Because a number of the families this history traces – in particular, the Funkhousers, the Zincks, the Rickabaughs, and the Lionbergers – were pioneers in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia during the first half of the 18th century, it seems appropriate to devote some attention to how that area was settled and how people there lived at that time. Fortunately, considerable research has been done on this subject, and so we know a good deal about both of these topics. Much of that research focuses on the lower (northern) Shenandoah Valley, chiefly what is today Frederick County, but there is reason to believe that much of what we learn from that research pertains as well to the areas further south and southeast. These areas would become Shenandoah County and Page County, where our families lived.
Migrants typically were drawn to a new geographic area both in order to pursue greater economic security and opportunity and to escape conditions they regarded as oppressive. (One cannot ignore, as motivating factors for some migrants, a certain restlessness and sense of adventure.) Most of those who went to the Shenandoah Valley during the first half of the 18th century, or their parents, had recently sailed from Europe to Pennsylvania. Here they spread outward into the several counties that ringed Philadelphia, but high land prices, driven upward by the colony's population growth and delays in opening uninhabited Indian lands to the west, produced an economic squeeze. Thus families began to look southward to the Shenandoah Valley – where neither Indians nor European peoples resided at this time, where ample good land awaited settlement, and where they could hope to manage their lives with a minimum of interference.
Coincidentally, Virginia's colonial leadership, alarmed by increased French penetration of the vast territory beyond the Allegheny Mountains, mounting clashes with unfriendly Indians, and other worries, took steps during the 1720s and 1730s to encourage settlement of the Shenandoah Valley. Although the Blue Ridge Mountains, on the western edge of Virginia's inhabited areas (and east of the Shenandoah Valley), formed what seemed at first to be a formidable barrier to incursions by French and Indians from further west, newly discovered passes through the Blue Ridge showed that the established eastern counties of Virginia were not as safe as it had been thought. If Virginia could push through those passes and begin to settle the Shenandoah Valley, though, it could create a buffer against unfriendly French and Indians, stabilize that desirable area for future growth, and at the same time eliminate the growing use of the mountains as a haven for escaped slaves.
So it was that Virginia's governor and council took a series of steps to entice new peoples to settle in the Shenandoah Valley. They created new counties and provided for justices and courts so that governmental authority and institutions would be in place when the bulk of the settlers arrived. It exempted newcomers from levies and taxes, land payments, and the like for ten years. It authorized naturalization of aliens (a major concern of Germans and Swiss immigrants). It set aside funds for arming settlers. And it took a step toward freedom of worship by relieving newcomers affiliated with other denominations of the yearly tithe that provided financial support for the Church of England, again for the first ten years.
Virginia especially hoped to attract white Protestants with families who would in short order establish themselves as independent yeoman farmers in the Shenandoah Valley – and be willing to defend their interests, if necessary, against the French and the Indians. An obvious source for such settlers was the increasing numbers of Germans and Scotch-Irish who were arriving in Pennsylvania and who were looking for better lives elsewhere. Virginians expected (altogether correctly, as it turned out) that such settlers would soon develop a network of extended-family, diversified-agricultural clusters along the colony's western frontier – the Shenandoah Valley – that would anchor that region and allay the apprehensions that Virginians were feeling. (Meanwhile, as we have seen in the Vineyard chapter, Virginia was also actively recruiting German families to fill in the space between the established areas and the eastern slopes of the Appalachian Mountains.)
Beginning during the 1730s, therefore, Virginia made a number of extensive land grants to men (some of them influential German or Scotch-Irish immigrants themselves) in return for their promises to attract as many as one hundred additional families to the Shenandoah Valley and to sell these families portions of the land Virginia would be granting. And attract settlers these men did, through personal and family ties, word of mouth, printed advertisements, travelers, and agents sent specifically to Pennsylvania and beyond to entice families to migrate to Virginia. Soon wagons full of people had begun arriving in the Shenandoah Valley, after arduous treks that could take up to two months along rudimentary paths and over and through countless creeks and rivers. Some of the families came as intact units; others sent one or more members to scout the land before the remainder followed.
