Why did people settle in the backcountry in the 1700s?
In the 1720s and 1730s, British and colonial authorities encouraged settlement of the backcountry, particularly by non-English Protestant immigrants whose small-farm, non-slave communities might create a buffer against Indian attacks and French expansion while deterring runaway slaves seeking to establish independent colonies in the Appalachians.
Where did the backcountry frontier of colonial Virginia reach?
The backcountry frontier of colonial Virginia reached westward from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the farthest extent of Virginia settlement in the eighteenth century.
Why are Virginia settlements west of the Blue Ridge called the backcountry?
It was in this context that referring to Virginia settlements west of the Blue Ridge as the backcountry made sense in the eighteenth century, when the colony had two frontiers. One was pushing westward with the expanding periphery of plantation settlement as Virginians migrated from the colony’s Tidewater region into the Piedmont.
Who lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains before European settlement?
By the time of the European settlement at Jamestown, Siouan-speaking Indians populate the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains while Iroquoian-speaking Indians reside in the Great Valley to the west. John Lederer, a German explorer, may be the first white man to visit the Blue Ridge Mountains.
What is the Thigpen Trail?
What river is Saxapahaw on?
Why were frontier migrants considered desperadoes?
What was the rule of migration in colonial America?
What does Byrd's dig reveal about the frontier squatters?
What was Frontier Folk?
Why did some people escape the colonial settlements?
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Which settlers migrated to the back country?
Then, in the 1700s, a new group of emigrants—the Scots- Irish—began to move into the Backcountry. The Scots-Irish came from the borderland between Scotland and England. Most of them had lived for a time in northern Ireland. In 1707, England and Scotland merged and formed Great Britain.
What other groups came into conflict with backcountry settlers?
As Backcountry settlers pushed west they came into contact with various Native American peoples, as well as French and Spanish colonists. As contact increased, so did conflict over land and resources.
What colonies were in the backcountry?
The Peace treaties with the Native Indians attracted settlers deeper into the mountains of the backcountry to upper east Tennessee, northwestern North Carolina, upstate South Carolina and central Kentucky. The largest proportion of the early Backcountry immigrants were "Scots-Irish" settlers.
What is the backcountry in the 13 colonies?
The Backcountry was a region in North America. The geographic term referred to the remote and undeveloped (by English standards) land west of the Appalachian border of the British Thirteen Colonies.
Why did settlers and Native Americans clash in the back country?
The Native Americans resented and resisted the colonists' attempts to change them. Their refusal to conform to European culture angered the colonists and hostilities soon broke out between the two groups.
What type of settlers lived in the Lowcountry?
Settlers from the British Isles, France, and other parts of Europe built plantations throughout the coastal lowcountry, growing profitable crops of rice and indigo. African slaves were brought into the colony in large numbers to provide labor for the plantations, and by 1720 they formed the majority of the population.
Why did people settle in the backcountry?
In the 1720s and 1730s, British and colonial authorities encouraged settlement of the backcountry, particularly by non-English Protestant immigrants whose small-farm, non-slave communities might create a buffer against Indian attacks and French expansion while deterring runaway slaves seeking to establish independent ...
Why did people settle in the southern colonies?
Settlers in the Southern colonies came to America to seek economic prosperity they could not find in Old England. The English countryside provided a grand existence of stately manors and high living. But rural England was full, and by law those great estates could only be passed on to the eldest son.
What were the Southern colonies known for?
The Southern colonies were noted for plantations, or large farms, and for the use of slaves to work on them. The English were the first Europeans to settle the Southern colonies. In 1606 an expedition of colonists sailed from England to the New World.
Which colony was first settled by Dutch settlers?
New NetherlandNew Netherland was the first Dutch colony in North America. It extended from Albany, New York, in the north to Delaware in the south and encompassed parts of what are now the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, and Delaware.
What is considered back country?
Frontcountry sites are close to access roads and usually have running water and a bathroom or outhouse. Backcountry sites are further from roads and do not generally have running water or bathroom facilities. Both types of crews usually live in tents.
What caused the social tensions in the backcountry?
The backcountry settlers mostly shared similar backgrounds and social levels. Things began to change as the population of the colony boomed from immigration, and a new and diverse wave of immigrants moved into the rural west, disrupting the stable social order that the farmers had maintained.
Which caused the most conflict between the early settlers in the West and the Native Americans?
But between 1622 and the late 19th century, a series of wars and skirmishes known as the Indian Wars took place between American-Indians and European settlers, mainly over land control.
