The first Lutheran worship was established by Rev. As a result, the Winchester area became home to some of the oldest Presbyterian, Quaker, Lutheran and Anglican churches in the valley. The availability of land grants brought in many religious families, who were often given 50-acre (200,000 m 2) plots through the sponsorship of fellow-religious grant purchasers and speculators. Though Virginia was an Anglican colony, Governor William Gooch had a tolerant policy on religion. The first German settler appears to have been Jost Hite in 1732, who brought ten other families, including some Scots-Irish. Tradition holds that the Quakers purchased several tracts on Apple-pie Ridge from the natives, who did not disturb those settlements. He and others began to homestead on old Shawnee campgrounds. The settlement of Winchester began as early as 1729, when Quakers such as Abraham Hollingsworth migrated up (south) the Great Valley along the long-traveled Indian Path (later called the Great Wagon Road by the colonists) from Pennsylvania. The Scots-Irish comprised the most numerous group of immigrants from the British Isles before the American Revolutionary War. This combination of events directly precipitated an inrush of settlers from Pennsylvania and New York, made up of a blend of Quakers and German and Scots-Irish homesteaders, many of them new immigrants. Robert "King" Carter, manager of the Lord Fairfax proprietorship, acquired 200,000 acres (810 km 2). In the late 1720s, Governor William Gooch promoted settlement by issuing large land grants. In 1705 the Swiss explorer Louise Michel and in 1716 Governor Alexander Spotswood did more extensive mapping and surveying. The first confirmed exploration of the northern valley was by the explorer John Lederer, who viewed the region from the current Fauquier and Warren County line on August 26, 1670. The Shawnee settled for some years in the Ohio Country before being forced by the US government under Indian Removal in the 1830s to remove to Indian Territory.Įuropean exploration and settlement įrench Jesuit expeditions may have first entered the valley as early as 1606, as the explorer Samuel de Champlain made a crude map of the area in 1632. In 1753, on the eve of the French and Indian War ( Seven Years' War), messengers came to the Shawnee from tribes further west, inviting them to leave the Valley and cross the Alleghenies, which they did the following year. The father of the historical Shawnee chief Cornstalk had his court at Shawnee Springs, near today's Cross Junction, Virginia, until 1754. The treaty also established the right of colonists to use the Indian Road, later known as the Great Wagon Road. The Iroquois Six Nations finally ceded their nominal claim to the Shenandoah Valley at the Treaty of Lancaster (1744). During the first decade of white settlement, the valley was also a conduit and battleground in a bloody intertribal war between the Seneca and allied Algonquian Lenape from the north, and their distant traditional enemies, the Siouan Catawba in the Carolinas. During the later Beaver Wars, the powerful Iroquois Confederacy from New York (particularly Seneca from the western part of the territory) subjugated all tribes in the frontier region west of the Fall Line.īy the time European settlers arrived in the Shenandoah Valley around 1729, the Shawnee were the principal occupants in the area around Winchester. The explorers Batts and Fallam in 1671 reported the Shawnee were contesting with the Iroquoians for control of the valley and were losing. The Algonquian-speaking Shawnee began to challenge the Iroquoians for the hunting grounds later in that century. Though little is known of specific tribal movements before European contact, the Shenandoah Valley area, considered a sacred common hunting ground, appears by the 17th century to have been controlled mostly by the local Iroquoian-speaking groups, including the Senedo and Sherando. Archeological, linguistic and anthropological studies have provided insights into their cultures. Indigenous peoples lived along the waterways of present-day Virginia for thousands of years before European contact. Winchester is home to Shenandoah University and the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. It is the principal city of the Winchester metropolitan area extending into West Virginia, which is a part of the Washington–Baltimore combined statistical area. As of the 2020 census, the city's population was 28,120. It is the county seat of Frederick County, although the two are separate jurisdictions. Winchester is the northwesternmost independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States.
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