Leaving from Philadelphia or somewhere in the ring of counties outside it, most of the travelers journeyed south and west on the route (there known as the Carolina Road and in the Shenandoah Valley as the Great Wagon Road) that paralleled the mountain ridges. After crossing the Potomac River south of Harrisburg, they entered Virginia just above the site where Winchester was founded in 1743, near the northern end of the sprawling Shenandoah Valley, after which they went through the Strasburg area and then traveled many more miles further south up the Shenandoah Valley. Some would end their journey in North Carolina, others in South Carolina. Still other migrants took a route somewhat to the east, from Lancaster in Pennsylvania to the Monocacy area of Maryland and then over the Potomac River – which also brought them to the Shenandoah Valley's northern section. From there, settlers scattered. Some (the Lionbergers and the Rickabaughs, for example) followed the South Fork of the Shenandoah River into the Page Valley; others stayed with the North Fork of that river until they found a home in what is now Shenandoah County (the Zincks and Funkhousers, for instance) or went even further south, into what are now Rockingham and Augusta Counties. This kind of dispersion was exactly what Virginia's leaders had hoped for.
Many of these families established deep and lasting roots in the Shenandoah Valley. Although members of their later generations might move on further south and west, across the Allegheny Mountains, numerous descendants of these pioneers who settled in the Shenandoah Valley during the first half of the 18th century remain in this part of Virginia today. In our case, many of the Funkhousers, Griffiths, and Lionbergers remained whereas the Rickabaughs, Zincks, and Crooks families left it entirely.
In addition, certain other families we have studied – the Rings, McCammons, and Cowdens, for example – probably passed through the Shenandoah Valley without ever residing here, or, as in the case of the Neals, without residing there for long. The Vanderpools are a special case, since they were not German or Scotch-Irish but Dutch and arrived in the Shenandoah Valley by means of a different route. In fact, however, they were recruited for the South Branch of the Potomac River region exactly as described in this appendix.
The newcomers found in the Shenandoah Valley a beautiful land with extensive forest cover atop a rich limestone soil, even richer bottomlands near the Shenandoah River's two branches, and numerous forest openings and meadows that seemed to invite immediate cultivation. Where watercourses fell over shale rock, sites for mills abounded. Most of the settlers carefully carved out of the wilderness sizeable tracts with a mix of assets: a reliable water source (a run or a spring), abundant fertile lowland, some higher pasture, and areas of woodland. They had their chosen land surveyed, arranged for payment, and got to work.
The Shenandoah Valley farmsteads that this process created were, unsurprisingly, rather rude at first. A visitor would notice a mosaic of small gardens and fields – fenced only enough to keep the free-roaming cattle, hogs, and other animals out of them – surrounding a simple residence and perhaps a few outbuildings. Orchards of apple, pear, peach, cherry, and plum trees would also be nearby. Scattered among the structures might be racks with skins drying on them (hunting would long remain a major source of both food and clothing), tables for slaughtering hogs, and outdoor fires for rendering and cooking purposes. The settlers one might encounter would be dressed quite simply and much like the Indian natives, in moccasins and skins that their hunting had yielded. They might or might not address their visitor in English, German-speakers remaining a sizeable segment of the Shenandoah Valley's population for many years.1
Shenandoah Valley farmsteads like this would raise several types of grains (wheat, rye, oats, barley) and corn, mostly for foodstuffs but also as a source of liquid refreshment. Flax and hemp might also be cultivated, along with a little tobacco – in large part for the convenience of paying taxes, which were calculated in pounds of tobacco.2 Butter and cheese might be produced in sufficient quantity so that a small surplus could be used for trading. Horses to pull plows, cattle for milk and meat (also, in many instances, for sale beyond the borders of Virginia), hogs and sheep for food and clothing, chickens and turkeys – all these would populate the woods and fields around every farmstead in this cluster of families. Many of the animals in fact were almost wild, roaming at will and living off the land.
