Volume 2 , Issue 9

Highland County Virginia - April 1938 - Samuel Willson Sterrett

This brief history of Highland County has been prepared by Mr. Samuel William Sterrett, a student of the University of Virginia. It was prepared in the School of Rural Social Economics which he is engaged in the preparation of economic and social surveys of various Virginia counties.

A large part of this material was adopted and condensed from A History of Highland county, by Oren F. Morten. Other sources used were:

Acts and Joint Resolutions Passed by the General Assemblyof the State of Virginia, Richmond, 1848.

1. History of Augusta County, Virginia, by J. Lewis Peyton, 1882.
2. Annals of Augusta County, Virginia, by Joseph A. Waddell, 1902.
3. Historical Sketches of Virginia Hot Springs, Warm Sulphur Springs, and Bath County, Virginia, by J. T. McAllister, 1908.

In beginning this history of Highland County it might be well to consider the geographical features of the county. History is not clearly understood without the help of physical geography. Conditions of soil, climate, animal and vegetable life, and the nature of the surface, whether damp or dry, level or mountainous, have very much to do with molding the habits of the people who settle a new region.

Highland County is located in the center of the Appalachian Uplift. In form it is an irregular quadrangle, its four corners looking nearly toward the cardinal points of the compass. Its area is 390 square miles according to the boundary survey of 1848, but according to the recent records of the county surveyor, the area is 455 square miles.

There are two Highland counties; one in Virginia, the other in Ohio. The boundary counties in Virginia are Bath and Augusta. Between the bordering mountain ranges four parallel elevations run entirely through the county, dividing it into five well-defined valleys.

Small springs are very frequent, except in the limestone regions, and many a farm house has no need of a well. The waters are usually freestone or limestone, although alum, sulphur, and chalybeate springs occur in several localities.

A well-known economist has remarked of Highland that "nowhere else in the United States in an equal area is to be found such an opportunity for diversity of employment in agriculture, mining, metallurgy, or varied manufactures."

Economic and religious opportunity were the two arms of the magnet that drew Europeans to America and made this country great.

The white settlement of Highland County begins in the year 1745. By 1727 the Cowpasture Valley had been prospected, and a year or two earlier a Dutch trader by the name of John Vanmeter had ascended the South Branch as far as the vicinity of Franklin (West Virginia). John Vanderpool, another Dutch explorer, discovered the gap which today bears his name, and told of a beautiful valley beyond, yet with unpassable mountains in the distance.

Hence, in 1727, a year before the first permanent settlement in Rockingham, and five years before there was anybody at or near where the city of Stauntion grew up, we find an attempt to colonize the Cowpasture Valley. We find that in the very year when the first actual settler came to the Shenandoah Valley, there was an earnest effort to colonize the Highland area (Highland designates the exact region which was set off into Highland County more than one hundred years after the settlement began).

Augusta County was practically the starting point of the Scotch-Irish settlement of Upper Virginia. In moving westward into Bath and Highland the settlers did not go over the rugged Shenandoah Mountain but flanked it by way of Panther Gap, some thirty miles southwest of Staunton.

Highland was settled in precisely the way we might expect. Scotch-Irish land seekers came through Panther Gap and along the upper James, and moved up the valleys of the Cowpasture and Jackson's River, until they reached the laurel thickets along the cross-ridges separating the waters of the James from those of the Potomac. German land-seekers from the opposite direction crept up the three valleys of the South Branch waters until they, too, had come to the divide. So, in the pioneer days of settlement we find two easily defined areas of settlements, consisting of not only a mere geographical boundary, but also a boundary between two provinces of settlement.

According to Waddell, settlement was made in the Calfpasture Valley as early as at Stauntion or nearly so. The authorization for possession would seem to have been verbal and for a definite period of years. It was not until April 2, 1745 that any recorded evidence of title land appeared. On this date, deeds for 21,247 acres were given by James Patton and John Lewis to William Campbell, Jacob Clemens, Samuel Hodge, Robert Gay, Thomas Gilliam, and William Jamison. On August 17th, 1745, other deeds for 5,205 acres were given by the same men.

In the early days of April. 1746, the Augusta County surveyor laid off several tracts within the Highland area. He came to the county again at the close of July and still again in September. All these surveys came under the order of the council of 1743.

When the settlement of Highland County began, the nearest Indian village was a small one of the Shawnees about sixty miles down the South Branch. The red men used the Valley of Virginia only as a hunting ground and military highway, along which bands of Northern and Southern Indians made forays against one another. The chief of these war trails lay through the Shenandoah Valley; this "Indian Road" is alluded to in the surveyor's book. The passing through of a war party was not at all welcome. Several murders were committed and several cabins were burned by these painted warriors. In 1742 there was a battle near Balcony Falls with a party of Mingoes. It was quite needless, Captain McDowell having unduly excited the passions of the Indians by treating them liberally with whiskey.

For more than twenty years after the founding of Augusta there was peace, such as it was, between the races. The English and the French had already fought three wars in America, and the decisive trial of strength was now a hand. The French claimed all the land west of the Alleghany divide, and so did the English. By 1754 the British Americans had not only pushed inward to this very line, but were pressing beyond it. the settlements of the former had several times been compelled to fight for their very existence, whereas, the weak, scattered settlements of the French had usually been let alone. This was because of the difference between the two nations in their attitude towards the Indian.

The Frenchman did not clear the land in large areas nor elbow the native Indian out of his hunting rights. the numbers of the British colonists were greater and they cleared the land as they came along, driving away the larger game. The British settlers esteemed the land of the red man more than his company, and in dealing with him he had less tact than the Frenchman. So, when Governor Dinwidie precipitated the fignting that took place between 1754 and 1760, the Indian tribes sided with the French, proving to be very valuable allies to them.

In 1775 Braddock marched his army against Fort Duquesne. Had he taken the place he would have dealt the French power an effective blow at a vital point, and the Indians would have been held in check. On the contrary he met a needless and crushing defeat, and his routed redcoats fled in panic to the coast. A frontier of hundreds of miles was at once exposed to Indian depredation. Flushed with victory, the red warriors from the Ohio proceeded to harry the frontier with fire and tomahawk.

The news of Braddock's defeat reached the people of the valley of Virginia in just one week and created consternation. Hundreds of people fled across the Blue Ridge, while others stayed manfully in their settlements. To Washington was assigned the defense of the frontier, with headquarters at Winchester. His force was entirely too small to protect a line effectively, and to make matters worse the men of one county were not inclined to help those of another.

The Highland area went through this trying ordeal with less injury than Bath or Pendleton to the North. Some damage was inflicted, yet there was no exterminating raid into the Bullpasture Valley, to which the settlement was as yet almost wholy confined.

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