Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem

NINE: Reconstructing the Colonial Environment of the Upper Chesapeake Watershed

chapter nine Reconstructing the Colonial Environment of the Upper Chesapeake Watershed robert d. mitchell, warren r. hofstra, and edward f. connor Establishing an environmental baseline from which to measure landscape change in the Chesapeake since the arrival of Europeans is a crucial contribution to ecological history. This chapter provides insight into how this might be achieved using the land survey records of Frederick County, Virginia, between 1730 and 1800 to reconstruct the vegetation and land cover of the northern Shenandoah Valley during the early contact period.This information offers valuable clues to changing land use under colonial conditions of land ownership, resource use, and a developing economy. European occupation of the Chesapeake region depended upon the transformation of what colonial settlers termed wilderness or wasteland into property. The condition of interior environments encountered by migrating European and Tidewater settlers during the early eighteenth century significantly influenced the locations and forms of colonial settlements . These environments were not pristine lands unaltered by previous native activities, although the nature and extent of the alterations remain problematic. Geographers and historians have long been interested in the first European penetrations of the mountainous upper reaches of the Chesapeake watershed in western Maryland and Virginia, but they have rarely been concerned with what is the focus of this chapter : what the process of appropriating property revealed about the relationships between society and environment. Our treatment of Chesapeake history rests on three assumptions. We need, first, an interdisciplinary approach combining natural and social sciences because natural processes often operate independently of human action.Humans act to modify these processes,but nature responds to human activity in unexpected ways. Second, to understand this mutual interaction , we need to reach beyond the traditional documentary sources of the historian. Land-survey records in Virginia, for example, reveal important information on vegetation cover by identifying particular boundary markers, “witness trees,” which are often described in some detail. When these surveys are organized geographically into continuous cadastral patterns, they provide the best data we are likely to acquire on the distribution of forested, open, and cultivated lands, as well as on the location of farmsteads, routeways, and other sites and paths of economic activity.Third, whether the intent is to test hypotheses about global processes or simply to reconstruct land cover from the bottom up, such research can take place only at local levels of inquiry and at the smallest spatial scales of individual settlement sites and land parcels. We focus on the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, with evidence derived particularly from Frederick County, the earliest and most effectively occupied county on colonial Virginia’s far western frontiers. The Shenandoah River and the upper branches of the Potomac River form the bulk of the drainage basin of the western part of the Chesapeake watershed , the Shenandoah occupying the northern half of the Great Valley of Virginia between the Blue Ridge and the front range of the Allegheny Plateau. The Conococheague River occupies a similar position north of the Potomac in the Great Valley section of Maryland and adjacent Pennsylvania. Settlement of the Upper Chesapeake English authorities were unfamiliar with the area immediately west of the Blue Ridge until the second decade of the eighteenth century, when Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Alexander Spotswood, and his entourage climbed the Blue Ridge in 1716 and looked over the Shenandoah Valley. Within three years, Virginia had begun to formulate a frontier policy designed to organize buffer settlements against potential French encroachments in the upper Ohio Valley and also against claims made by holders of the Northern Neck Proprietary grant to lands drained by the upper reaches of the Potomac. Maryland was slower to organize a western land policy, in part because of boundary disputes with Pennsylvania and in 168 Discovering the Chesapeake part because of a general perception that much of western Maryland was devoid of trees (and was thus referred to as the “Barrens”). Colonial settlement of Maryland’s Piedmont and Great Valley sections was delayed until the 1740s. In Virginia, on the other hand, authorities had begun to develop a more elaborate settlement policy under Lt.-Gov. William Gooch during the early 1730s. His administration issued orders to individuals willing to settle families west of the Blue Ridge with the stipulation that within two years the grantors would settle one family per 1,000 acres granted. The goal was rapid settlement of the Appalachian frontier rather...