on large castled estates in England;
they would never see their Virginia lands. Nevertheless, Lord Fairfax
did employ agents in the Virginia Colony to administer the Proprietary
and to see that the local Virginia Council did not infringe on his
lands between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers as the Council
handed out their own grants in the region. The Virginia Council
often ignored the Fairfax claim to the land and gave out land grants
within the disputed area anyway. At this time the Virginia Colony
was selling frontier lands not only to individual settler families
but also to land speculators, who provided a service by surveying
the land and bringing in additional settler families. The land speculators,
in tandem with their settlers, were required to survey parcels of
land and have them recorded for the issuance of a patent by the
Governor or Proprietor. There wasn’t always a strong distinction
between the speculators and settlers because they often belonged
to the same extended family. Once the governor issued a settler
a patent, they then held a strong legal title to the land. In order
to acquire a large land grant, land speculators were usually required
to bring in a specified number of settlers to the colony by a specified
deadline. The settlers then paid fees and rents to the large land
speculators. The system necessarily meant that a lot of money traded
hands; it also provided the potential for some of the middlemen
to get rich, and created a strong financial incentive to attract
settlers. Land patents from the Virginia Council and grants from
the Fairfax Proprietary were mostly in the Coastal Plain and Piedmont
areas of Virginia through the 1720's; the lower Shenandoah Valley
on the western side of the Blue Ridge was largely unexplored before
1700, and will become the focus of the following narrative. Early
Virginia history is replete with tales of European exploring parties
setting out westward, walking up the moderate slopes of the Blue
Ridge and gazing out over the Shenandoah Valley, supposedly uttering
flowery phrases and waxing poetic over the lovely vision before
them, followed by the congratulatory backslapping return with lusty
tales of adventure describing hardships and toil for the ears of
the more timid souls who had remained safely at home. You have to
wonder, since a traverse of the Blue Ridge is hardly a Himalayan
odyssey, if there were a few traders, trappers or Native Americans
nearby thinking to themselves “big deal, my grandmother walks
up there every week…”. 1693In Britain, the Fairfax family, who had acquired the rights to the Northern Neck Proprietary in Virginia, asked for and received confirmation of their Proprietary from the King. They apparently hoped this would resolve once and for all who held title to the land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers in that wild, uncivilized colony across the Atlantic. It didn’t.
1699A new system of land
grants became available to immigrants coming into the Virginia
colony, referred to as treasury rights. This allowed
anyone to
purchase land, 100 acres for 10 shillings. To retain ownership, an
annual quit rent and
occupation of the property was necessary. This replaced the old system
of acquiring land by bringing in settlers, known as head rights. 1702Robert
Carter, in Williamsburg, Virginia, became the agent of Lord Fairfax.
Until his death in 1732, he was particularly effective at controlling
or at least lodging legal complaints (caveats) against infringements
on Fairfax Proprietary lands. He eventually held all the important
positions on the governing Council of the colony while at the same
time acting as Fairfax’s agent. His tenacity may have tended
to reduce settlement in the lower Shenandoah Valley because of the
difficulties in acquiring a clear legal title to the land. He and
other Fairfax agents managed to steer many land grants toward members
of their own families - thus adding significantly to the Carter,
Fitzhugh, and Lee family fortunes in Virginia. 1705The Virginia colony
passed a law forbidding the granting of patents in excess of
4000 acres; exceptions to
this policy were
sometimes
given
to companies
and individuals. To the north in Pennsylvania, William Penn’s
Proprietary had now expanded to almost the Susquehanna River. Native
American groups (at
least those that were paid) tended to be more tolerant of the Pennsylvanian
settlers because of Penn’s policy of purchasing land from
the local tribes. The English settlers in Virginia and Maryland,
on the other hand, were referred to
by the natives as "Long Knives" because of their habit
of acquiring land by force. At this time the French were exploring
and settling the
Ohio Valley, and the Spanish were increasing their settlements
in Florida and along
the lower
Mississippi. 1709Joist
Hite, born in Germany, crossed the Atlantic and settled in New York
with a number of other Dutch and German families, including his
father and stepmother. He had married Anna Maria Mercklin 5 years
before, and had worked as a linen weaver before setting sail from
Rotterdam with several other local families; Anna had given birth
to two children but they hadn’t survived. Many history texts
describe him then as a wealthy, distinguished businessman with the
financial wherewithal and influence to organize and finance the
journey to the New World for many families, and was supposedly even
able to provide his own ships; the histories then go on to describe
his inevitable continued success and prominence as a real estate
entrepreneur in the New World. It would be interesting to see where
this fable originated, as recent scholarship points to a more humble
origin - he has been documented as crossing the Atlantic as one
of a group of indentured servants who worked for a time at a failed
