The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746-1832

ONE: Settling the Wilderness [Includes Image Plates]

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Virginia Southside, extending nearly nine thousand square miles from the Fall Line of the James River to the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, remained nearly untouched by the political institutions of eastern Virginia, the economic arrangements of the Chesapeake tobacco economy, or the influences of European immigration. It was, at least in the eyes of those white Englishmen who sought to bring it under their domain, a rude wilderness that needed to be tamed and mastered. • THE SOUTHSIDE FRONTIER, 1700­1746 In 1733, William Byrd II, while surveying his lands in the South­ side region that would later become Lunenburg County, recorded some impressions of the character of the area. Byrd had invested in over 100,000 acres of land in the Virginia Southside in hopes that he could lure Swiss and German immigrants to buy tracts and settle there, so it is not surprising that his account of his first thorough survey of the region should stress the potential bounty offered by the new lands. Byrd praised the rich soil, the quality of O N E Settling the Wilderness Settling the Wilderness 15 the timber, and the beauty of the countryside, and he even held out hope that the several copper mines in the area might someday yield substantial returns. But he was unable to subdue his impres­ sion of the rudeness and remoteness of the place, believing it "quite out of Christendom." Describing one of the principal plan­ tations of the Southside, he noted that it "was a poor dirty hovel, with hardly anything in it but children that wallowed about like so many pigs." His own house in Lunenburg, where his manager Henry Morris lived, was a modest structure; during the 1733 ex­ pedition Byrd's entire party of nine was forced to sleep in one room. Nevertheless, that modest dwelling seems to have been one of the grandest in the Southside. When a neighboring family came to visit they "admired it as much as if it had been the grand Vizier's tent in the Turkish army."1 Byrd was hardly more flattering in his comments about some of the "leading citizens" of the region. Cornelius Cargill, founder of what would become one of Lunenburg's principal families, was described by Byrd as a less­than­honest horse trader living in "comfortable fornication with . . . a young woman" of the area. Captain Henry Embry, who would later become one of Lunenburg's first elected burgesses, lived in a "castle containing of one dirty room with a dragging door to it that will neither open or shut. . . . We were obliged to lodge very sociably in the same apartment with the family where, reckoning women and children, we mustered in all no less than nine persons, who all pigged lovingly together."2 Byrd's descriptions hardly bring to mind images of the Virginia gentry culture typified by his own life at Westover, or of Robert Carter's Nomini Hall or even of western Piedmont estates like Edgehill or Shadwell, belonging to the Randolph and Jefferson families. He believed that he was traveling in a remote wilderness, a region lacking even rudimentary forms of social and political organization, an untamed, frontier area in the classic sense. Yet by his investments and his visits to the area, Byrd signaled his intention to bring some degree of order to the region, a form of order that would no doubt reflect some of the values and patterns of authority of his own place of residence in Charles City County. And a little more than a decade after Byrd's visit, in its act incor­ porating Lunenburg as a separate county in 1746, the Virginia 16 The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry General Assembly signified its intention to bring the county within the political and cultural umbrella of that traditional gentry society in which men like William Byrd played such an important role. The social and physical characteristics of the vast expanse of wilderness comprising the early Virginia Southside would pose striking contrasts and formidable challenges to those men who, like Byrd, sought to extend to the region the institutions and cul­ tural values of traditional Virginia society. Indeed, the principal forces for order and stability in the communities of the eastern Chesapeake^the economic power of the planter class, the legal power of the county court, and the moral authority of the...