Chapter 5: Who Came to the Mountains? Scotch-Irish, German, English, and African Migration into Appalachia

There is a story that Americans tell about Appalachia, and it goes something like this: the Scotch-Irish came to the mountains because they were a restless, independent, combative people who wanted to be left alone. They were clannish and proud and suspicious of authority. They had been that way in Scotland, they had been that way in Ulster, and they brought that temperament to the American backcountry like luggage. The mountains suited them because the mountains were remote, and remote was what they wanted.

It is a tidy story. It flatters the people it describes. It has the advantage of simplicity. And it is, at best, a quarter of the truth.

The actual history of who came to the Appalachian Mountains, and when, and why, is far more complex, far more diverse, and far more interesting than the Scotch-Irish monoculture myth allows. Yes, the Scotch-Irish were the largest single ethnic group to settle the Appalachian backcountry in the eighteenth century, and their cultural influence on the region was profound. But they were not alone. German-speaking families from the Palatinate and other Germanic states settled the Shenandoah Valley in numbers that rivaled the Scotch-Irish and built communities whose influence persists to this day. English settlers — from the Tidewater, from the Piedmont, from every class and condition — pushed into the mountains for reasons ranging from land hunger to debt flight to religious conviction. And African Americans, both enslaved and free, were present in the earliest Appalachian settlements, their labor and their lives woven into the fabric of mountain communities from the very beginning — a fact that the region's dominant narrative has worked very hard to erase.

This chapter tells the story of all of them. It traces the routes they traveled, the forces that pushed them out of their old homes and pulled them toward the mountains, and the world they built when they arrived. It examines the most important migration corridor in early American history — the Great Wagon Road — and the men who scouted the way ahead. It interrogates the academic theories that have tried to explain Appalachian culture as a transplanted ethnic inheritance. And it insists, throughout, on a truth that the rest of this book will reinforce in every chapter: the mountains were never as homogeneous as the myth.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Identify the major ethnic groups that settled Appalachia and their geographic origins
2. Explain why the Scotch-Irish dominated but did not monopolize mountain settlement
3. Trace the Great Wagon Road as the primary migration corridor into the Appalachian backcountry
4. Document the presence of enslaved and free Black people in the earliest Appalachian settlements

The Road South: Migration and the Geography of Settlement

To understand who came to the mountains, you must first understand how they got there. And that means understanding a road.

The Great Wagon Road was the most heavily traveled overland route in colonial America. It ran approximately 735 miles from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, southwest through Lancaster, across the Susquehanna River, down through the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania, into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and onward through the Virginia backcountry into the Piedmont and foothills of the Carolinas. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was carrying more traffic than any other road on the continent — more than the post roads of New England, more than the coastal highways of the Tidewater. Benjamin Franklin observed in the 1750s that the stream of settlers flowing southwestward through the Great Valley was one of the most remarkable demographic movements in the colonies.

The road was not, in any modern sense, a road. For most of its length, it was a rutted, unpaved track that followed an ancient path — the Great Warriors' Path that Indigenous nations had used for centuries as a north-south travel corridor through the valley system running between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains. The Iroquois, Cherokee, Catawba, and Shawnee had all used this path, and European settlers did not so much build a road as widen an Indigenous one. This is a detail worth pausing over: the primary route of European settlement into Appalachia followed a path that Indigenous people had been traveling for thousands of years. The settlers were not discovering empty wilderness. They were walking in footsteps.

The geography of the Great Wagon Road determined the geography of Appalachian settlement. The road ran through the Great Valley — the long, broad valley that parallels the Blue Ridge from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. This valley was the gateway. Settlers who traveled south along the Great Wagon Road entered the Shenandoah Valley first, then continued into the valleys of southwestern Virginia, and from there dispersed into the mountains of present-day West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The Great Wagon Road was not the only route into the mountains — settlers also came westward from the Piedmont through gaps in the Blue Ridge, and Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road would open a direct path into Kentucky — but it was the primary one, and its influence on settlement patterns was decisive.

Primary Source Excerpt — Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg's Journal (1752)

"We reached the Yadkin [River] October 18... The land in the Forks of the Yadkin is very rich and has been much looked at... Wm. Churton told us of 20 families who are on their way to take up this land, most of them having first seen it on their journey down the Great Road from Pennsylvania."

Spangenberg, a Moravian bishop, was scouting land in North Carolina for a Moravian settlement. His journal records the constant southward flow of settlers along the Great Wagon Road.

Understanding the Great Wagon Road explains something that puzzles students encountering Appalachian history for the first time: why the settlement of the southern Appalachians was so heavily influenced by people from Pennsylvania and the mid-Atlantic, rather than by the English colonists of the Virginia Tidewater who were geographically closer. The answer is the road. Settlers from Pennsylvania, many of them recently arrived immigrants who landed at the port of Philadelphia, flowed southwestward along the Great Wagon Road like water following gravity. The road funneled them into the Great Valley and then into the mountains. The Tidewater planters, meanwhile, were oriented eastward, toward the Chesapeake and the Atlantic trade. The mountains were behind them, not ahead of them. Some Tidewater families did push west — the Virginia gentry had enormous land speculations in the backcountry — but the mass migration into the mountains came down the Great Wagon Road from the north.

The Scotch-Irish: Dominant but Not Alone

The single largest ethnic group to settle the Appalachian backcountry was the Scotch-Irish — a term that requires immediate unpacking, because it confuses nearly everyone who encounters it for the first time.