business venture in New York. By 1714 he was apparently a landowner
with a growing family living north of Philadelphia, and about 3
years later he owned a plantation and gristmill outside the present
community of Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, a few miles north of Philadelphia,
and was doing some weaving on the side (Jones et al. 1979). His
later efforts at administering a large land grant in the lower Shenandoah
Valley of Virginia will prove to be a major chapter in the history
of the land that has now become the National Conservation Training
Center. 1719Lady Fairfax died. Her
24-year old son Thomas, 6th Lord Fairfax, became the sole Proprietor
of the Northern Neck in Virginia. He
owned only a 1/6 interest in the Virginia proprietary outright,
the other 5/6 he held only for his lifetime. He had rather reclusive,
taciturn bachelor tendencies, and often preferred to spend his time
alone on his British estates rather than engage in the typical aristocratic
functions of a young British peer. 1720'sThe debate over exactly
when a permanent community in the Shepherdstown area first developed
has not been resolved
-
some authors put the date as early as 1706, others 1719, others
still later in the 1720s. If in fact Europeans lived in the area
before 1720, they seem most likely to have been itinerant groups
that stretch the definition of "community", since they
seem not to have built substantial cabins, churches, mills, or
cleared extensive fields, or laid claim to more than a small amount
of land and a very minor portion of the springs and water resources
of the area; they may have lived more in the manner of the Native
Americans who still established small temporary camps in the region
at the time, perhaps trapping, hunting, trading and gardening to
survive. In the early to mid-1720s there seems not to have been
an established group of people willing to defend their claims to
any large land holdings near present-day Shepherdstown, the evidence
being the number of springs, creeks and rich bottom lands -the
most valuable real estate- that remained to be claimed in the late
1720s by families such as the Van Meters, Morgans, Shepherds and
others (these families, of course, may have purchased or bartered
the rights to these water sources from earlier arrivals who didn’t
intend to stay). So with due caution, the second half of the 1720s
probably marked the arrival of the first long-term "settlers" into
what became the Shepherdstown area. At the regional level, many
of the early settlers coming into northern Virginia and northern
Maryland were Germans most recently from the Lancaster and York
areas of Pennsylvania. William Penn’s agents had been busy
in the Rhine Valley of Germany attempting to lure settlers into
Penn’s proprietary. After arriving by the shipload in Philadelphia
and other ports, many of the newly arrived settlers stopped in
the small established German communities in Pennsylvania such as
York and Lancaster only long enough to ask for directions to the
closest available land. Many of these settlers belonged to various
sects of the Protestant faith seeking land and a place to practice
free expressions of their faith, including Moravians, Quakers,
Dunkers, and Friends. It is misleading in some respects to refer
to them as "German", since many of them had spent only
a short time in what was referred to as the Palatine area of Germany.
Their Protestant faith had made them unwelcome in many parts of
Europe, so they had sought refuge in the Palatinate and may have
lived there less than a generation in many cases. William Penn’s
agents no doubt found them an attentive audience. After negotiating
the wilderness paths south out of Pennsylvania (Mason and Dixon
would not mark the legal border between Maryland and Pennsylvania
until 1763 – many considered Lancaster to be in Maryland),
and their arrival on the other side of the Cohongoroota River in
Virginia near the river ford, a few groups may have set about building
cabins and clearing a bit of land for pasture and crops. The first
arrivals had no readily available system in place to acquire legal
title to the land they occupied, and had to depend on other settlers’ willingness
to recognize their "tomahawk rights", which refers to
their method of marking property claims by blazing marks on the
trunks of trees. The new settlers would find it difficult to develop
legal, cultural and social ties with Williamsburg and the other
European-populated areas of Virginia because of the distance and
lack of roads - therefore they were rather tenuously "Virginians" only
in a narrow geographical context, and even that was debated for
years until the leaders of the colonies agreed on which tributary
constituted the main stem of the Potomac River. (Lawsuits debating
the boundaries between Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania continued
even up to the 20th century). 1725Charles
Mounts Anderson, early explorer and operator of an Indian trading
post on the Monocacy River near present-day Frederick, Maryland,
was asked by the Maryland Assembly to provide a meeting place at
his home for a council with a local Indian tribe. A John Powell
was charged with inviting the Indians, and was "to go to
Shuano town on Potomack, commonly called Opessa’s Town”;
he was provided calico shirts and scarlet worsted stockings to be
used as gifts to help induce the Indians to attend. The purpose
of the proposed council was to negotiate with the Shawnee over returning
slaves they had been harboring - but the Shuano (Shawnee) Indians
chose not to show up on the appointed date, and Anderson’s
partner Israel Friend was sent back to invite them to visit Annapolis
instead (Archives of Md, vol. 25 p 443, 451). Opessa’s Town
is now called Oldtown, located on the Potomac River between Hancock
and Cumberland, Maryland, about 50 miles west of Shepherdstown.
