Native Americans Preparing for a Feast
Source: Indians of North America - Theodore De Bry Copper Plate Engravings
People who were "native" to the area when the Europeans arrived were not all the same; Virginia's "Indians" spoke different languages and lived different lifestyles. Be careful when you hear someone say "All the Indians..." The tribes were different and competitive with each other - that's why the Europeans discovered Native American villages with pallisades.
The earliest European settlers were also from different cultures. Some were poor men looking for a steady wage from the Virginia Company. Others were "gentlemen," venture capitalists who adventured their person and risked their health in the new colony as well as their wealth.
Those Virginians who are related to the early English colonists are proud to identify their genealogical links to the Randolphs, the Carters, the Lees - and some have a connection even to the original residents, the original First Families of Virginia. Numerous FFV's today, especially those in the Bolling family, can trace their ancestry back to the son of Pocahontas and John Rolfe.
Why bother with categorizing Virginians? Today we can categorize the 7 million or so Virginians in different ways - by gender, by ancestry, by income, by residence, etc. Discrimination based on race is prohibited now, but selective marketing based on clear business criteria rather than racial prejudice is common. Defining a "target audience" is essential for a business trying to match their product with their customers. Those telemarking phone calls, "junk mail" invitations for credit cards, and "get out the vote" solicitations just before an election are based on sophisticated slicing and dicing of demographic data. After all, the Republicans don't want to encourage the Democrats to vote, or vice-versa. Companies trying to sell diapers want their advertising to be mailed to neighborhoods with lots of young couple, not to retirement homes.
However, some business still blanket a community with advertising even if that requires wasting money on some households in order to be sure they reach all potential customers. Telemarketers used to call every phone number, and AOL used to send a disk to every household - even those without a computer, just to ensure every potential subscriber got the marketing materials.
Knowing the audience of potential customers can make the difference between a successful business and a bankrupt business. The Hummer dealerships are not located at random across the state; they're concentrated near wealth. In October 2007, there were only 4 Hummer dealerships in Virginia. Two were in Northern Virginia (Vienna and Chantilly), one in Richmond, and one in Virginia Beach. Those are the three areas of Virginia with high population density and high population totals. Surprise! That's where the Hummer dealers are most likely to find enough wealthy customers willing to buy their vehicles. A Hummer dealership in Cumberland Gap would not stay in business very long...
Fast food restaurants are located at highway intersections and in urban areas for a reason - that's where the customers are concentrated. There are exceptions to every rule, of course. A few restaurants in out-of-the-way locations may become popular, such as the Inn at Little Washington (in Rappahannock County) and the restaurant at the Chateau Morrisette winery (in Floyd County). Those restaurants have become intentional destinations for the traveller, and the inconvenient location is outweighed by the quality of the food and dining experience.
 Blue Ridge vista from Buffalo Mountain in Floyd County |
 "downtown" Newport in Montgomery County |
The physical geography of a place used to provide the primary context for the culture of the people who lived in that place. Climate shaped how people dressed, and the foods they could raise. Mountains and other physical barriers isolated groups of people, and they developed different languages, different styles of clothing, different religious beliefs, and different shapes of "points" and other tools. Rivers also blocked communication and trade - until the residents developed rafts, canoes, and finally ships that could move against the currents and the wind.
Until 500 years ago, Native Americans and Europeans were unfamiliar with the culture and the technology on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. European discovery of Virginia did not lead immediately to European settlement in Virginia. It took over a century from the time Columbus "sailed the ocean blue" before Europeans successfully established a colony in Virginia.
When it finally occured, European settlement of Virginia displaced the native culture that had evolved over 10,000-plus years and dramatically transformed the natural landscape. The Europeans incorporated a few aboriginal place names (such as Quantico) and agricultural crops (such as corn) into their culture, but discarded most of the rest of Native American culture while replacing forests with farms.
The development of new technologies - sailing ships, railroads, the telegraph, radio, television, and now the Internet - have made it far easier to experience other cultures in person or virtually. We can travel vast distances in a day compared to just 400 years ago, when the Jamestown colonists spent 5 months trying to cross the Atlantic from England to the Chesapeake Bay. We can get fresh vegetables from California or Chile throughout the year, so we tend to forget the connections to the land and the latitude that were so essential in defining "Virginia" vs. "England" vs. "Florida" until very recently.