What Indian tribes fought each other?
In the 1860s and '70s, the United States Army was engaged in war with the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes. The Pawnee tribe had fought these other tribes for years, and so the Army turned to the Pawnee for help against a common foe. The Lakota (Sioux) had much more trouble with early emigrants than other tribes.
How did English settlers interact with natives?
While Native Americans and English settlers in the New England territories first attempted a mutual relationship based on trade and a shared dedication to spirituality, soon disease and other conflicts led to a deteriorated relationship and, eventually, the First Indian War.
Which group had the most representation in South Carolina's early colonial government?
Most English colonies had a bicameral (two house) assembly. In SC, the Proprietors, and the elite had greater representation in the government than did the common people.
What drove the migration from Virginia to Ohio between ... - ResearchGate
If anyone has access to/ever used the official TIS-6 questions, or could point me in the right direction, I would be very grateful. Every paper citing the Roodt 2004 paper mentions the TIS-6 but ...
Migration of our Ancestors Within the American Colonies
Migration of Immigrants •Almost all of our immigrant groups have begun to migrate within the United States very soon after their arrival. •Our early immigrant groups were
What was the backcountry frontier?
The backcountry frontier of colonial Virginia reached westward from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the farthest extent of Virginia settlement in the eighteenth century. By royal charter, the extreme western boundaries of Virginia at this time extended to the Pacific Ocean, but the terms “backcountry” or “back settlements” specifically refer to new settlements in the eastern Appalachian Mountains—most notably in the Shenandoah Valley—that began taking shape in the 1720s. This term was commonly used in the colonial era, when “frontier” referred more specifically to national boundaries. In the 1720s and 1730s, British and colonial authorities encouraged settlement of the backcountry, particularly by non-English Protestant immigrants whose small-farm, non-slave communities might create a buffer against Indian attacks and French expansion while deterring runaway slaves seeking to establish independent colonies in the Appalachians. Due to its social, economic, political, and cultural distinctiveness, the backcountry frontier as a region played a significant role in the eighteenth-century history of Virginia and in the writings of historians about the influence of Virginia’s colonial period on the later history of the state and the nation. By the end of the eighteenth century, the backcountry had become a successful model for the development of mixed-farm, market-town settlements on new frontiers as Americans overspread the trans-Appalachian west.
How did the backcountry change?
In a long-term trend that started in the mid-1740s but accelerated sharply in the 1750s, prices for wheat and flour in the Atlantic economy began to rise . Flour exports from Philadelphia increased sixfold as this prominent port city captured control of the provisions trade with the West Indies and southern Europe. Connected to western Virginia by the Great Wagon Road, one of the longest single roads in early America, Philadelphia transformed the economy and landscape of the backcountry frontier. By late in the 1760s, wheat had become the Shenandoah Valley’s primary staple crop: a farmer in the lower valley could grow wheat, grind it into flour at a local mill, sell it on the Philadelphia or Alexandria market, and realize a profit against considerable transportation costs.
What was the backcountry settlement system?
If the open-country neighborhoods and exchange economies characterized the first phase of backcountry settlement, then a town-and-country settlement system was the product of a market revolution in agriculture, the improvement of the landscape, and the development of market towns with an attending hierarchy of rural hamlets and local villages. The emergence of this system by the close of the eighteenth century marked the end of the frontier period in western Virginia. What happened after the backcountry ended, however, was anything but backward. So productive was the agricultural economy west of the Blue Ridge, with a bountiful commerce pouring out of the region as profits in the flour and livestock trades and into it as imported goods in the consumer revolution, that the region came to be characterized as a “New Virginia” of high farming and market-town commerce. Enduring sectional patterns emerged as Old Virginia remained committed to slavery, tobacco, and the politics of fiscal conservatism. The dynamic town-and-country economies west of the Blue Ridge predisposed its peoples to favor banks, internal improvements, and other forms of economic modernization. They voted Federalist in debates over the Constitution and actively supported the new central government whose economic power to integrate interstate and international commerce constituted the lifeblood of western Virginia in the nineteenth century. Thus the backcountry became a model for trans-Appalachian frontier development. Its significance as a region remains in the heritage of a backcountry to what Virginia was in the eighteenth century and in a forecountry to what the United States was to become thereafter.
What was the significance of the Shenandoah Valley?