Charles Anderson had been in the Indian trading business since at
least 1712, when he was recorded as entering into a lawsuit in Cecil
Co, Maryland, with the widow of Indian trader Jacque LeTort, who
lived at the Indian town at Conestoga, Pennsylvania (see Diller,
n.d). Charles Anderson had been involved with negotiations over
these same slaves since at least 1722 when the Maryland Council,
hearing he was in Annapolis, had asked him to go to the Shuano town
(Oldtown) with gifts of coats and socks, and a promise of a
"chain of friendship" for "so long as the
sun and moon shall endure," especially if they would give
the slaves back (Md Archives, vol 25, p. 395). 1726John
Van Meter and his family purchased a 200 acre tract from Lord Baltimore
near present-day Frederick, Maryland. The Van Meters were of Dutch
origin, and had been in the Dutch colonies near New York and New
Jersey for several generations. All of John’s children were
born on land the family owned in New Jersey, but the family had
moved west to Maryland by the early 1720s. John, 43, and occasionally
his younger brother Isaac were itinerant traders and plantation
owners in the Monocacy River valley, and they no doubt had some
contact with Charles Anderson’s Indian trading post there.
The Van Meters were likely well acquainted with a fellow Dutch Swearingen
family living nearby at the time. The Van Meters certainly became
acquainted with another family living in the neighborhood - John’s
daughter Elizabeth would marry Thomas Shepherd in a few years, and
the young couple would, with Elizabeth’s parents and several
of their neighbors and relatives, soon take up land on the other
side of the Cohongoroota River near a ford along the old wilderness
trail, which the Shepherds would years later develop as “Shepherdstown”.
1727Sometime this decade
a small number of German immigrants and others from colonies
in Maryland and New Jersey may have begun
forming a community near Pack Horse Ford on the Virginia side of
the Cohongoroota River, along the old wilderness trail that had
been used for perhaps thousands of years by the native Americans,
located a mile or so south of the land later developed by the Shepherds.
These first Europeans left few traces of their time spent here,
vague church records, explorer’s accounts and uncertain graves
being the bulk of the evidence (see Dandridge 1910, Bushong 1941).
There are records of Europeans exploring this area before 1729,
though it may be stretching it a bit to call them a community before
about 1730. Within a few years land sales and legal actions recorded
at Virginia courthouses would provide better documentation of these
and perhaps later arrivals, including the Morgans, Shepherds, Weltons
and Van Meters. The Native Americans had not been forced to give
up their use of the Shenandoah Valley at this time, by either violence
or treaty, but the Europeans apparently felt that the small numbers
of Natives who traveled through the area did not present enough
of a menace to keep them from settling there. The Natives were
getting anxious, though: in a letter to the authorities in Maryland
complaining of white incursions near the Cohongoroota (Potomac)
in 1731-32, several Indian representatives of the Five Nations,
including one Capt. Civility, specifically mentioned that they
had sold land only to Israel Friend, the trading partner of Charles
Anderson, near Antietam Creek on the eastern (Maryland) side of
the Cohongoroota near Pack Horse Ford (Md Archives vol. 28, p.10-11).
They considered any other whites settling in the area to be trespassing
and urged the Maryland authorities to stop the surveying of property.
1728Peter Beller and his
wife, likely recent German immigrants, were baptized in a German
religious community near Lancaster, Pennsylvania after helplessly
watching their young daughter die (Klein 1926). They would soon
be migrating further southwest to the colonial frontier beyond the
Blue Ridge. (This may be a different Peter Beller than the one who
eventually owned NCTC property, but the timing and circumstances
seem right. There was also a Peter Bellar who had owned, prior to
1712, the same piece of property north of Philadelphia later purchased
by Joist Hite [Phil Deed Book F, Vol 2, p. 48]). 1729Brothers John and Isaac
Van Meter, explorers and traders from the Monocacy River valley
in Maryland (Isaac apparently
spent
most of his time in New Jersey), built a cabin about 2 miles west
of present-day Shepherdstown, West Virginia near where Route 45
crosses Rocky Marsh Run. They had spent some time in the last several
years making contacts with authorities in Virginia about acquiring
a large land grant, which included talks with Robert “King” Carter,
representing Lord Fairfax and the Northern Neck Proprietary. They
no doubt agonized over who held the rightful claim, the Virginia
Colony, or Lord Fairfax in Great Britain? John Van Meter became
the Constable of Monocosie Hundred in Maryland in 1729, a position
he would hold intermittently through 1734, suggesting that his
Virginia cabin was a temporary dwelling at first. The Virginia
cabin site eventually became his home in the mid-1730s and became
part of a patented property of over 1700 acres that included most
of the watershed of the spring-fed creek now known as Rocky Marsh
Run. It’s interesting to note that John, who could presumably
pick out the most desirable property in the entire area, deliberately
picked out the wettest, marshiest site around, and for years his
tract was referred to as the Van Meter Marsh patent. (Homeowners
now living in this area are occasionally the subject of local newspaper
articles during wet years – the marshy aspect of the landscape
has apparently become less useful in recent years, and some would
prefer that the perennial surface water, so attractive to the Van
Meters, drained a little faster to the Potomac through the now-channelized
sections of creek.) Before moving full time to Virginia Van Meter
lived in what was known as the Monocasie Hundred which encompassed
an area extending from the mouth of the Monocacy River where it
joined with the Potomac up into Pennsylvania, including the area
now known as Frederick, Maryland. After writing a letter to authorities
complaining of “abuses” by the settlers in Monocacie
Hundred, Constable Van Meter was given a couple of deputies, including
one Joseph Mounts (Tracy and Dern 1987).
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