From Tidewater to Blue Ridge : the expansion of population in eastern Virginia during the early eighteenth century

One hundred years after the founding of Jamestown, population in colonial Virginia had barely begun to expand beyond the Fall Line. By 1710 the situation began to change. Diffusion of settlement beyond the Fall Line increased rapidly, so that by the 1730's the best lands on the Piedmont and parts of the Shenandoah Valley were either owned or occupied by settlers from Tidewater. This thesis explains the century-long delay in settlement expansion before 1710 and analyzes the new elements that came into play after 1710 to account for the rapid diffusion of population, as well as the directions of population movement between 1711 and 1722 in eastern Virginia. The 1,528 Virginia land patents contained in patent books ten (1710-1719) and eleven (1719-1722) were analyzed to discern the directions of diffusion. From each grant information on the county location, the type of land granted, the amount of land, and the number of people imported and money paid was recorded and used to derive the total number and total acreages of land granted in Virginia.

The land grant records reveal two distinct phases of movement: the first a push by farmers and small planters into southern Virginia between 1711 and 1715 and the second a northwesterly movement of large planters and speculators between 1716 and 1722. It was concluded that the uneven movement of population resulted from pressures created by the cultivation of tobacco and the presence of frontier barriers, and that the Turnerian concepts of successive frontier groups, increasing degrees of commercialization, and long periods of isolation on the frontier do not apply to eastern Virginia during the early eighteenth century.