Absentee Landowning and Exploitation in West Virginia, 1760-1920

Barbara Rasmussen

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813184395
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Absentee landowning has long been tied to economic distress in Appalachia. In this important revisionist study, Barbara Rasmussen examines the nature of landownership in five counties of West Virginia and its effects upon the counties' economic and social development.

Rasmussen untangles a web of outside domination of the region that commenced before the American Revolution, creating a legacy of hardship that continues to plague Appalachia today. The owners and exploiters of the region have included Lord Fairfax, George Washington, and, most recently, the U.S. Forest Service.

The overarching concern of these absentee landowners has been to control the land, the politics, the government, and the resources of the fabulously rich Appalachian Mountains. Their early and relentless domination of politics assured a land tax system that still favors absentee landholders and simultaneously impoverishes the state.

Class differences, a capitalistic outlook, and an ethic of growth and development pervaded western Virginia from earliest settlement. Residents, however, were quickly outspent by wealthier, more powerful outsiders. Insecurity in landownership, Rasmussen demonstrates, is the most significant difference between early mountain farmers and early American farmers everywhere.

1

Imperial Politics

Early Speculators and the Leather Stocking
Assault upon Virginia’s Transmontane

Petroglyphs, pictographs, and carvings on trees provide evidence that for centuries humans have lived and hunted within the Appalachian mountain ranges that now constitute modern West Virginia. Long before the arrival of settlers in leather stockings or investors in silk stockings, ancient Indian tribes populated the mountains. Mysteriously abandoned by those resident tribes, the region became the coveted hunting grounds of later, rival Indians. By the seventeenth century, the powerful Iroquois dominated the area and its lucrative fur trade. From that time on, Iroquois, Europeans, and Americans—individuals, corporations, and sovereigns—focused their desires for empire on the Appalachian Mountains and whatever lay beyond.

The land, game, and timber first lured explorers west. Although vast beyond measure, these attractions were but a portion of the bounty that nature bestowed on the region. Beneath the surface of the earth, coal, gas, limestone, and sandstone lay awaiting discovery. Each of these resources represented one more dimension of the idea of property as it evolved into more and more complex dimensions in the minds of the ambitious men who would seek to capture the wealth of the mountains. The concept of property would be asked “to embrace a broad range of resources” as people and ideas moved westward across the continent.¹

Eons in the making, these gifts from the geologic past were created while all of western Virginia was the floor of a huge sea into which poured many ancient rivers. The silt, sand, and pebbles from these rivers accounted for the rich sandstone deposits found in the eastern edges of the state. Farther west, at the deepest part of the ancient sea, marine shells and skeletons formed the thick limestone layers now found in Greenbrier and Monroe counties. In the plentiful shallower portions of this sea, swamplike conditions prevailed, hosting vegetation that became the vast seams of coal that undergird most of West Virginia’s counties. Nearer to the edge of the Ohio River, plentiful oil and natural gas deposits were formed.

As mountains hove out of this sea and the waters disappeared, the Appalachian range stood as a barrier to westward movement, save for the relatively recent Indian hunting trails.² Beyond the Allegheny Front, seemingly endless waves of mountain peaks deterred almost all advances except for those of the Iroquois, who controlled the region. Susquehannas from what is now Pennsylvania and Senecas from the Illinois region traversed the mountains, although they were subjugated by the Iroquois. Indians protected their commercial interests in the area: French traders sought game and pelts.³

Until the era of exploration and war in the eighteenth century, the Virginian transmontane was nearly devoid of settlement, Indian or white. When the source of the Potomac River was marked for Lord Fairfax in 1736 and the first Fairfax Stone was laid there in 1746, white settlement of what is now West Virginia began. Lord Fairfax was a single proprietary owner who leased his lands in the English fashion, planning to sell none. His land, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, had been given to his ancestors by a grateful King Charles II.

The Shenandoah Valley was well populated during early colonial days, with settlement being facilitated by the reasonably traversable landscape. Both settlers and the leadership of Virginia looked westward during the eighteenth century. Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood in 1710 planned to interrupt French trade with the western Indians. By 1716 he claimed the entire Valley of Virginia for the king of England. Spotswood’s expansionist ideas were later carried on by Governor Robert Dinwiddie, who pressed western exploration and settlement. To enhance settlers’ safety, he negotiated treaties of protection with the Indians. To ensure settlers’ economic success, he exempted them from taxes and quitrents. In the first third of the eighteenth century, Mecklenberg (later Shepherdstown) was established, and further settlements punctuated Jefferson and Berkeley counties.⁴

In this era Indians resisted white settlement in their hunting grounds, and most of the transmontane remained under the control of native Americans or their French allies. Dominated by the Iroquois nation, Indian fur trade was lucrative. Hunting territories were jealously protected by various tribes.⁵ Difficult and life-threatening, English settlement continued, despite French and Indian resistance. Settlers and land agents pushed west with an indomitable fervor.

