Augusta County, VA (52 Locations in 52 Weeks)
Augusta County, Virginia, lies in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. It was formed in 1738 from Orange County, which lies in the central part of the state. (Orange County itself had been formed only four years earlier – things were changing very rapidly in Virginia.) The county was named for Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, the mother of King George III of England (who would become King before the American Revolution). Augusta had married Frederick (Prince of Wales) in 1736, the second newly added county (to the north of August) was named Frederick.
As early as 1716, the self-proclaimed “Knights of the Golden Horseshoe,” under the leadership of acting Royal Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood, had crossed the first range of the Blue Ridge at Swift Run Gap (about 30 miles north of modern-day Charlottesville, Virginia). Virginia, which had been settled by Europeans for more than 100 years, had been experiencing what they perceived as population pressure as more and more immigrants arrived from England and increasing numbers of landless men from the older parts of the colony moved west in search of land.
It is likely that Spotswood and his men were less interested in gaining more land for the residents of his colony and more interested in claiming the Valley to fend off the French, who were coming to dominate the Ohio Valley (just on the other side of the mountains).
At roughly the same time, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians (who were fleeing Ireland after decades of religious persecution) had begun to make their way to America, settling first in the Philadelphia area. They were not entirely welcomed by the original settlers of Pennsylvania – the Quakers seemed to take a specific dislike to them – and they soon moved down the Great Wagon Road into the valley of Virginia. Germans from Pennsylvania also came to Augusta County by this route. Here’s the route of this road:
Virginia was by no means a bastion of religious toleration in the 1730s, but the Shenandoah Valley was quite distant from the population centers in the eastern part of the colony, and settlers there could count on being pretty much left alone by the powerful people in the colony.
At the time of this earliest settlement of Augusta County, the agricultural value of the land was unknown – no one had tried to farm it in any systematic fashion. However, the natural growth of trees and meadows spoke to the likely fertility of the soil and attracted interest. At that time abundant wildlife filled the Valley – including herds of buffalo that had not yet been chased to the West and to virtual extermination over the next two centuries.
The first documented white settlement in Augusta County was in 1732, when some Germans from Pennsylvania claimed land on the side of Massanutten Mountain just east of Staunton. In the early years of the area’s settlement, land ownership was not formalized, and settlers simply claimed land as they moved to it. As the county’s population increased, the need surfaced for a more regularized form of land ownership, and disagreements with the planter aristocracy from the eastern parts of the colony continued over some years.
One key figure in the settlement of the county illustrates the haphazard pattern of settlement; James Patton, an Irishman who sailed from Hobbs Hole, Virginia (just east of the fall line on the Rappahannock River in the eastern part of the state), made 25 crossings of the Atlantic, bringing hundreds of Irish immigrants who worked off their time as indentured servants in the Valley of Virginia.
Evolution of County Boundaries
In compiling a narrative history of Augusta County, it is important to recognize that events described as occurring in the county did not necessarily occur within the current boundaries of the county. As the following maps illustrate, the territory labeled “Augusta County” changed rapidly in the middle of the 18th century. All these maps are taken from https://www.mapofus.org.
A (Very) Little History
From 1753 until 1764, Augusta County experienced what are known locally as the “Indian Wars.” Although traditionally no Indian nations claimed the land in the Shenandoah Valley, several tribes hunted on the land and fought over access to it. The growth of the white population in the area impinged on the hunting rights and free access that the Indians had counted on for centuries. When white settlement increased, the enmity of the Indians focused on the white settlers who were impeding anyone else’s access to the land.
The first well-known skirmish with the Indians took place in 1755, when George Washington accompanied British General Braddock to the Ohio River in an effort to scout the French settlement there. The French were joined by 100 or so Indians in rebuffing Washington’s foray; British General Braddock was killed in this encounter. The remaining troops withdrew to Virginia. This was the beginning of what the Americans called the French and Indian War and what the rest of the world called the Seven Years War.
In the Valley, Augusta men were encouraged by Virginia Governor Dinwiddie to fight the Indians. These were violent times in the Valley. Although the French and Indian War is counted as one of the most important military conflicts of the pre-Revolutionary era, it was most significant to Virginians, whose leaders were most interested in gaining access to the land in the Ohio Valley that was at that time controlled by the French. Apparently large numbers of settlers in Augusta County abandoned their land and fled east, back over the Blue Ridge, to escape the Indian attacks.
The Indian Wars cooled down with the end of the French and Indian War and the establishment of the Proclamation Line of 1763. The British didn’t want white settlers to move beyond the Proclamation Line because of the continued danger to these settlers from the French and the Indians who, despite their defeat in the war, were still a threat to British expansion.
However, events a decade later, in 1774, further disturbed Augusta County. A 1768 treaty that attempted to acknowledge native claims to use the land beyond the Appalachian chain as a hunting ground resulted in pacification of the area for a while, and white settlement into the trans-mountain area surged. In 1773, Daniel Boone famously led the first party of white settlers into what was then Kentucky County, Virginia (later to become the state of Kentucky). Boone followed a route that came to be identified as the Wilderness Road, and his party was subjected to Indian attacks which resulted in the death of his 16-year-old son. This tragedy began a series of skirmishes between Indians and white settlers that came to be called “Lord Dunmore’s War,” which many historians see as a precursor to the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” at Lexington and Concord a year later.
My Ancestors in Augusta County
So this is the situation in which my Augusta County ancestors lived in the last half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. They moved to Illinois by 1850. My ancestors in Augusta County include the following individuals.