The James River Batteau And Festival History
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Visualize Virginia about 250 years ago, then a wilderness of vast forests. The rivers were fed by many streams and springs and teemed with fish, beaver, otter and muskrat. Squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, mink, deer, bear and in many locations buffalo were numerous and roamed the forests. Nature had created a home, one unsurpassed in natural beauty and well supplied with the necessities of life.

Only the Indians, who hunted and had their permanent encampments in the valley, trappers and explorers knew of the earth’s riches.

Jamestown, a business venture, was founded in May of 1607 with the landing of three ships carrying one hundred men and four boys. By 1634, the colony of Virginia was divided into eight counties or shires. The James River valley from the Falls to the Blue Ridge, belonged to the Monican Indians know as the Tuscaroras, one of six nations, whose headquarters were near Forks of James (now Columbia). Another major permanent village was located at present day Wingina.

Between 1650 and 1700, there were many expeditions within the Piedmont and beyond the mountains, as only a handful of fur traders had previously explored this area. In 1669, Virginia Royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley, dispatched German physician, John Lederer, on a mission to explore western Virginia. No one knew how wide the American continent was, but many believed the East India Sea (modern Pacific Ocean) lay on the other side of the Blue Ridge. If Lederer could find his way across, Virginia English merchants could open a lucrative trade with the Orient. John Lederer made three trips into the mountains but never found the sea. He did leave us with the earliest published descriptions of the Virginia interiors. Among the many wild beasts he described, he told of herds of buffalo that roamed central Virginia, evidenced in later years by place names such as Buffalo River, Forks of Buffalo, Buffalo Spring and Buffalo Ridge. By 1700, the numbers of traders dealing with the Indians greatly increased. They no longer called the mountains by their long Indian names, instead the first range was known as “The Ledge” or “The Blue Ledge”, ledge being an old word for ridge. There were few, if any, regular settlers above the mouth of the Rivanna River by 1730. In those days the James River proper only came up as far as Columbia then known as Point of Fork. The north fork was known as Rivanna (River Anna) and the south fork was known as Fluvanna (Fluv Anna or Fluvius Anna, again River Anna).

In the 1600’s, Virginia was generally governed by men from the mother land whose primary purpose was to “make their fortunes” at the expense of the colonies. The settlements were confined to the tidewater region. Tobacco growing, learned by the early Jamestown colonists from the area Indians was the one major vocation in Virginia and the profits enabled many of the planters to spend their winters in London or Glasgow and send their sons and daughters to the finishing schools in the mother country.

In 1716, an expedition led by Governor Alexander Spotswood which crossed the Blue Ridge at Swift Run Gap, advertised to the world the rich back country. Now known as the Valley of Virginia, an immigration from Pennsylvannia and from Europe followed which revolutionized the province. This rapid western growth forced serious issues on the colony. There were 24 counties and 100,000 people living in the Virginia colony. Between 1707 and 1740, many Scottish immigrants came in the area as traders, teachers and tobacco growers and settled along the middle James, a river named for King James I of England which stretched 300 miles from the Allegehany Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. By 1727, the population jumped to 150,000, of which, 50,000 were negro slaves. The capital Williamsburg was no more than a struggling village and Richmond had yet to be founded.

Hugh Jones wrote in 1724, “If New England can be called the receptacle of dissenters, and Amsterdam of religion, Pennsylvania, the nursery of Quakers, Maryland, the the retirement of Roman Catholics, North Carolina, the refuge of runaways and South Carolina, the delight of buccaneers and pirates, Virginia may be just esteemed the happy retreat of true Britons and true churchmen and for the most part should merit the greater esteem and encouragement”.

The colony was not quite so united as the General Assembly, composed largely of the Tidewater gentry, suggested. Governor Gooch indicated the kind of people with whom he was surrounded by his statement that “the gentlemen and ladies here are perfectly well bred, not an ill dancer in my government”. The Tidewater gentry were being threatened by the democracy of the west, which now extended up the James to Point of Fork (Columbia), by debts to English agents, and by the depletion of the land from which they produced more and more tobacco. Tobacco had been the basic problem as well as the golden treasure. It meant dancing, riding, feasting and fine clothes or hard times, debt, anger and insolvency.

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