"The Frontier"
The Algonquin, Sioux, and Iroquois Indian tribes had some claim on the land at various times. A few Mingo, Tuscarora, Shawnee and Delaware lived on the fringes as an invasion of white men gathered at the close of the 1600's to push westward. As early as 1671 an expedition to the New River by Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam reached close to the present Virginia-West Virginia border and found signs that other white men had preceded them. Originally believed close to the "Western Ocean" or "East India Sea", it was now known that the lands westward of the Virginia colony were vast, though imaginations then could hardly conceive of the actual extent. In a single century, the West Virginia region was by turns a wilderness mystery, fur trading realm, colonial settlement prize, battleground, and, finally, part of a frontier of a new nation moving west in seven-league strides to the very real, but very far away, ocean in the west. In the first two decades after 1700, there were several enthusiastic attempts to penetrate the mysteries of the lands beyond the mountains and to encourage their settlement. It was traders, however, who established effective bonds with the roaming Indian bands to make possible gradual settlement.
Credit is usually given to Morgan Morgan as the first permanent white settler within what is now West Virginia. A monument on Mill Creek near Bunker Hill [Berkeley County] records the date as 1726, but historians now believe it was closer to 1731. At about the same time [perhaps even somewhat before] some settlement began at Mecklenburg [now Shepherdstown] by German immigrants. Dutch, Irish, Scotch and English settlers followed, but it was not until 1754 that the population justified formation of a new county, Hampshire, valid claimant now to the title of the state's eldest. A factor in early settlement efforts were crown grants such as the Fairfax estate, a huge, ill-defined tract with only vaguely known boundaries. A surveying party was sent by Lord Fairfax along the north branch of the Potomac in 1736, the earliest known tracing of the eastern panhandle northern boundary.
"The Blue and Gray"
Events in West Virginia played an important part in the preservation of the Union, but there was little drama on the scale which characterized better known campaigns. The State's contribution to the war effort , and to its outcome, have usually been underestimated, however. Much of the fighting in the State was of a brutal guerilla type (bushwhacking under the guise of squirrel hunting was popular) and some of the more important engagements were miniature by comparison with other campaigns. About 35,000 West Virginians marched in the Union cause and about 12,000 for the Confederates.West Virginia gave to the Confederacy one of its most brillant leaders, Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, born at Clarksburg and killed by shots from his own pickets at Chancellorville. To the Union's highest ranks went Jesse Lee Reno of Wheeling, a major general when killed at South Mountain , Maryland. The divisive impact of the struggle is no better illustrated than by Laura Jackson Arnold, sister of Stonewall Jackson. The wife of an ardent Southerner and secessionist and a resident during the war in Randolph County, she remained steadfast to the Union. Her loyalty under the greatest of stresses is honored to this day by Blue and Gray partisans alike. Jackson himself is today the State's hero "in memoriam" despite history and traditions which would seem to bind West Virginian firmly to the Union. The abundance of Jackson and Confederate memorials to the "War Between The States" might seem to be misleading to tourists about what actually happened here.
Separtist agitation in western Virginia may have been similarly misleading to John Brown in 1859. Seeking a "gateway to freedom" for slaves and believing he had found ripe ground for the start of an uprising, he and a small band of followers seized the Harpers Ferry arsenal on October 16. Both the Federal and Virginia goverments moved against him. It is one of history's ironies that a detachment of marines led by Lt.Col. Robert E. Lee crushed the "revolt." Failed by the slaves he did not understand and condemned even by sympathizers who could not condone his violence, Brown was tried at Charles Town and hanged on December 2, 1859.Tradition has it that a body of soldiers slept on the eve of his hanging in the courtroom where Brown was tried. One of the troopers was John Wilkes Booth.
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