To encourage western settlement and finance his estate, Lord Fairfax began in 1720 to issue some land leases for portions of his Northern Neck of Virginia property. His tenants paid composition money, or down payments, and annual quitrents. This feudalistic approach to land management was not wholly successful in the New World, and Fairfax was not to enjoy a trouble-free flow of income from the rent. Plagued by the mismanagement and duplicity of his agent Robert Carter, a prominent Virginia planter, Fairfax reluctantly came to America in 1747 to tend his lands for himself.⁶

In the same period, other settlement led by frontiersmen proceeded without respect for proprietary owners’ rights to leases or quitrents. These settlers wanted full title, in fee. Creeping westward, they settled along the Shenandoah and South Branch rivers, reaching present Pendleton County and the spine of the Appalachian Mountains by the 1740s.⁷ This region marked the western edge of the Valley of Virginia and was attractive to early settlers and speculators because it was reasonably accessible from eastern Virginia.

From these first days of settlement in the eighteenth century through the establishment of the Monongahela National Forest in the early twentieth, absentees and speculators dominated enough of the Monongahela’s land to secure their control of the affairs of the region. Although frontiersmen were numerous, they never controlled nearly the amount of land that remained in the hands of absentees and speculators. Fairfax’s proprietorship, the Levi Hollingsworth survey, Albert Gallatin’s lands, George Washington’s claims, and the Deakins family claim, all in place within the transmontane of Virginia before the writing of the U.S. Constitution, accounted for vast portions of the Monongahela region. They are all examples of the early influence of absentees and speculators within the region.

Aside from these great landholdings, settlers also held land in parcels of various sizes. Pushing into the region and bringing traditional Virginia mountain farming culture with them, these farmers claimed land. Their claims were in many cases insecure, but they had no way to apprehend that their descendants would suffer ejectment in the next century.

Governor Patrick Henry, who opposed the earlier land policies of Governor Dunmore, in 1776 attempted to protect the rights of settlers in the West. He signed the first land law to grant actual settlers preemption rights to four hundred acres of land. These claims could be validated by taxes paid, even in the absence of a deed. Henry also chaired a committee that questioned the right of the king to sell vacant lands and that urged future settlers not to accept lands under such conditions. This feeble attempt to protect western settlers came in the throes of Revolutionary War fervor and was short-lived.⁸ During the years of the Revolutionary War (1776–83), Virginia honored early settlement claims, but subsequent challenges by speculators and absentees clouded many of them. Virginia’s 1779 land law failed to resolve land contests and became instead a source of strife on the frontier. Early farmers and graziers were frustrated from the start by provisions of that law that allowed the holders of preemption rights and military and treasury warrants to transfer them to other purchasers.⁹ This device allowed wealthy purchasers to gather a great deal of land very cheaply. Persons who sold their claims remained in the East with their cash, leaving westward settlement to others.

The Virginia Land Law of 1779 attempted to impose order on the chaotic rush for western lands. The law for a few years recognized and legitimated the unrecorded claims of settlers and Revolutionary War pensioners, but this security began to erode shortly after 1783. In the years after the Revolutionary War, owners of large tracts of land and developers were able to defeat settlers’ claims with increasing success. A few fortunate pioneers held on to their land in spite of challenges from powerful land agents and absentees. Generally, however, the challenges to land claims of transmontane settlers were successful, especially in regions where deeds were not recorded meticulously, or in cases where Virginia treasury warrants were held by those who sought the lands claimed by settlers. Those settlers who were confronted with challenges in early years frequently gave up and moved farther west. By the eve of the Civil War, this solution was no longer possible. Many farm families were forced to accept disheartening compromises or to fight ejectment proceedings.¹⁰

Within the boundaries of modern Tucker County, the western limit of Lord Fairfax’s Northern Neck adjoins the Deakins family’s grants. Settlers who wanted to claim their own land were attracted to the region also. The Potomac River rises in Tucker, and its feeder streams and those of the northerly flowing Cheat River form an attractive site for logging and milling, as well as for farming. Similar geographic elements exist in Randolph and Pocahontas counties. All these counties were settled by farmers early in the nation’s history.

These counties lie along the eastern edge of the Allegheny Plateau. The sharply defined geography of the Valley and Ridge province significantly affected the settlement, as well as the isolation, of the region. Nearly impenetrable from the east, the mountains forced settlers moving west to drift south through valleys, in search of mountain passes. Pocahontas and Pendleton counties form the highest part of the plateau region that covers a third of the state, sweeping in a curve to the southwest.¹¹ Numerous rivers began within these hills, luring settlers ever westward.