The Scotch-Irish were not a mixture of Scottish and Irish people. They were the descendants of Scottish Lowlanders who had been transplanted to the northern Irish province of Ulster beginning in the early 1600s as part of the English Crown's deliberate policy of plantation — the colonization of Irish land with loyal Protestant settlers. The Crown's goal was to pacify Ireland by replacing the Catholic Irish population of Ulster with Presbyterian Scots who would be loyal to the English interest. It was, in essence, a colonial project: the Scottish settlers were given land confiscated from Irish owners, and they were expected to form a Protestant buffer against Irish Catholic rebellion.

For roughly a century, this arrangement held. The Scots who settled in Ulster built communities, established churches, farmed the land, and developed a culture that was neither fully Scottish nor Irish but something distinct — shaped by the experience of being a transplanted population in a land where they were surrounded by a hostile dispossessed majority and governed by an English establishment that regarded them with suspicion despite their loyalty.

Then, in the early eighteenth century, the arrangement fell apart. A series of economic crises, droughts, rent increases by absentee landlords, and restrictions on the Presbyterian faith by the Anglican establishment made life in Ulster increasingly untenable for the Scotch-Irish. The wool trade was suppressed by English mercantilist policy. Rack-renting — the practice of dramatically increasing rents when leases expired — displaced families that had farmed the same land for generations. The Test Act of 1704 barred Presbyterians from holding public office, serving in the military, or teaching in schools, effectively making them second-class citizens in a colony they had been brought to populate.

The result was a massive emigration. Between 1717 and 1775, an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 Scotch-Irish left Ulster for the American colonies. They came in waves — the first major wave in 1717–1718, driven by drought and rent increases; another in the 1720s; a sustained flow through the 1730s and 1740s; and the largest wave in the 1760s and early 1770s, driven by another round of lease expirations and economic distress.

Most of them landed at Philadelphia or the smaller Delaware Valley ports. And most of them did not stay in Philadelphia. The rich farmland of southeastern Pennsylvania was already taken — claimed by English Quakers and German settlers who had arrived earlier. The Scotch-Irish, arriving with little capital and facing established competition for the best land, did what landless people in agricultural societies have always done: they moved to where land was available. The Great Wagon Road carried them south and west, into the backcountry of Pennsylvania, down the Shenandoah Valley, and eventually into the mountains.

The Scotch-Irish cultural footprint on Appalachia was enormous, and we will encounter its elements throughout this book — in the region's religious traditions (Chapter 8), its music (Chapter 27), its language (Chapter 31), its politics (Chapter 34). Presbyterian church governance, with its emphasis on the authority of the local congregation and its suspicion of hierarchical ecclesiastical power, became a template for Appalachian political culture. Scotch-Irish family structures, with their emphasis on extended kinship networks and clan-like loyalties, shaped the social organization of mountain communities. The whiskey-making tradition that would become central to the Appalachian frontier economy — and that would provoke the federal government's first direct confrontation with mountain communities in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 (Chapter 10) — was a Scotch-Irish inheritance.

But the cultural influence of the Scotch-Irish has been exaggerated, romanticized, and deployed for purposes that have more to do with modern identity politics than historical accuracy. And this brings us to an academic debate that has shaped — and distorted — the study of Appalachian culture for decades.

The Celtic Thesis: An Attractive Theory and Its Problems

In 1988, the historian David Hackett Fischer published Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, an ambitious work that argued American regional cultures could be traced to the specific British regions from which their settlers had emigrated. Fischer identified four great migrations from Britain to America: Puritans from East Anglia to New England; Cavaliers from southern England to Virginia; Quakers from the North Midlands to the Delaware Valley; and "Borderers" — Scotch-Irish and northern English from the Anglo-Scottish border region — to the American backcountry.

Fischer's argument about the backcountry settlers was sweeping. He contended that the violence, clannishness, personal honor codes, suspicion of authority, religious intensity, and even the speech patterns of the Appalachian backcountry could be traced directly to the culture of the Anglo-Scottish borderlands and Ulster. The mountains did not create Appalachian culture, Fischer argued — the people brought it with them, fully formed, from the borders of Britain. Appalachian people were, in this reading, essentially transplanted Borderers living out a cultural inheritance that predated their arrival in America by centuries.

A related argument had been advanced by the historian Grady McWhiney in Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (1988), which went further, arguing that the entire culture of the American South — including its herding economy, its violence, its leisure patterns, and its resistance to Yankees — was essentially Celtic, imported from the Celtic fringe of the British Isles (Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall) and persisting virtually unchanged in the American environment.

These arguments — collectively known as the Celtic thesis — were enormously influential. They provided a coherent, compelling narrative that explained Appalachian distinctiveness in cultural-genetic terms. They were cited in popular books, repeated in classrooms, and absorbed into the region's self-understanding. If you have ever heard someone explain Appalachian feuds, moonshine, or religious intensity as "that's just the Scotch-Irish way," you have heard the Celtic thesis in folk form.

The problems with the Celtic thesis are significant, and Appalachian historians have spent the past three decades identifying them.

First, the thesis overstates cultural continuity and understates adaptation. Cultures do not travel unchanged across oceans and centuries. The Scotch-Irish who arrived in the Appalachian backcountry were not reproducing a British Borderlands culture in a new setting. They were adapting to a radically different environment — different land, different climate, different neighbors, different political systems, different economic possibilities. The mountains themselves shaped behavior. The presence of Indigenous nations shaped behavior. The frontier economy shaped behavior. To attribute Appalachian culture primarily to ethnic inheritance is to treat mountains and forests and Cherokee and Germans and enslaved Africans as irrelevant scenery in a drama whose script was written in Ulster.