Invited inside the dwelling of the family, our visitor would be reminded again that life on such a frontier farm was simple and without comforts. Most early structures were basic one-room cabins of notched logs with beaten earth (possibly puncheon) floors, although stone structures were not uncommon. Typically twenty or twenty-two feet wide across the front and sixteen or eighteen feet deep at the ends, a log or stone cabin would have an off-center door and a single window in front, a large stone fireplace at the end opposite the door, and a pitched roof of shingles or thatch. Such a structure was little more than a kitchen and shelter from the weather, and its furnishings would be few in number and rudimentary in nature: a rough table, perhaps a chair or two, a couple of rope beds, a candlestick, a mirror if the family could afford it, and not much more.
Once larger residences were constructed many of the earliest cabins were turned into outdoor kitchens, where smoke and heat and the danger of fire could be kept separate from the newer principal residence. Other cabins became the first modules of larger dwellings. As other buildings were subsequently built, they were joined to the earlier ones and the resulting amalgamation was covered over in ways to make it look like a single – and more modern – structure.
A farmstead's outbuildings might include a stable, a spring house, a smoke house, and perhaps a shed for drying skins. A barn was a high priority, since the welfare of one's animals was almost as important as the welfare of one's family. Single-story barns similar to the settlers' cabins might be erected first, but Pennsylvania bank barns usually were erected as soon as possible. On one side of such barns a ramp led up to a floor and loft used for threshing and storing crops; on the opposite side an outdoor animal lot opened into a lower level, tucked beneath the projecting main floor above, where animals could find shelter.
What the Shenandoah Valley pioneers ate is evident from what they raised. Fresh meat might be available throughout the winter, since menfolk would hunt – mostly deer but also such smaller animals as raccoons and squirrels – throughout the colder months. Chickens, turkeys, and cattle could also be slaughtered and consumed even during colder weather, but much of a family's meat over the winter was preserved. Pork, along with cornmeal the major ingredient of the pioneer's diet, was salted after the hogs were butchered (usually in early winter). Beef could be potted in a sealed crock, where it would keep for months. Fruits and vegetables might be pickled, preserved (in brandy or sugar), or dried during harvest season in preparation for the long winter ahead. Some foodstuffs, like potatoes and apples, would keep in a root cellar for an extended period. Variety in meals was not common.
Linked to this small farmstead by a number of primitive paths (or "traces") would be a scattering of other farmsteads occupied by kin and close friends and, perhaps, a place of worship. Although most of those living nearby would likely be members of the same ethnic group, Germans could be found in Scotch-Irish areas and vice versa. Multiple marriages would bind generation after generation of German neighbors to one another in complex webs of relationships, and Scotch-Irish neighbors to one another in similar relationships, but rarely would the two groups intermarry. Unless the settlers in an area had gotten together and petitioned for a road (after which an overseer would be charged with seeing that the tithable males would build and maintain it), this cluster of families would most of the time be a universe within itself – one of the many clusters of settler families that Virginia had sought to plant in the Shenandoah Valley.
Isolated and diversified as these Shenandoah Valley farmsteads might be, they were far from self-sufficient and independent. Indeed, they were interdependent elements of a broader exchange economy in which their labor and products served as a kind of money. During the period we are focusing on here, the 18th century, there were almost no merchants or stores in the Shenandoah Valley and only the occasional itinerant trader with his pack of wares. Instead, families traded goods and services with one another, getting in return labor or products they could not produce themselves. This was not a one-to-one barter system but an ongoing and complex system that extended the benefits of such exchanges over a wide area.
