Virginia had "established" the Anglican church as an official part of the government. Mandatory church levies i. Tidewater was dominated by the Church of England, the region but was not exclusively Anglican. International shipping ports like Norfolk had numerous non-Anglican sailors adding diversity to the Virginia culture, and the colony was relatively tolerant of Protestant dissenters.
Prior to the French and Indian War, Scottish merchants "factors" purchasing tobacco in Fall Line cities from small planters provided a Presbyterian business class. In addition, in the Piedmont a substantial number of indentured servants and poor farmers were stimulated by the "Great Awakening" and itinerant dissident preachers, especially the Baptists.
Patrick Henry's mother was a Presbyterian convert, perhaps one reason he was such a rabble-rouser Historians still debate how the threat to the hegemony domination of the gentry class affected the political thinking prior to the American Revolution.
Immigrants coming south through Pennsylvania were predominantly Protestant - but not Anglican - refugees, people who fled the many conflicts among political states that have now been assembled into modern-day Germany.
They discovered the price of land was lower as they moved west, and substantially less as they crossed the Potomac River into the "empty" Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. The valley was empty in part because it was a border territory raided by Iroquois from the north, Cherokee from the south, and Shawnee from the west. In addition, diseases brought from Europe by Spanish explorers in the 's and permanent colonists in the 's may have dramatically reduced the population of the indigenous Native Americans.
In the days when transportation was by one-horsepower wagon, the Blue Ridge was a significant physical barrier that divided the colony. Those planters rolled hogsheads of tobacco eastward, downhill to the cities like Fredericksburg developing along the Fall Line, in order to ship their crop to Europe. Wagons that carried crops eastward to market returned home with nails, cloth, and other manufactured products. The mercantile system ensured that industries in England would have a market in the colonies, and the Fall Line cities became the "hinge" between the Piedmont and England.
But those cities were irrelevant to the immigrants west of the Blue Ridge, so long as roads through the mountain gaps were too poor for farm wagons. The immigrants who had come south from Philadelphia, migrating west to Lancaster and then following the limestone valleys south into Virginia, sent their farm products back north as well. Since the roads were poor OK, really really poor , hauling tobacco to Philadelphia was a poor OK, really really poor So the immigrants in the valley raised livestock, walking their herds to market in Baltimore and Philadelphia long before cattle drives of Texas longhorns captured Hollywood's imagination.
If the movie moguls ever film a Virginia cattle drive, look for the herds of cattle from the South Branch of the Potomac River walking north, down the Shenandoah Valley. After numerous pauses for grazing on grasslands in the valley, the herds should cross the Potomac River and then veer eastward to the market cities of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Expect the herd of cattle to be followed by droves of pigs, feeding on the manure left behind on the trail by the cattle - with a flock of turkeys or chickens behind the pigs, fully utilizing all the food resources on the way to market.
Prior to the French and Indian War, the economic ties, religious sympathies, and family loyalties of the Shenandoah settlers were to the north, not towards Tidewater Virginia. However, after the Piedmont filled with settlers oriented to the Tidewater, a substantial number of "English" immigrants came into the valley across the Blue Ridge. The French and Indian War triggered a decade of Tidewater commitment to the valley, from George Washington lived in Winchester for several years as the commander of the Virginia forces, and the legislature and the governor committed substantial resources though still far-from-enough to fund forts and militia on the frontier from the Potomac to the New River.
He was sensitized to the western attitudes and sought throughout his political career to use transportation improvements to link western loyalties to the primary American cities on the East Coast. By the 's, roads crossed from Tidewater through the "wind gaps" in the Blue Ridge to the Valley. In the 's, railroads such as the Manassas Gap Railroad cemented the economic ties between the valley and the Fall Line cities. But transportation improvements were never fairly allocated to the western counties of Virginia.
The legislature approved few projects west of the Allegheny Front, where the waters drained into the Ohio River. Instead, the Tidewater-dominated General Assembly supported projects to enhance farm-to-market transportation leading to Petersburg, Richmond, and Fredericksburg. Alexandria was part of the District of Columbia from , and the State of Virginia was reluctant to finance improvements to a non-Virginia city during those years.
For some counties, for statistical purposes, the Bureau of Economic Analysis combines any independent cities with the county that it was once part of before the legislation creating independent cities took place in Many county seats are politically not a part of the counties they serve; under Virginia law, all municipalities incorporated as cities are independent cities and are not part of any county.
These cities are no longer county seats, since the counties ceased to exist once the cities were completely formed, but are functionally equivalent to counties. It is also worthy of note that there are several counties and cities which have the same name, but are separate politically. Many of the buildings here are the originals from the s. All rights reserved. Personality Quizzes. Funny Fill-In. Amazing Animals. Weird But True! Party Animals.
Try This! The colonial claims to the Forks of the Ohio Pittsburgh area were dropped in the 's. Kentucky became a separate state in the 's, and in the the western 33 counties of Virginia split off to become West Virginia.
George Washington considered the possibility that the United States would collapse, and split between the northern and southern states. If that had occurred, Washington planned to join the northern region. Proposals for creating a separate State of Northern Virginia are not taken seriously today Boundaries of the southeastern region, known as Hampton Roads or more recently as Coastal Virginia, are vague.
Some people include Williamsburg and Gloucester, while others omit them. Efforts to define other regions also involve changing boundaries. Bedford County was placed in the Central Region, centered on Richmond. An official with the primary economic development group in Roanoke noted that economic links to the New River Valley and Bedford had been obscured by that classification system, saying: 6.
The data just isn't meaningful from a Roanoke perspective It is really only useful as a contrast between NoVa, Hampton Roads and the balance of the state. There is wide variation within these regions, which aren't really descriptive of anything. It estimates the hourly earnings required to pay for basic expenses, in different locations with different costs of living. Definition of "region" is also a key part of marketing used by tourism officials. The counties of Highland, Bath, and Alleghany once advertised themselves as "The Alleghany Highlands," but tourists might end up looking at visiting the Alleghany region of Pennsylvania, Maryland, or West Virginia.
As described in Highroad Guide to the Virginia Mountains : 8. Did the term "Alleghany Highlands" refer to the entire Allegheny Mountain range though the spellings were different?
Did it mean just Alleghany County, which has the same spelling of "Alleghany"? Or did Alleghany Highlands mean the three western counties of Bath, Highland, and Alleghany most closely associated with the Allegheny Mountains?
The counties have now allied with Craig County, and they market themselves as "Virginia's Western Highlands.
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