Second, the thesis erases everyone who was not Scotch-Irish. If Appalachian culture is fundamentally Celtic, then the contributions of German settlers, English settlers, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples become invisible. This is not just an oversight — it is a distortion that reinforces the myth of a homogeneous white Appalachia and makes it harder to see the actual diversity that characterized mountain settlement from the beginning.

Third, the thesis has uncomfortable political implications. The argument that cultural traits are inherited from ethnic ancestors and persist across centuries is, at its core, a racialist argument — not in the sense of overt white supremacy, but in the sense of treating culture as something carried in the blood rather than produced by specific historical circumstances. McWhiney's Cracker Culture, in particular, has been criticized for romanticizing a culture of violence and for providing an intellectual framework that excuses poverty and dysfunction as cultural inheritance rather than examining the structural forces — land dispossession, extractive industry, political disenfranchisement — that produced them.

The historian David Hackett Fischer was more careful and more rigorous than McWhiney, and Albion's Seed remains a valuable work of comparative cultural history. But even Fischer's argument, taken as a complete explanation rather than a partial one, collapses under the weight of evidence that Appalachian culture was shaped as much by the American environment as by British inheritance.

Then and Now

The Celtic thesis debate may seem academic, but it has real consequences. If Appalachian poverty and social problems are the products of a deficient culture inherited from Celtic ancestors, then the solution is to change the culture — an approach that has justified everything from settlement schools to the "culture of poverty" thesis to modern conservative arguments that mountain people just need to try harder. If, on the other hand, Appalachian problems are the products of structural forces — dispossession, extraction, political marginalization — then the solution requires changing the structures. The Celtic thesis, intentionally or not, shifts responsibility from systems to people. We will see this pattern again and again throughout this book.

The Germans: The Valley Builders

If the Scotch-Irish are the most discussed settlers of Appalachia, the Germans are the most overlooked.

German-speaking settlers — primarily from the Palatinate region of southwestern Germany, but also from Württemberg, Baden, Hesse, Alsace, and the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland — began arriving in the American colonies in large numbers in the early eighteenth century. Like the Scotch-Irish, they were pushed by catastrophe and pulled by opportunity. The Palatinate had been devastated by a succession of wars — the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the wars of Louis XIV, and ongoing conflicts that made southwestern Germany one of the most war-ravaged regions of Europe. Religious persecution of Protestants by Catholic rulers added spiritual pressure to economic desperation. When William Penn's agents began advertising cheap land and religious freedom in Pennsylvania, the response was overwhelming.

The first major wave of German immigration arrived in Pennsylvania between 1710 and 1730, and it continued at high levels through the 1750s. By 1760, German speakers constituted roughly one-third of Pennsylvania's population — a proportion that alarmed Benjamin Franklin, who worried publicly about whether they would ever learn English or assimilate into British colonial culture.

Like the Scotch-Irish, many Germans found that the best land in southeastern Pennsylvania was already claimed. And like the Scotch-Irish, they followed the Great Wagon Road southward. But the Germans and the Scotch-Irish tended to settle in subtly different patterns. German settlers, as a generalization supported by demographic evidence, were more likely to settle in the broad, fertile valleys — particularly the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia — where the terrain resembled the agricultural landscapes of their European homeland. The Scotch-Irish were more likely to push further into the ridges and hollows, into rougher country where the land was cheaper and the distance from authority was greater.

This is a generalization, and it has exceptions. But the pattern is visible in the landscape: the Shenandoah Valley, from Winchester to Staunton and beyond, was heavily German. The names on the land — Strasburg, Woodstock, Edinburg (originally Mühlstadt), Timberville — reflect this. The stone barns, the massive fireplaces, the distinctive German-style farmhouses with their central chimneys, the bank barns built into hillsides — these are German contributions to the Appalachian landscape that persist to this day.

German communities in the valley were characterized by traits that distinguished them from their Scotch-Irish neighbors: a stronger emphasis on intensive agriculture (grain farming, orchting, animal husbandry) rather than the open-range herding more common among Scotch-Irish settlers; a tradition of craft production (pottery, ironwork, furniture-making) that created local industries; religious institutions — Lutheran and German Reformed churches, along with smaller sects like the Moravians, Mennonites, and Dunkers (Church of the Brethren) — that served as community anchors; and a written culture, including German-language newspapers and almanacs, that maintained connections to a broader German-speaking world.

The Moravians deserve particular mention. The Moravian Church (Unitas Fratrum), a Protestant denomination with roots in fifteenth-century Bohemia, established carefully planned communities in Pennsylvania (Bethlehem, Nazareth) and North Carolina (Salem, now Winston-Salem). The Moravians were meticulous record-keepers — their archives are among the richest primary sources for colonial Appalachian history — and they maintained a missionary tradition that brought them into sustained contact with Indigenous communities. Bishop Spangenberg's 1752 journal, quoted earlier in this chapter, is a Moravian document, and it reflects the Moravian practice of systematic observation and documentation that has been a gift to historians ever since.

The German influence on Appalachian culture has been systematically underestimated, in part because the Celtic thesis directed scholarly attention toward the Scotch-Irish, and in part because German communities assimilated linguistically — switching from German to English — over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, making their distinctiveness less visible to later observers. But the material culture of the Shenandoah Valley and the Great Valley system from Pennsylvania to Virginia is substantially German, and any account of Appalachian settlement that treats the mountains as exclusively Scotch-Irish territory is ignoring hundreds of communities and tens of thousands of people.

The English: The Invisible Majority

Here is a fact that surprises many students of Appalachian history: in the colonial period, the single largest ethnic group in the American colonies was English. And while the Scotch-Irish and Germans dominated the narrative of backcountry migration, English settlers were present throughout Appalachia — often in larger numbers than popular memory acknowledges.

