Discovering the Appalachian Valley

By 1675 there were 60,000 settlers in the northeastern frontier threatened the Indian way of life.  One Wampanoag chief, King "Philip", tried a last attempt to save his people.  During the next year and a half, one half of Philip's warriors, allied with the Narragansett tribes, killed 600 New Englanders (1/6 of the total male population) before the Indians were slaughtered or sold as slaves.  The ultimate goal of eliminating the "Indian obstacle" was so settlers could move westward again without resistance.

Afterward the settlement of the Appalachians proceeded rapidly in the South.  Here in 1650, 43 years after the first permanent settlement at Jamestown, Captain Abraham Wood, a profit minded fur trader, led an expedition along the Piedmont's Roanoke River Valley in search of choice real estate to sell.

Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, was interested in land speculation.  He authorized three expeditions under the command of John Lederer, a German physician in 1668 and 1670.  They hoped to find a passage through the mountains to the west.  It took until 1671 for Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam to follow the Staunton River through a gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains and emerge to a broad valley with a west flowing river to the western wilderness.

"The soil was deep and good, mountain passes that led to a broad valley, blessed with limestone soils of unbelievable fertility. The Great Appalachian Valley, from south of Carolina to northern New York."

Next time - a new group of immigrants.
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Today in Pioneer History: On August 31, 1886, an earthquake near Charleston, South Carolina, leaves more than 100 people dead and hundreds of buildings destroyed. This was the largest recorded earthquake in the history of the southeastern United States.