The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley Thomas Hallock The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley Warren R. Hofstra . The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 2004. 410 pp., maps, photographs. $49.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8018-7418-1). Meticulously researched, archivally rich yet woven to a larger economic and political history, The Planting of New Virginia chronicles the evolution of the "town and country" landscape of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Warren R. Hofstra documents the origins of what he calls a "landscape of competence" (p. 320)—from the arrival of white settlers in the 1730s, to subsistence farming then commercial agriculture, to the creation of village centers supported by a rural economy. The book begins with a qualified definition of central-place theory, or "how the marketing of goods and services produces certain spatial regularities in ordering central places across a landscape" (p. 13). From an historian's perspective, the focus on "ordering places" and "spatial regularities" echoes Frederick Jackson Turner, whose frontier hypothesis [End Page 155] has long been recognized as obscuring more than it explains. And the bounty of documentation sometimes clogs the narrative. However, Hofstra provides a model for setting local events within a larger history, and for demonstrating how history becomes readable in the land. The study begins with a well-known event, although one rarely treated with such subtlety and detail—a 1742 reconnaissance by a party of Onondagas and Oneidas, led by the warrior Jonnhaty. While passing through the Shenandoah Valley, in an ongoing war with the Catawbas, the party met a hostile band of Virginians; this episode, which had heavy diplomatic fallout, left a wide paper trail for the historian to follow. Hofstra seizes upon the material to introduce the backcountry through Jonnhaty's eyes, using the Iroquois perspective to envision early white settlements. Native-white relations never fall fully from view in the early chapters, as French encirclement during the Seven Years (or French-Indian) War led British officials to encourage emigration to Virginia. These imperial efforts left their mark as open farms that fell along the Blue Ridge, and that took advantage of water access and arable land. The settlement of the Shenandoah Valley reached a second stage with the establishment of boundaries. Geographers will take note of Hofstra's discussion of cadastres, surveys that provide artifacts of settler intentions, and he makes particularly imaginative use of trade ledgers, using book keeping records to map the imaginative and literal routes of a scattered community. His telling of imperial history through a local lens, moreover, shows how the face of a country changed in response to British tactical needs. The town of Winchester was founded in 1747, and from a fort there commanded by George Washington, England waged a battle for the trans-Appalachian West. The military presence affected the economy and therefore the land: with the influx of soldiers came a market for provisions, flour especially, and "money made the town grow" (p. 250). After the war, wheat tied the region to the larger colonial and trans-Atlantic world; the tactical place became a central place, giving the town and country landscape its shape. Hofstra moves seamlessly and in exhaustive detail from an imperial compass to local markets. Expanding plantations in the West Indies led to increased prices for flour; farmers in the Shenandoah Valley found an outlet for their crops in the booming ports of Philadelphia and Baltimore; during the American Revolution, a demand for cordage created a market for hemp; the influx of capital continued after the war, and the desire for consumer goods diversified the economy. Documenting an increasingly rich material culture, Hofstra shows how shoppers at John Conrad's Winchester store could purchase "bolts of brown and white Irish linens, osnaburgs [sack cloth], bagging, and fine broadcloths, as well as ink powder, rifle locks, snuff boxes, looking glasses, screws, spectacles, hinges, corkscrews, tableware, sets of china, coffeepots, decanters, goblets, salad dishes, pudding dishes, butter boats, and many more dry-good or hardware items" (p. 302). (Similar lists run through the second part of the book.) By the 1790s, Winchester could support thirty stores, various...