It's perhaps most obvious that, prior to European settlement in Virginia, the tribal lifestyles were closely integrated with the resources available in a particular area. The Powhatans, with access to seafood, lived differently than the Monacans. The current Federal initiatives to manager certain landscapes in national parks to protect the spiritual values (i.e., limiting climbing on Devil's Tower in Wyoming), reflect the recognition that places have meaning far beyond the provision of food and shelter. We know the lifestyles of many Native American tribes were dramatically impacted by their relocation to western reservations. It is less clear how the tribal cultures were affected by earlier relocations forced by tribal competition prior to European contact. The Spanish in the 1500's, and the English and French a century later, forced cultural changes - but we also know from changes in pottery styles that the culture changed dramatically at times long before Europeans arrived.
Do you automatically get a sense of place because you are connected through a bloodline to people who once lived there? Perhaps not, but others do. A sense of personal connection to the "family farm" or "family home" may continue, long after the place was sold to strangers. The repatriation process for excavated human remains and artifacts defined in the the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act suggests that the one-time occupants of a location (such as Kennewick Man) have a special connection to a place, and their skeletons should be returned to the tribes who live there now for reburial.
"In wide America, in this sprawling map of dizzily drawn borders, we find no common culture, nor should we expect to. Time has been at work, dilatorily, for a few hundred years in this nation - hardly long enough for us to agree on a national speed limit, let alone a culture."1
Place and culture are connected... but how tightly do you feel your perspectives have been shaped by where you live? Has there been enough time for a new "Virginia culture" to develop in just 400 years after Jamestown? |
European settlement into Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia came from the east. In the Shenandoah Valley (and the rest of the Valley and Ridge physiographic province stretching to Cumberland Gap), most European settlement arrived from the north rather than the east, due to the barrier of the Blue Ridge.
Some settlers migrating south through the valleys west of the Blue Ridge crossed to the east side of the Blue Ridge, reaching the Piedmont at modern-day Roanoke. Some of the settlers who migrated south through the Shenandoah Valley, then went east at the Roanoke River gap, occupied the Piedmont of North Carolina. For example, Daniel Boone's family and the Moravians who initially settled Winston-Salem both migrated through that gap on their way to the Yadkin River valley in North Carolina.
In the 1720's, Governor Spottswood purposefully encouraged settlement of the Shenandoah Valley by non-English immigrants. When Spottwood started serving as governor, the Piedmont (east of the Blue Ridge) was just being settled by immigrants from England. The English immigrants developed farms beween the Fall Line and the Blue Ridge, but settlement was moving slowly upstream into the Piedmont and not sweeping westward over the Blue Ridge.
Spottswood had bad maps where longitude was compressed. He thought the French forts on the Great Lakes were less than a 1-week march from the Blue Ridge. Governor Spotswood identified the most likely military threat to the western frontier of Virginia to be from the French in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. If the French allied with hostile tribes, they could block English settlement at the Blue Ridge, and threaten settlements in the Piedmont.
The first European country to occupy lands between the Blue Ridge and the Ohio River would control that territory... so the Virginians recruited the Germans and Scotch-Irish who arrived at Philadelphia. They migrated into Virginia from the north rather than the east. The Scotch-Irish and the Pennsylvania Deutsch ("Dutch") immigrants walked from Philadelphia into the Shenandoah Valley, where they established settlements that would serve as a buffer and a trip wire to alert the Virginians about western incursions. (In the 1750's, settlements all the way south to the New River were attacked during the French and Indian War.)
European culture has spread completely across Virginia in the last 400 years. However, for the first 200 years, most of the population lived near the Atlantic Ocean. Half of all the people in America lived east of the new capital of Washington DC when it was founded in 1800. Only in 1860 did the center of population move west of Virginia, across the Ohio River.