English settlers came to the mountains from multiple directions and for multiple reasons. Some pushed westward from the Virginia Tidewater and the Carolina Piedmont, moving up the river valleys — the James, the Roanoke, the Yadkin — into the foothills and beyond. These families were often younger sons of established Piedmont families, seeking land they could not afford in the settled east, or they were indentured servants who had completed their terms and were looking for a fresh start where land was cheap. Some were debtors, fleeing east for the same reason people have always fled to the frontier: because the frontier was where creditors could not follow.

Other English settlers arrived via the Great Wagon Road, mixed in with the streams of Scotch-Irish and Germans. The Great Wagon Road was not an ethnically segregated highway. Families of different backgrounds traveled together, camped together, and settled in proximity to one another. Intermarriage among English, Scotch-Irish, and German families began within a generation of settlement and accelerated with each subsequent generation, blurring the ethnic distinctions that scholars would later try to reconstruct.

The English contribution to Appalachian settlement has been obscured by two factors. First, English settlers were the default — the unmarked category in a colonial society where English language, law, and culture were the norm. German and Scotch-Irish settlers were notable because they were different. English settlers were unremarkable because they were, in the colonial context, ordinary. Nobody wrote about the English character of a settlement in the same way that travelers commented on the German character of the Shenandoah Valley or the Scotch-Irish character of the backcountry.

Second, the Scotch-Irish narrative is more dramatic. A story about persecuted Presbyterians fleeing religious oppression and economic exploitation in Ulster, carrying their fierce independence across an ocean and into the mountains, is simply a better story than "English families gradually moved west because land was cheaper there." The Celtic thesis thrives in part because it is a compelling narrative, and narratives, as we will see throughout this book, have a power that demographic data does not.

But the data is clear. Studies of colonial-era settlement patterns in southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee consistently show that English-origin settlers constituted a significant minority — and in some areas, a majority — of the early population. In the New River Valley, which will serve as one of our anchor examples throughout this book, the earliest European settlers included families of English, Scotch-Irish, and German origin, arriving through multiple routes and intermarrying within a generation. The New River Valley was not Scotch-Irish territory. It was not German territory. It was a multiethnic frontier from the beginning.

African Americans in Early Appalachia: Present from the Beginning

And then there were the people whose presence the traditional narrative erases most completely.

African Americans were in Appalachia from the earliest days of European settlement. They came as enslaved people, brought by settlers who owned human beings as property. They came, in smaller numbers, as free people — some of them manumitted, some born free, some who had purchased their own freedom. They were present in the Shenandoah Valley, in the New River Valley, in the hollows of western North Carolina, in the frontier settlements of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. They cleared land, built cabins, tended livestock, raised crops, worked iron furnaces, produced salt, and did the thousand forms of labor that made frontier life possible.

The next chapter of this book is devoted entirely to the history of slavery in Appalachia, so this section will be brief. But it is essential to establish here, in the chapter about who came to the mountains, that African Americans came to the mountains too — not voluntarily, in most cases, but they came, and they were there, and any account of Appalachian settlement that omits them is not incomplete. It is false.

The demographic data is unambiguous. The 1790 census — the first federal census — recorded enslaved people in every Appalachian county where data was collected. In the Shenandoah Valley, enslaved people constituted 15 to 25 percent of the population in several counties. In the Greenbrier Valley of present-day West Virginia, enslaved people were present on farms and at salt works. In southwestern Virginia, the New River Valley's early census records show enslaved people on farms of every size. In western North Carolina, enslaved people worked on farms, in homes, and in the nascent iron industry.

The numbers were smaller than in the plantation regions to the east. Mountain slavery was different from plantation slavery in important ways that Chapter 6 will explore. But smaller does not mean absent, and different does not mean benign.

The presence of free Black people in early Appalachia is even less well known. Free Black communities existed in the Shenandoah Valley, in parts of western North Carolina, and along the mountain frontier from the colonial period onward. Some were established by manumitted people who chose to remain in the region. Others formed around institutions — a church, a school, a cluster of landowning families — that provided a foundation for community. These communities were small, precarious, and subject to the constant pressure of a legal system designed to restrict Black freedom. But they existed, and their existence contradicts the narrative of a white Appalachia that has never been complicated by race.

Whose Story Is Missing?

The earliest enslaved people in Appalachia left almost no documentary record in their own voices. They appear in census records as numbers — counted but not named, or named but not heard. They appear in estate inventories, listed alongside livestock and furniture. They appear in the occasional court record. But the interior experience of enslaved people on the Appalachian frontier — what they hoped, what they feared, what they preserved of their African heritage, how they understood the mountain landscape that surrounded them — is largely lost to us, silenced by a system that denied them literacy, mobility, and legal personhood. Chapter 6 will recover what it can of this history. But the silence itself is a historical fact, and it is not accidental.

The Long Hunters: Scouting the Way

Before the settler families came, men went into the mountains alone or in small parties, stayed for months or years, and came back with stories.

They were called long hunters — "long" not because of their rifles (though their rifles were long) but because of the duration of their hunts. Beginning in the 1760s, hunters from the Virginia and Carolina backcountry penetrated deep into the trans-Appalachian wilderness — into present-day Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia — on extended hunting expeditions that sometimes lasted eighteen months or more. They lived off the land, sleeping in caves and lean-tos, following game trails through country that no European had mapped.

The long hunters were not explorers in any formal sense. They were not commissioned by governments or sponsored by philosophical societies. They were hunters, operating in a commercial economy: they went into the wilderness to kill deer and bear and elk, to process the hides, and to bring them back to sell. The deerskin trade that had once connected Cherokee hunters to European markets now connected backcountry white hunters to the same markets, and the long hunts were commercial ventures, driven by the same profit motive that drove every other aspect of the colonial economy.