Indian trails through the mountains were plentiful. These rough paths were the only passages through the region for almost one hundred years after white explorers found the area. The McCullough trader’s trail led from Moorefield via Patterson’s Creek and Greenland Gap, across a spur of the Alleghenies to the North Branch River, west of Oakland, Maryland, to the region of Bruceton Mills, on the Pennsylvania–West Virginia border. A branch of the trail traversed Tucker County through Lead Mine Run and Horseshoe Run to the Cheat River, where it connected with a branch of the trail through Parsons and ultimately intersected the Seneca Trail at Elkins. From Elkins, the trail headed south to the Greenbrier River, passing through Pocahontas County at Mingo Flats, west of the Marlinton Pike, crossing the mountain and splitting into two branches on top of Middle Mountain. One branch continued to Old Field Fork, and the other to Clover Lick.¹²

The predominant route through the Monongahela region was the legendary Seneca, or Shawnee, Trail, which connected the South Branch with the Tygart River Valley. This trail was heavily traveled by settlers in the early 1800s, and it ultimately delineated some modern transportation routes. Cattle were driven eastward to market on this trail, and pack-horses carried out iron and salt. The trail ascended the South Branch and followed the North Fork and Seneca Creek, crossed the Alleghenies twenty miles south of the North Branch Trail and the branches of the Cheat River above the mouth of Horse Camp Creek, and passed near Elkins and Beverly to the vicinity of Huttonsville in Randolph County.¹³ These trails were difficult, but all were well traveled.

This region contains rugged mountains and narrow valleys, watered by often fickle rivers. The Cheat, Greenbrier, Tygart, and Blackwater rivers run full, flooding in the early spring months, and dwindle to a trickle by the advent of summer. This geographic characteristic aided nineteenth-century efforts to harvest timber in the region. In settlement days, pioneers were blessed and cursed equally by these temperamental mountain streams. Spring floods were as dangerous as summer droughts. Encouraged by the plentiful water supply, however, settlers followed quickly after the rivers were found by European trappers, traders, and explorers. The Greenbrier River was discovered in 1749 by General Andrew Lewis, of the Greenbrier Land Company, while he was surveying the firm’s one hundred thousand–acre grant of land in the region.¹⁴ Near modern Marlinton, Lewis encountered Jacob Marlin and Stephen Sewell, who had been living in the area for several years.

Settlement and exploration in the Monongahela region were further hastened by the 1748 formation of the Ohio Company, which received at least half a million acres of land along the Ohio River, between the Great Kanawha and the Monongahela rivers.¹⁵ Settlers were drawn to the area because of bottomland along the river. Both settlers and speculators seized upon the potentials for the region. Land along the Horseshoe Bottom of the Cheat River, claimed by settlers as well as land agents, became the locus of the scramble for timber and wealth for nearly two hundred years after its settlement.

Tentative settlements within present Randolph and Preston counties came in the 1750s, but permanent settlement required a negotiated peace with the Indians. The Treaty of Logstown in 1752 provided some accommodation with the Iroquois but upset the Delawares, who were threatened by the prospect of dispossession for a second time.¹⁶ In 1763, at the end of the Great War for the Empire between England and France, Ottawa chief Pontiac sought a confederacy of Huron, Shawnee, Delaware, and Ottawa tribes to push back white intruders and recapture the transmontane. Pontiac led his warriors in 1763 in plundering white trading businesses along the Ohio and Monongahela rivers.¹⁷ In 1765 General Henry Boquet finally negotiated a treaty with Pontiac that brought peace to the region for another ten years.¹⁸ Boquet had a personal stake in western peace. He owned stock in the Ohio Company equivalent to twenty-five thousand acres of land.¹⁹

In this era, Americans as well as Britons were taken by land fever. Everyone with “any ambition and capacity, it seems, on both sides of the Atlantic, sought some profit from what promised to be the greatest land boom in history.” Officials of colonial America, British politicians, and planters and merchants from everywhere were as eager to capture an interest in land as were the poorer but braver settlers who undertook to farm the land.²⁰

During the peaceful interlude negotiated by Boquet, settlers poured over the mountains, heedless of King George III’s 1763 royal proclamation that banned settlement west of the spine of the Allegheny Mountains. The Crown, and many influential Britons, feared that the lure of free land in America would result in a depopulated England. Alarm increased when the Board of Trade realized that not only the poor were leaving England; many persons of talent and potential were also looking to America for improved opportunity and prospects. By closing the frontier, many Britons believed, the lure of American land would be dulled.²¹ Complaints about emigration came from the landed and commercial classes in England, but these ...