The strategic importance of the Shenandoah Valley was certainly on the mind of Virginia’s lieutenant governor Alexander Spotswood when he led an expedition of gentlemen soldiers there in 1716. Colonial rangers had recently discovered passes over the Blue Ridge that exposed the colony, as many feared, to attack by Indians and Frenchmen alike. Settlement of the valley by British subjects would secure and defend Virginia, not only in conflicts with northern and southern Indians, but also in the imperial struggles that had convulsed the Atlantic world for the previous three decades, during which New France had extended settlements and garrisons from Canada to Louisiana along the broad Ohio and Mississippi river systems. Also worrying Spotswood and his successors were claims by royal proprietors to western lands and the growing threat that runaway slaves might establish autonomous communities in the mountains and resist reenslavement, as did the maroons in Jamaica, with whom Britain was engaged in a protracted war.
What was the name of the war that engrossed the backcountry of Virginia in fear and fighting?
Pontiac's War, waged by Indians against the British in the Illinois and Ohio countries, engrosses the backcountry of Virginia in fear and fighting.
How many acres of land did William Gooch grant to the British?
The major push toward British occupation of the Virginia backcountry begins when Lieutenant Governor William Gooch issues nine land grants totaling close to 400,000 acres west of the Blue Ridge. As many as 160 families are residing in the area of Virginia west of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Why did wheat prices rise in the Atlantic?
Prices for wheat and flour in the Atlantic economy begin to rise, in part because of the growing needs of the British military. 1754—1763. The French and Indian War embroils the backcountry of Virginia in armed conflict, stimulating town founding and growth. 1763—1765.
What is the Thigpen Trail?
THIGPEN TRACE “Thigpen Trace, the oldest military road in Georgia, was cut by James Thigpen to transport military supplies of Col. James Moore, former Carolina governor. It followed a well beaten trail of the Indians from the mountains to the sea in use before the era of the white man. Coming from South Carolina above the Broad River, along the Chattahoochee water divide to the Gulf of Mexico, it avoided all swamps and great rivers. The English claimed the territory as Carolina while the Spanish claimed it as Florida. Col. Moore led the English in an attack down Thigpen Trail and “made Carolina as safe as the conquest of the Spanish and Appalachee (Indians) can make it.” GHM 159-3 GEORGIA HISTORICAL COMMISSION 1956 Perhaps the most important road in North Carolina history, Thigpen's Trace is a road most have never heard about. It has a highway marker in Georgia but none in South Carolina, Virginia, and North Carolina. It dates back to 1704 and profoundly
What river is Saxapahaw on?
Paddle Tour on the Haw River: Swepsonville to Saxapahaw, the middle fords November 27, 2010 Touring rivers is new to the Trading Path Association. We've walked plenty of river banks, before, looking for remnants of riparian commerce and looking for stream crossings, but the idea of searching a river from the water just hadn't caught on with us, perhaps, because so few Piedmont streams will float a vessel. We knew, though, a number of stream crossings on the Haw any one of which could be visited in a single afternoon, but to see more than just the one would take far too much time, hence the paddle tour. In the course of the tour we saw five fords, at least a half dozen dam sites, a couple of power houses that once housed turbines, some sort of occupancy site that may have been a mill prior to government records in the area, and a canal and lock in good enough shape to know what it was even though we couldn't figure out how it work. In other words, paddling proved
Why were frontier migrants considered desperadoes?
Frontier migrants were thus, almost by definition, desperadoes for one reason or another. And they should be recognized as a special class of migrant and dealt with separate from the more classic migrants of the 18th and 19th century. Frontier folk were folk willing and able to live in a subsistence economy without the advantages of civilization so as to avoid the costs of civilization.
What was the rule of migration in colonial America?
So, rule number one about classic migration in Colonial America is that migrants were settlers, not frontiers people, and they moved to settle on lands already under the aegis of some authority capable of transferring more or less clear title to the lands on which they hoped to grow their estates.
What does Byrd's dig reveal about the frontier squatters?
His witty dig reveals at least as much about the nature of frontier squatters as it does about Virginia prigs. They were rugged and even rough, unpretentious, frequently enmeshed in multi-racial, multi-cultural societies a polite gentleman like Mr. Byrd would not have recognized even if he deigned to see them.
What was Frontier Folk?
Frontier folk were folk willing and able to live in a subsistence economy without the advantages of civilization so as to avoid the costs of civilization.
Why did some people escape the colonial settlements?
Some went to see what they could see and never came back. Some went to escape an odious labor contract and others to escape debt or other inconveniences common in the English colonial settlements, like wholesale hunger. But, more or less, all escaped into the backcountry, the unmapped, unknown frontier lands away from the coastal enclaves.
