Antiques

The interior parts of America afford the fairest prospect of advantage
to settlers.... These parts of Virginia and the Carolinas are the
paradise of America.
Richard Champion, Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine, October 1787

At the dawn of the eighteenth century the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia was just beginning to be encountered by Europeans. According to Francis (or Franz) Louis Michel, a young Swiss merchant on a scouting trip for a colony of his countrymen, a "considerable tract of wild and uncultivated deserts" lay along the lower stretches of the Shenandoah River. "There is good land," he observed, "where are great forest trees of oak, and where much game abounds." Beginning in the 1730s the valley formed part of the burgeoning frontier, with migrant streams drawn by offers made by colonial and imperial officials eager to position a defensive buffer of yeoman farm settlements between the Tidewater plantation regions of Virginia and the threats posed by French expansion and Indian warfare to the west. Scots-Irish and German settlers from Pennsylvania were joined by smaller numbers of men and women with English backgrounds, who pushed across the Blue Ridge Mountains from lower Virginia.

The mountains to either side, which hem in and give shape to the broad expanse of lowland, provided a natural corridor for the movement of people. Spilling down the Great Wagon Road that traversed the Valley of Virginia, the enormous flood of new settlers reached the Yadkin River valley of North Carolina before the end of the 1740s. As he watched the wagons roll through Wachovia in North Carolina, the Moravian leader Frederick William Marshall remarked: "The migrations of men are like the movements of a flock of sheep, where one goes the flock follows, without knowing why." Eventually measuring 735 miles long, the Great Wagon Road was "the most heavily traveled road in all America" during "the first great internal folk movement in American history," wrote Carl Bridenbaugh.

By 1800 the entire Valley of Virginia had become private property--divided and subdivided by surveys endorsed by the government and secured by deeds in local courthouses. Thriving market towns such as New Market, where the decorated boxes discussed in this issue were made, grew up in a region of livestock, wheat, and lumber production. Many travelers made a point of visiting the Shenandoah Valley because they had heard about its beauty, its fertile land, and the industriousness of its inhabitants. These were certainly the sentiments of the Englishman Richard Champion. "The climate in is temperate and serene," he wrote, continuing, "The soil fertile, full of rich and pleasant vallies, finely wooded, and watered by continual springs. The meadows produce grass for the maintenance of cattle during the winter, and the lands even bring forth, without culture, several species of grain and fruit. The different kinds of game and poultry are abundant. Wine, oil, and fruits ... may be cultivated with equal facility in these happy regions.... They afford the equal comforts of raiment, by possessing materials from which garments of silk, cotton, and linen may, in time, as the country settles, with ease be procured."

Isaac Weld, a Dubliner who visited the United States between 1795 and 1797, connected the land and the social structure to republican society. Journeying from Richmond across the Blue Ridge Mountains and into the Shenandoah Valley, he observed that in the latter, "every one appears to be in a happy state of mediocrity," describing a middling class of propertied farm families with a republican social order, in which modest, broadly distributed wealth produced substantial comfort but few distinctions of class or status.

Beyond what they noted was a conviction among travelers that in the Shenandoah Valley they were looking into the future of the United States, a future that lay in the industry of the people, in the prosperity and independence they could derive from private property, and in the landscape they created in the pursuit of competence and improvement. From this "paradise of America," Champion saw arising a population of successful and happy folk who would overflow into the surrounding country and make vast wildernesses productive. It was upon such convictions that the future of the new Republic rested.

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