But the long hunters served a function beyond commerce. They were, in effect, scouts. They learned the terrain. They found the gaps in the mountains, the river crossings, the fertile valleys where soil was dark and deep. And they came back and told people about it.

The most famous long hunter was Daniel Boone — and Boone's fame is both deserved and distorting. Boone was a real person who did real things: he explored Kentucky beginning in 1767, led the cutting of the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap in 1775, and established the settlement of Boonesborough. He was a genuinely skilled woodsman and a charismatic figure whose exploits were publicized by John Filson's 1784 biography, The Discovery, Settlement and present State of Kentucke, which transformed Boone from a frontier hunter into an American icon.

But the Boone mythology obscures several important things. First, Boone did not "discover" Kentucky. Cherokee and Shawnee people had lived in and used the region for centuries, and they had not invited him. The land Boone scouted was ceded — under enormous pressure — at the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals in 1775, the fraudulent deal described in Chapter 4. Boone was an agent of the Transylvania Company, a land speculation venture organized by Judge Richard Henderson, and his mission was commercial: find the best route to land that Henderson intended to sell.

Second, Boone was not a solitary wilderness figure. He traveled with companions, relied on Indigenous knowledge of trails and terrain, and operated within a network of hunters, traders, and land speculators who were systematically mapping the trans-Appalachian West for exploitation. The mythology of the lone frontiersman obscures the reality that western expansion was an organized, capitalized enterprise.

Third, Boone's Wilderness Road — the trail cut through the Cumberland Gap into central Kentucky — was significant not because one man blazed it but because it became a migration corridor. An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 settlers traveled the Wilderness Road between 1775 and 1810, making it second only to the Great Wagon Road as a route of Appalachian settlement. The road transformed the Cumberland Gap from a natural feature into a historical fulcrum — the point at which the migration stream that had been flowing southwestward along the Great Wagon Road turned westward, carrying settlers through the mountains and into the trans-Appalachian interior.

Primary Source Excerpt — Felix Walker's Account of Boone's 1775 Expedition

"On entering the plain we were permitted to view a very interesting and romantic sight. A number of buffaloes, of all sizes, supposed to be between two and three hundred, made off from the lick... We felt ourselves as passengers through a wilderness just arrived at the fields of Canaan."

Walker was one of the men traveling with Boone to establish Boonesborough. His biblical language — Canaan, the promised land — reveals the mythological framework settlers imposed on Indigenous land.

Push and Pull: Why They Came

Migration is never random. People do not leave home without reason. Understanding who came to the mountains requires understanding what pushed them out of their old homes and what pulled them toward the new one.

The push factors varied by group but shared common elements:

For the Scotch-Irish: Economic distress in Ulster — rack-renting, crop failures, the suppression of the wool trade by English mercantilist policy. Religious discrimination — the Test Act's exclusion of Presbyterians from civic life. A sense of betrayal: these were people who had been brought to Ulster as loyal Protestant settlers and then treated as second-class subjects by the very Crown that had invited them.

For the Germans: The devastation of the Palatinate and southwestern Germany by a century of warfare. Religious persecution of Protestants by Catholic princes. The collapse of the agricultural economy in regions where armies had marched back and forth for generations, burning crops and requisitioning livestock.

For the English backcountry settlers: Land scarcity in the Tidewater and Piedmont, where the best land was already claimed by established families. The completion of indentured servitude — freed servants who had no land and few prospects in the settled east. Debt — the frontier offered a fresh start to people who had failed in the east.

For enslaved African Americans: There was no "push factor." They were brought. Their migration was compelled, a function of the economic decisions of the people who claimed to own them. When a Scotch-Irish farmer moved his family from the Shenandoah Valley to the New River Valley, and that farmer owned enslaved people, those people moved too — not as migrants, but as property.

The pull factors were more uniform across groups:

Land. This was the overwhelming pull factor for every free settler who came to the mountains. Land in the Appalachian backcountry was cheap — often free, if you were willing to squat on unceded territory and gamble that your possession would eventually be recognized. In a society where land ownership was the foundation of economic independence, social standing, and political participation, the availability of cheap land in the mountains was an irresistible force. It pulled people out of Pennsylvania, out of the Piedmont, out of the Tidewater, and into the hollows.

Distance from authority. This factor has been romanticized — the "leave me alone" mythology — but it was real. The Appalachian backcountry was far from the colonial capitals, far from tax collectors, far from creditors, far from the Anglican establishment, far from the social hierarchies of the east. For people who had been on the losing end of those hierarchies, distance was freedom.

Chain migration. This is the most important and least dramatic pull factor, and it deserves emphasis because it explains more about settlement patterns than any other single mechanism. Chain migration is the process by which early settlers in a new area send information back to their communities of origin, encouraging friends and family to follow them. The early Scotch-Irish settlers in the Shenandoah Valley wrote letters. They sent word through the networks of Presbyterian churches. They told people: the land is good, come. And people came — not as individuals making independent decisions, but as links in chains of information and kinship that stretched from the mountains back to Philadelphia, back to Ulster, back to the Palatinate.

Chain migration explains why settlement was clustered. It explains why certain hollows were overwhelmingly Scotch-Irish while adjacent valleys were overwhelmingly German. It explains why family names appear in clusters — the same surnames showing up in the same county for generations, because the original settlers had been followed by cousins, in-laws, former neighbors, and members of the same congregation. Chain migration created the kinship networks that would define Appalachian social structure for centuries.

