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Family Migration and the Eighteenth-Century Southern Backcountry W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2002 Southern routes: Family migration and the eighteenth-century southern backcountry Creston S. Long College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Long, Creston S., "Southern routes: Family migration and the eighteenth-century southern backcountry" (2002). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623411. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-sxw9-6174 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Reproduced with with permission permission of the of copyright the copyright owner. owner.Further reproductionFurther reproduction prohibited without prohibited permission. without permission. SOUTHERN ROUTES: FAMILY MIGRATION AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SOUTHERN BACKCOUNTRY A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of History The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Creston S. Long HI 2002 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPROVAL SHEET This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Creston S. Long Approved, November 2002 James P. Whittenburi James Axtell Kevin P.P.KeflvX KeJIy Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Tu'dt- M ,C P , N. Turk McCleskey Virginia Military Institute ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. For Caroline, Thomas, and Anna My family Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v LIST OF TABLES vii LIST OF FIGURES viii ABSTRACT ix INTRODUCTION 2 CHAPTER I. MIGRATION TO THE SOUTHERN BACKCOUNTRY: 6 THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE REGION CHAPTER H. EXPERIENCES ON THE ROAD 21 CHAPTER m . SCOUTING OUT THE LAND: THE JOURNEY OF JAMES 61 AULD CHAPTER IV. LAND AND MIGRATION 99 CHAPTER V. ACROSS THE MILES: NETWORKS OF KITH AND KIN 145 CONCLUSION AND EPILOGUE: THE EXPANSION OF THE 180 SOUTHERN BACKCOUNTRY APPENDIX. THE SOUTHERN BACKCOUNTRY: THEMES FROM 191 THE RECENT LITERATURE BIBLIOGRAPHY 210 VITA 222 iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere appreciation to a number of people who have helped me through die process of completing this dissertation. Several have offered direct commentary on my writing and have provided a number of suggestions to help me polish the final product. The members of my dissertation committee, James Axtell, Kevin Kelly, and Turk McCleskey all offered valuable feedback and criticism. I truly appreciate the time they gave me. Before I got to the final drafting stages, however, a number of people at various institutions offered suggestions and pointed to valuable sources. Very early in my research, the staff of the Special Collections of the Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary gave me a number of ideas to pursue. Additionally, the staffs of the Rockefeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg; the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress; the Lloyd House, Alexandria Public Library; die Southern Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the North Carolina Division of Archives and History; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Chester County Historical Society; the Perkins Library, Duke University; the Library of Virginia; the Friends’ Collection, Guilford College; the History Room, Rowan County Public Library; and the Nabb Research Center, Salisbury University all were very helpful in tracking down sources and making my research more enjoyable. While traveling to these various repositories a number of friends graciously opened up their homes to me. Doug and Sheila Sweeney in Bryn Mawr, Page Turney in Alexandria, and Bryan Newman in Richmond all gave me a place to rest and more importandy they provided hours of enjoyable de-stressing time as I traced the steps of my subject migrants. When I was outside of my network of kith and kin, money from several William and Mary summer research grants greatiy helped me during my visits to the North Carolina backcountry. On the issue of funding, without the generous support from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the form of apprenticeships and assistantships, my graduate experience would have been virtually impossible. Early in my graduate career at William and Mary, conversations with Dan Ingram, Brian Geiger, Erika Toms, Joan Campbell, and Chesley Flotten, my classmates, all helped shape my thinking and focused my pursuit of historical research. A few years in front of me, John Coombs and Phil Levy were the first to indoctrinate me under the hot sun at the Richneck plantation excavation site. In between efforts to identify, post holes, post molds, and fence lines, theirendless talk about history, research, theory, politics, and sundry other topics encouraged me to v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. think in new ways. My graduate experience would have not have been as rich without the contact I had with these fellow students. Jim Whittenburg has been my mentor, advocate, and friend throughout the years on this project. Although we shared an interest in the North Carolina Regulators, he suggested I pursue a study of the migration to the backcountry when I first arrived at William and Mary. His suggestions about possible sources and avenues of inquiry informed virtually every aspect of this work. I did not get to spend as much time in Williamsburg working with Professor Whittenburg as I would have liked. But I will always be grateful for his willingness to direct this project from afar, and I truly appreciate our many meetings over coffee and Indian food as I swept through town on numerous research trips. Finally, my family has put up with my constant preoccupation with “the dissertation.” The birth of Thomas one month before I took my comprehensive exams kept things truly interesting. And Anna’s arrival during the later stages of my dissertation writing also added some spice. They both helped me keep perspective and they have given me constant joy. I would also like to thank Margaret and Creston Long, my parents, whose affection, encouragement, and support, financial and emotional, made my pursuit of this degree possible. Caroline has read every word of my manuscript; I truly appreciated that. But more than anything, I am grateful for her unfailing ability to reassure me that I would indeed complete this project. I cannot imagine doing this without her unwavering love and support. vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Migrants from Augusta County, Virginia: Land Transactions and Destinations 117 2. Migrants from Brunswick County, Virginia: Landowners hip and Destinations within North Carolina 135 vii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Map of Valley of Virginia 14 2. Map of river systems of North Carolina 19 3. Fry-Jefferson Map 31 4. Map of James Auld’s route from Maryland to North Carolina 68 5. Pungoteague Tavern 74 6. Davidson’s Creek and Fourth Creek settlements in the Catawba River valley 122 7. Map of Rowan and Mecklenburg counties in North Carolina 123 8. Patents in the Yadkin River valley section of the Granville District 142 viii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT In the early 1730s, small groups of settlers started moving into the Valley of Virginia, beginning the movement into the southern backcountry. By the late 1740s Scots-Irish, English, and German settlers pressed into North Carolina’s western Piedmont, and the small trickle of migrants quickly turned into a flood which persisted for the next three decades. This is a study of mid-eighteenth-century migration to the backcountry South. The purpose of this study is to describe the process of eighteenth-century southern backcountry migration and to determine migrants’ underlying motivations and considerations as they went about this process. It explores the experiences of settlers who migrated to the Valley of Virginia and North Carolina’s western Piedmont from the late 1740s through the early 1770s. To describe the process of migration, including means of transportation, routes of travel, and the practices of provisioning and seeking accommodations, this study relies on travel accounts written by migrants, as well as the journals of merchants, missionaries, and itinerant ministers. All of these travelers went through approximately the same process of visiting ordinaries, seeking meals, and encountering others along the way. For migrant families, the journey required considerable planning. Families with ample financial resources often sent someone ahead to investigate opportunities to acquire land and determine
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