There was no guarantee that English settlement to the west would be successful. (If you do believe in Manifest Destiny, how do you explain the failure of the Americans to settle Mexico and the prairies of Canada?) The French could have succeeded in occupying the Ohio River valley, establishing a line of settlements from New Orleans to Quebec and restricting the British to a strip on colonies along the Atlantic Ocean.
| 1790 | 1800 | 1810 | 1820 | 1830 | 1840 | 1850 | 1860 | 1870 | 1880 | 1890 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1900 | 1910 | 1920 | 1930 | 1940 | 1950 | 1960 | 1970 | 1980 | 1990 | 2000 |
Think the population of Virginia has always been growing, especially the counties in Northern Virginia?
The historical census data for Virginia tells some tales. Just after the Revolutionary War (as recorded in the 1790 Census), Virginia had:
- 292,627 "slaves"
- 12,866 "all Other Free Persons"
- 442,117 "White" people
for a population total of 747,550.
Just before the Civil War (in the 1860 Census), the state population had grown to a total of 1,596,206, including:
- 490,865"slaves"
- 58, 042 "free coloreds"
- 1,047,299 "whites"
Contrast that with Prince William County. In 1790, the county had:
- 4,704 "slaves"
- 167 "all Other Free Persons"
- 6,744 "Whites"
for a total of 11,615 people.
Just before the Civil War (in the 1860 Census), the county population had dropped to only 8,565, including:
- 2,356 "slaves"
- 519 "free coloreds"
- 5,690 "whites"
Obviously Prince William lost population (over 25% decline...) while the state population more than doubled during those 70 years. The agricultural potential - and low cost - of new lands in Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi, and further west drew farmers from the worn-out tobacco plantations of the Piedmont. Population growth in Virginia is not steady, or spread evenly across all sections. The increasing population and cultural diversity of Prince William since 1960 is in clear contrast to the county's demographic patterns between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.
In 1790, 19% of the national population lived in Virginia. Virginia remained the most populous state for 20 more years through the 1810 census, but its percentage of the total population of the United States dropped steadily:
| Year | Virginia % of
Total Population |
States With the Most People |
|---|---|---|
| 1790 | 18% | VA, PA, NC |
| 1800 | 17% | VA, PA, NY |
| 1810 | 14% | VA, NY, PA |
| 1820 | 11% | PA, NY, VA |
| 1830 | 9% | NY, PA, VA |
| 1840 | 7% | NY, PA, OH, VA |
| 1850 | 6% | NY, PA, OH, VA |
| 1860 | 5% | NY, PA, OH, IL, VA |
| 1870 | 3% | NY, PA, OH, IL, MO,
IN, MA, KY, TN, VA |
At the start of the United States, Virginia had the largest population of any state. In 1790, nearly one out of every 5 Americans was a Virginian. Four of the first five presidents were Virginians - Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. The "Virginia Dynasty" dominated the national political life for the first 35 years of the United States, until President James Monroe's second term ended in 1824.
Virginia had 19% of the national population in 1790, but that state did not elect 19% of the House of Representatives. Why not? In 1790, 40% of the people in Virginia were slaves in bondage.
Under the Constitution ratified in 1788, only three-fifths of the slave population was counted when determining the number of members for each state in the House of Representatives. That formula helped the northern, non-slave states ensure that the southern states could not buy votes when they bought slaves. Even today, some people argue that the Constitution defined each slave to be just 60% of a person, but the formula for counting slaves was not designed to diminish the importance of individual slaves. Instead, the formula dimished the political power of slaveowners.
Nowadays, California is the most populous state. Politicians campaign extensively in that state and rarely visit Virginia, since California has the greatest number electoral votes. According to the 2000 Census, California still has only 12% of the total national population now, compared to Virginia's dominance in 1790 with 19% of the national population.
Alexandria has more people per square mile than any other jurisdiction in Virginia, according to the Census 2000 2 The 2002 biennial session of the General Assembly passed legislation to protect trees, but restricted the authority to just densely-populated areas:
§ 15.2-961. Replacement of trees during development process in certain localities.What localities would be affected?A. Any locality with a population density of at least 75 persons per square mile may adopt an ordinance providing for the planting and replacement of trees during the development process pursuant to the provisions of this section. Population density shall be based upon the latest population estimates of the Cooper Center for Public Service of the University of Virginia.