Land Grants, Squatting, and the Making of Property

How did settlers acquire land in the mountains? The answer reveals a great deal about the origins of the property relationships — and the property conflicts — that would shape Appalachian history for the next three centuries.

The official mechanism was the land grant — a legal instrument by which the colonial government (and later the state government) transferred title to a specific tract of land to a specific individual. In Virginia, the dominant colonial power in much of Appalachia, land grants were administered through a system of warrants and patents. A settler would apply for a warrant, specifying the acreage desired. A surveyor would survey the tract. The settler would pay a fee — typically modest, but not trivial. And the colonial government would issue a patent, conferring legal title.

In practice, the system was far messier. Surveys were inaccurate. Boundaries were vague — defined by landmarks ("from the large oak by the creek to the ridge where the trail forks") that shifted, rotted, or were removed. Multiple grants overlapped. Speculators acquired enormous tracts and then sold them to settlers at markups, creating conflicts between the original grantee and the actual occupant that could take decades to resolve in court.

And many settlers did not bother with the official system at all. They squatted.

Squatting — occupying land without legal title — was one of the most common methods of land acquisition on the Appalachian frontier. Squatters developed their own informal property customs. A tomahawk claim was made by blazing a mark on a tree at the corner of a tract you intended to occupy — the blaze was your claim, recognized by other squatters if not by the colonial government. A corn right was established by clearing a small plot and planting a crop — the labor of cultivation was considered to create a moral, if not legal, claim to the land.

These informal customs reflected a frontier moral economy that was profoundly at odds with the legal property system of the colonial elite. Squatters believed that labor — the work of clearing, building, planting — created property rights. The colonial legal system held that property rights were created by official grants, and that the paper in a land office in Williamsburg trumped the axe marks on a tree in a hollow two hundred miles away. This conflict between labor-based and title-based property claims would echo through Appalachian history for centuries, surfacing again in the broad form deed disputes of the coal era (Chapter 15) and the mineral rights conflicts that continue to this day.

The other critical feature of the early land system was speculation. Wealthy men — many of them members of the Virginia and Carolina gentry who had never set foot in the mountains — acquired enormous land grants in the backcountry, often through political connections. George Washington held extensive western lands. The Loyal Land Company and the Ohio Company controlled hundreds of thousands of acres. Judge Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company, which employed Daniel Boone, attempted to purchase twenty million acres from the Cherokee at Sycamore Shoals.

This pattern — absentee ownership of Appalachian land by outside interests — begins here, in the colonial period, and it never stops. The land speculators of the 1760s and 1770s were the direct predecessors of the timber agents and coal companies of the 1880s and 1890s, who were the predecessors of the energy companies and real estate developers of today. The people who lived on the land and worked the land were often not the people who owned the land. This disconnect between residence and ownership, between labor and title, between the people in the hollow and the people in the land office, is one of the defining structural features of Appalachian history. It begins in this chapter, and it does not end.

Primary Source Excerpt — William Byrd II, History of the Dividing Line (1728)

"Most of the Rum they get in these Parts comes from New England, and is so bad and unwholesome, that it is not improperly call'd 'Kill-Devil.' ...The Men, for their Parts, just like the Indians, impose all the Work upon the poor Women. They make their Wives rise out of their Beds early in the Morning, at the same time that they lye and Snore."

Byrd, a Virginia Tidewater aristocrat, wrote about backcountry settlers with the contempt of a man who considered them his social inferiors. His account is an early example of the outsider gaze that would characterize writing about Appalachia for centuries (see Chapter 14). But even through Byrd's snobbery, the outlines of backcountry life — its informality, its subsistence economy, its distance from Tidewater norms — are visible.

The New River Valley: A Case Study in Multiethnic Settlement

The New River Valley of southwestern Virginia — one of this book's four anchor examples — illustrates how the different streams of migration converged to create a frontier community that was, from the beginning, more diverse than the Scotch-Irish monoculture myth allows.

The New River is one of the oldest rivers in the world — older, by some geological estimates, than the mountains through which it flows, having maintained its course as the Appalachians rose around it over hundreds of millions of years (see Chapter 1). Its valley, a broad fertile lowland surrounded by mountain ridges, was prime agricultural land, and it was contested.

The first European settlement in the New River Valley was Draper's Meadows, established around 1748 near present-day Blacksburg, Virginia. The settlement was named for the Draper family — English settlers who had moved westward from the Piedmont. The community also included the Ingles family, the Harman family, and others of mixed English and Scotch-Irish origin. Mary Draper Ingles, who would become one of the most famous figures in Appalachian frontier history after her capture by Shawnee warriors in 1755 and her extraordinary escape and 600-mile journey home, was an Englishwoman, not Scotch-Irish — a detail that complicates the dominant narrative.

The Shenandoah Valley communities to the north and east of the New River included substantial German populations. German families from the valley extended their settlement southwestward along the Great Wagon Road, and by the late eighteenth century, German surnames appeared in the records of Montgomery, Pulaski, and Wythe counties alongside Scotch-Irish and English names. The German community in the town of Wytheville, for instance, left its mark in church records, architecture, and the craft traditions that persisted into the nineteenth century.

And enslaved African Americans were present from the earliest days. The 1782 Virginia census for Montgomery County — which then encompassed much of the New River Valley — recorded over 500 enslaved people in a total population of roughly 5,000. By 1790, the proportion was similar: enslaved people constituted approximately 10 percent of the New River Valley's population. They worked on farms, in homes, and in the nascent iron industry that would grow along the rivers of southwestern Virginia.