The intrinsic value of products and labor, calculated in monetary terms (their recognized "worth"), circulated in a continuous flow from one family to another and, in time, throughout the Shenandoah Valley's economy. Money itself usually did not change hands, although gold and silver specie – which was scarce – could be exchanged as commodities themselves; mostly, money was used to balance accounts, if and when that was required. The result was a stable system of revolving debts and credits extending over a long period of time, often many years, that functioned as a kind of perpetual-motion machine – almost completely without the involvement of the government, merchants, banks, or other middlemen. Eventually stores and a monetary system would evolve to replace the exchange economy, which had largely disappeared by 1800, and in time cash would become the medium for purchases and sales.
A simple exchange would be a straightforward transaction involving two families. One of them would trade, say, several hogs in return for a newborn calf; unlike a straight barter, any difference in value between the items changing hands would be held over for a future exchange. But the benefit of the exchange economy was its ability to make possible more complex exchanges of labor and products. For example, one family might offer several days of labor, a few deer skins, and some pairs of shoes (made as a sideline to farming, since most Shenandoah Valley artisans could not yet support themselves solely through their trade) in exchange for another family's flax seed, linen, and fifty pounds of honey. The family receiving the honey might use some of it to acquire liquor or lead for bullets from someone else, perhaps a total stranger to the first family, and then trade some of the lead to yet another person as payment for having a horse gelded. The lead, in turn, might continue in motion as part of yet another exchange, and so on.
Credit and debits thus were passed along from family to family – just as our dollar bills are passed along, over and over, to various merchants and individuals in turn. All the while, the trading partners maintained, usually in their heads but sometimes on paper, their "balances" with others. Credits and obligations could be preserved in such mental banks until needed, perhaps for many years. The object of participating in this exchange system was not to "make" money but to remain in approximate balance with others while filling one's needs.
Supplementing this system was a similar one in which personal notes, or IOUs, did serve as a kind of paper currency. A debtor might write out an acknowledgement of his debt, which the creditor would use to obtain something from a third party who would (if all went well) accept the note as payment in the confidence that he could recover the stated value from the writer of the note – or who discounted it by a certain amount that corresponded with his lack of confidence in this ability to collect what he was owed. Alternatively, a creditor receiving a note might subtract the amount he was owed and pass along an amended note for the remainder. These notes, too, could pass through many Shenandoah Valley hands before being retired. Written orders for payment, like today's checks, also circulated. In this instance, in order to satisfy his creditor the writer of the order would instruct a third party to pay to the creditor (perhaps someone unknown to that third party) that third party's own debt to the initiator of the order. Here again the written order could be endorsed, for the full amount or some portion thereof, over to persons not involved in the original transaction.
In all these ways the exchange system extended its reach throughout the Shenandoah Valley (and even beyond, since manufactured goods were typically obtained in Philadelphia or, later, Baltimore, using a similar system of credits and debits, notes, and orders) and served as a more or less fluid method for the flow of trade and commerce over both time and space.
To be sure, the Shenandoah Valley of the first half of the 18th century was a far different place than it is today, although one can see – in addition to the enduring beauty – vestiges of that earlier culture in the peoples, folkways, values, settlement patterns, and architecture of the modern Shenandoah Valley. The experience newcomers gained while settling the Shenandoah Valley during the 18th century was also put to use as Americans subsequently crested the Allegheny Mountains, during and after the American Revolution, and continued to pursue our nation's constantly moving frontier during the decades that followed. Thus the Shenandoah Valley served as a kind of precursor or model for the later frontier experience that would become one of America's most distinctive and powerful features.
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Notes
1George Washington's diary entry (cited in the Vanderpool chapter of the text), recorded after his visit to Abraham Vanderpool's property on the South Branch of the Potomac in 1748, must have been prompted by a scene something like the one described in this paragraph. Return to text
2Wheat as a cash crop was increasingly grown in the Shenandoah Valley from the 1760s onward, as higher prices for flour overcame the high cost of transporting it to Eastern destinations. A bounty for producing hemp for naval use, again from the 1760s onward, stimulated production of this crop. Return to text
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