The New River Valley, then, was not a Scotch-Irish settlement. It was a settlement — multiethnic, multilingual, including both free and enslaved people — that was shaped by the convergence of multiple migration streams, multiple cultural traditions, and the specific demands of the mountain landscape. This is the reality of Appalachian settlement, and it is far more interesting than the myth.

The Texture of Migration: What It Actually Looked Like

We have talked about push and pull factors, about ethnic groups and land systems. But what did migration actually look like? What was the physical experience of moving to the mountains?

A typical migrating family in the 1760s or 1770s traveled with a wagon — if they could afford one — pulled by horses or oxen, loaded with tools, seed, cooking equipment, bedding, and whatever personal possessions could be carried. Families that could not afford a wagon walked, carrying what they could on their backs or on pack horses. The journey from Philadelphia to the Virginia backcountry might take four to six weeks, depending on the weather, the condition of the road, and how many rivers were in flood.

The Great Wagon Road was crowded. Travelers reported passing hundreds of families on the move, all heading the same direction — southwest, into the valley, toward the mountains. They traveled in loose groups for safety, camping at established stopping points where earlier travelers had cleared space and where water was available. They stopped at ordinaries — frontier taverns that provided food, drink, and a place to sleep, usually on the floor of a common room alongside every other traveler who had stopped that night.

The experience of arrival was as significant as the journey. A family arriving in a hollow in the Appalachian backcountry faced immediate, pressing work: clearing land (burning timber, pulling stumps), building a shelter (initially a lean-to or rough cabin), planting a crop (corn, the universal frontier staple), and establishing relationships with neighbors who might be miles away. The first year was the most dangerous. Families that arrived too late to plant a crop faced winter with no stored food. Families that arrived without adequate tools faced the mountain environment with inadequate means. Some turned back. Some died. Most survived, because the people who came to the mountains were not romantic wanderers — they were practical people making calculated decisions about where they could build a life, and they came prepared for hard work.

Women's labor was essential to survival, and it began the moment of arrival. While the popular mythology of frontier settlement focuses on men with axes and rifles, the work of establishing a household — cooking over open fires, preserving food, spinning thread, making cloth, tending gardens, raising children, nursing the sick — fell overwhelmingly on women. We will explore this in detail in Chapter 9. Here, it is enough to note that every family that migrated to the mountains was a partnership, and that the partner whose work was most essential to the family's survival in the first critical years was usually the woman.

The Pace and Pattern of Settlement

Settlement of the Appalachian backcountry was not a gradual, even process. It came in waves, shaped by political events, economic conditions, and the availability of land.

The 1730s–1750s saw the first substantial wave of settlement in the Shenandoah Valley and the upper valleys of Virginia, driven by the large-scale arrival of Scotch-Irish and German immigrants via the Great Wagon Road. This wave was concentrated in the Great Valley system — the broad, fertile valleys between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Front. Settlement beyond the valley system — into the rougher terrain of the mountains proper — was limited during this period, both because the valley land was still available and because the terrain beyond the valley was more difficult and more contested with Indigenous nations.

The end of the French and Indian War (1763) and the collapse of the Proclamation Line (discussed in Chapter 4) opened a new phase. Settlers pushed beyond the Great Valley into the New River Valley, the Greenbrier Valley, the Holston River settlements, and the Watauga settlements of northeastern Tennessee. This expansion accelerated rapidly, driven by the availability of land, the weakening of Cherokee and Shawnee military power, and the entrepreneurial activities of land speculators and long hunters who had scouted the territory.

The American Revolution (1775–1783) temporarily disrupted but did not halt westward expansion. Frontier settlements were vulnerable to attack by Indigenous nations allied with the British, and some families retreated eastward during the war years. But the Revolution also broke the last legal constraints on expansion — the Proclamation Line was irrelevant once the colonies were independent — and the postwar period saw a massive surge of settlement. Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road, cut in 1775, became a flood channel for settlement into Kentucky and Tennessee.

The 1790s through the 1810s saw the filling in of the mountain interior. Settlers moved up every river valley, into every hollow that could support a farm, and across the ridges into the most remote areas of what are now West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and western North Carolina. By 1820, the Appalachian frontier, in the traditional sense of a moving boundary between settlement and "wilderness," had effectively closed — not because the mountains were full, but because settlers had reached the western edge of the mountain system and were continuing into the flatlands of the interior.

The population numbers tell the story. Virginia's trans-Allegheny population grew from a few hundred in 1750 to over 55,000 by 1790. Kentucky's population exploded from essentially zero European settlers in 1775 to over 73,000 in 1790 and over 220,000 in 1800. Western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee saw similar growth. In a single human lifetime — roughly 1750 to 1820 — the Appalachian backcountry went from the contested edge of European settlement to a settled, organized, politically integrated part of the United States.

This speed of settlement had consequences that will reverberate through every subsequent chapter of this book. It meant that Cherokee and Shawnee resistance was overwhelmed by sheer numbers. It meant that land was claimed faster than legal systems could process the claims, creating property conflicts that lasted for decades. It meant that communities developed in isolation from one another, fostering the localism and self-reliance that outsiders would later mythologize. And it meant that the resource base of the mountains — the forests, the game, the soil — was exploited at a rate that the land could not sustain, beginning an ecological transformation that would accelerate dramatically when industrial extraction arrived in the nineteenth century.

What the Settlers Found — and What They Destroyed

The settlers who arrived in the Appalachian backcountry found a landscape that was, by any measure, extraordinary. The forests were immense — towering stands of chestnut, oak, hickory, poplar, walnut, and pine that had grown for centuries. The rivers ran clear. Game was abundant — deer, bear, elk, bison (yes, bison — the great eastern herds had once ranged throughout the Appalachian valleys, and remnant herds survived into the late eighteenth century). The soil in the valley bottoms was rich and deep, built up over millennia by the slow work of decomposing forest litter.

This landscape was not "wilderness" in the sense the settlers understood the word. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, it was a landscape that had been managed by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years — managed through fire, through selective clearing, through agricultural practices that maintained the health of the forest while creating the open meadows and fertile bottomlands that the settlers found so appealing. The settlers did not find empty wilderness. They found the product of ten thousand years of Indigenous land management, and they mistook it for nature.

And they transformed it. Within a generation, the forests around a new settlement were dramatically thinned. Trees were felled for cabins, for fencing (the worm fence or split-rail fence, built without nails from split logs, consumed enormous quantities of timber), for firewood, and simply to clear land for planting. The large game was hunted out quickly — elk and bison were gone from most of Appalachia by the early nineteenth century, and deer populations were severely depleted. The clear-running rivers began to silt as exposed soil washed downhill from cleared fields.

This ecological transformation was not unique to Appalachia — it happened everywhere Europeans settled in North America. But in Appalachia, the transformation had specific consequences. The steep slopes and thin soils of the mountains were more vulnerable to erosion than the flat farmland of the Piedmont or the Midwest. Once the forest cover was removed, the soil washed away faster and could not be replaced. Fields that produced good crops for a generation became exhausted, driving settlers further up the hollows or deeper into the mountains in search of fresh land. The ecological unsustainability of frontier farming was one of the forces that kept the migration moving — not just a search for new land, but a flight from worn-out land.

The Myth of Isolation

One more myth needs to be addressed before we close this chapter: the myth that the early Appalachian settlers were isolated, self-sufficient mountain hermits, cut off from the world and content to be so.

They were not.

Even the most remote frontier communities were connected to broader economic networks. Ginseng dug in the hollows of southwestern Virginia was sold in Philadelphia and shipped to China, where it was prized as a medicine (Chapter 7). Cattle and hogs raised on Appalachian farms were driven on foot along mountain roads to markets in the Piedmont and the coast — livestock droving was one of the first commercial activities in the backcountry. Salt, produced from brine springs in the Kanawha Valley and elsewhere, was traded across the region. Whiskey, distilled from corn, functioned as both a commodity and a currency, and it connected mountain farmers to the same market system that connected the Tidewater to London.

The settlers wanted land, not isolation. They wanted distance from certain forms of authority — tax collectors, creditors, the Anglican establishment — but they did not want to be cut off from the world. They wanted to participate in the world on their own terms. The myth of the isolated mountaineer, like the myth of the homogeneous Scotch-Irish settlement, is a later construction, imposed on the mountains by outsiders who found it useful to imagine Appalachia as a place outside of time and history (see Chapter 14).

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

Chapter 5 Portfolio Task: Settlement History

Research when the first non-Indigenous settlers arrived in your selected county. Using county histories, genealogical records, and early census data (the 1790 and 1800 censuses are available online through the National Archives and Ancestry.com), answer the following questions:

1. When did the first European settlers arrive in your county? Where did they come from?
2. What ethnic groups were represented in the early population? (Check surnames, church records, and genealogical sources.)
3. Were enslaved people present in your county by the time of the first available census? How many? What proportion of the population?
4. How did settlers acquire land — through grants, purchase, or squatting?
5. What was the primary migration route into your county — the Great Wagon Road, the Wilderness Road, river valley routes from the east, or other paths?

Write 400–500 words connecting your findings to the themes of this chapter. Note any surprises — particularly any evidence that challenges the Scotch-Irish monoculture narrative.

Chapter Summary

The settlement of Appalachia was a more complex, more diverse, and more consequential process than the popular myth of Scotch-Irish mountain pioneers allows. The Great Wagon Road channeled a multiethnic stream of settlers — Scotch-Irish, German, English, and enslaved African Americans — from the mid-Atlantic colonies southwestward into the Great Valley and then into the mountains. Each group was pushed by specific forces (economic distress, religious persecution, land scarcity, enslavement) and pulled by the overwhelming availability of cheap land.

The Scotch-Irish were the largest single group and left the deepest cultural imprint, but the Celtic thesis — the argument that Appalachian culture is essentially transplanted British Borderers culture — overstates ethnic continuity, erases non-Scotch-Irish contributions, and deflects attention from the structural forces that actually shaped the region's history. German communities built the Shenandoah Valley into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the colonies. English settlers were present everywhere, unremarked because they were the colonial default. And African Americans, both enslaved and free, were part of Appalachian communities from the beginning — a fact whose systematic erasure is one of the great intellectual crimes in the historiography of the region.

The land system that distributed this territory combined official grants, rampant speculation, and widespread squatting, establishing a pattern of disconnected ownership — where the people who lived on the land were not the people who owned it — that would define Appalachian economic life for centuries. The long hunters, led by Daniel Boone, scouted the routes that settlers would follow, but they were agents of commercial enterprise, not solitary wilderness heroes. And the settlers who arrived found not empty wilderness but a landscape shaped by ten thousand years of Indigenous management — a landscape they began to transform, and in some cases to exhaust, within a generation.

The mountains were never homogeneous. They were never isolated. They were never outside of history. They were a multiethnic frontier from the first day, shaped by the same forces — land hunger, capital, labor, empire, race — that shaped every other part of the American experience. To understand Appalachia, you must understand this, because the diversity and complexity of the settlement period is the foundation on which everything else was built.

And the people who are missing from this story most completely — the enslaved African Americans whose labor helped build the mountain communities and whose presence has been systematically denied — are the subject of the next chapter.