Patrick County (1791) the last of the group like Henry was named in honor of Patrick Henry. After the formation of Henry County, Patrick Henry made large purchases of land in the county, and subsequently Henry County was divided and the new county was named Patrick.1

1 Brock, Id. p. 72; Long, 141; Bulletin, Va. St. Lib., Vol. 9, p. 182.

CHAPTER V

The French and Indian Wars

ROM about the year 1690 the English Colonies in America from New Hampshire to Georgia were almost constantly in conflict and hostilities with the Indians on their western borders, who were instigated by the French and the Spaniards; the Spaniards in Florida and New Spain; and the French, first, in the north, and later, both in the north and on the waters of the Mississippi.

These conflicts between the French and the English were, it seems, the inevitable result of the "fatal treaty between Charles I and Louis XIII, by which 'was restored to France, absolutely and without demarcation of limits, all the places possessed by the English, in New France, Lacadie and Canada, particularly Port Royal, Quebec and Cape Breton.' "1 As matters stood about 1700 the actual jurisdiction of the British Colonies extended westward from the Atlantic Coast to about the line separating the area drained by the rivers emptying into the Atlantic from the area drained by the Mississippi. The actual jurisdiction of the French embraced the area including the Great Lakes and a strip of land southward of Lake Erie. It included the Maumee River and the area now embraced in Michigan.

The great territory drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries was claimed by both the French and the English; the French basing their claim on their occupancy of the Mississippi; while the English based their claim upon their occupancy of the Atlantic Coast.2

Localizing this situation for a history of Lunenburg, it may be

1Dinwiddie Papers, Introduction by R. A. Brock, V, citing Chalmers, II, p. 372.

2Thwaite, see map No. 3, The Colonies, 1492-1750.

said that the French claims extended from the western boundary of Lunenburg County westward to the Rocky Mountains.1

John Lederer, exploring for Governor Berkeley, reached the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1669, but did not descend the western slope. Abraham Wood, who lived near where Petersburg now stands, in 1671 crossed the mountains and discovered the Great Kanawha; about 1700 a few adventurous traders, both English and French, were on the waters of the Ohio.

It was not, however, until Governor Spotswood's exploit that the public attention was fixed upon the transmontane country as a theatre for extensive settlement.

In August, 1716,2 soon after his trip to Christanna, with John Fontaine, Governor Spotswood made his famous expedition which has become known to history as that of the Knights of the Golden Horse Shoe, across the Appalachian Mountains. This was an event of the greatest importance as it demonstrated the possibility of crossing the mountains, something which had theretofore been deemed impossible. John Fontaine was again with the Governor and has left an entertaining account of the trip.3 Thereafter, under the encouragement of Spotswood and his successors, settlements were gradually made to the westward. Two years after Lunenburg County was created, The Ohio Company was formed in 1748 by Thomas Lee, and twelve others, including Lawrence and Augustine Washington, brothers of George Washington in Virginia, and John Hanberry, a Quaker merchant of London. The company had a grant of 500,000 acres of land on the Ohio, between the Monongahela and Kanawha Rivers. Two hundred thousand acres of the land were to be immediately settled, and on condition that the company would settle one hundred families on the land within seven years, at its

1Thwaite: The Colonies, 1492-1750, and see also Peter Fontaine, Jr.'s Map, Memoirs of a Huguenot Family, 356.

2There is considerable confusion as to the date of Governor Spotswood's Expedition, some placing it in 1714, some in 1716. The correct date is 1716, as is shown not only by John Fontaine's journal of the trip which he kept, but by Governor Spotswood's letters as well. Even so critical a scholar as Reuben G. Thwaites has not observed the correct date. See note 1, page 64, Withers' Chronicles of Border Warfare. 3Memoirs of a Huguenot Family, 281-292.

expense, and build a fort and maintain a garrison sufficient to protect the settlement, the lands were to be free from quit-rents and taxes to the King. Governor Dinwiddie and George Mason, father of the author of the Bill of Rights, became owners of shares in the company.

Peter Fontaine, Jun., in a letter to his uncle, John Fontaine (who in 1716 made the trip to Christanna, with Governor Spotswood), dated "Lunenburg, Virginia, 7th June, 1754," wrote:

"I cannot help adding a piece of domestic news, which is, that the French on the back of us are disputing our title to the Mississippi lands, have built a fort to annoy our settlements, and have drove off about seventy families of my countrymen. The Assembly has enacted the levying of £10,000 currency to enable them to oppose the enemy. We expect every day to hear that about fifteen hundred men, levied in these colonies, have either settled on Mississippi and built a fort to countermine that of the French, or that they have, if opposed, engaged them."1

The writer of this letter was the first surveyor of the southern district of Lunenburg, and was the first surveyor of Halifax County. Peter Fontaine, Minister of Westover Parish, father of Peter Fontaine, Jun., the Surveyor of Lunenburg and of Halifax, in a letter to his brothers, John and Moses, dated "Virginia, 15th April, 1754," in giving news of various relatives, says: "As far as I can learn, James has got a parish amongst the mountains, and is concerned in the Ohio Company, who have an entry on Halifax, beginning on the other side, or properly, west side of the great mountains, upon the line between North Carolina and Virginia, of eight hundred thousand acres of land. His wife's uncle, Colonel Walker, is the chief person in this scheme. They have it quit free for some years, and sell it to settlers at £3 the hundred acres. They have about thirty settlements upon it, if the French and their Indians have not routed them lately."

This interest of the Fontaine family in the Ohio Company enterprise was the occasion for the reference by Peter Fontaine, Jr., to the matter of the dispute respecting these lands as "a piece of domestic news."

1Memoirs of a Huguenot Family, 365. 2Memoirs of a Huguenot Family, 342.

The year following the creation of the Ohio Company, and three years after Lunenburg became a county, the Governor of Canada, Galissoniere, sent a French expedition, in 1749, under Celeron de Bienville, into the Ohio Valley with "a suitable escort of whites and savages to take formal possession of the valley in the name of the King of France, to propitiate the Indians, and in all ways short of actual warfare, to thwart the English plans."1

The report of the expedition was not favorable to the Frenchit was to the effect that there were vast numbers of English in the valley who had secured the Indians as allies.

At this juncture the Marquis Duquesne succeeded Galissoniere as Governor of Canada, and took immediate steps to offset the trend of events favorable to the English. In the early part of 1753, he sent a force by Lake Ontario and Niagara to seize the northeastern branches of the Ohio River. These forces "passing over the portage between Presque Isle and French Creek, it constructed Forts Le Boeuf and Venango,"2 and in pursuance of the “aggrandizing policy in North America," which had been adopted by the French, proceeded in the purpose to link their possessions on the lower Mississippi with those on the St. Lawrence, by a chain of forts on the Ohio.

Robert Dinwiddie had become Governor of Virginia on November 20, 1751. He was a man of great energy, vigilance and zeal, and very soon learning of the acts of the French, he dispatched late in October, 1753, Major George Washington, then only twenty-one years of age, to M. Le Gardeur de St. Pierre, the commandant of the fort which the French had constructed, "to demand by whose authority an armed force had crossed the lakes, and to urge a speedy and peaceable departure."

Major Washington arrived on December 11, 1753, while Fort Le Boeuf was being constructed, but M. de St. Pierre declined to discuss the matter, claiming that the protest should have been made to the Marquis Du Quesne, Governor of Canada.

1 Boogher, Gleanings of Virginia History, 10. 2Boogher, Gleanings of Virginia History, 11. 3Dinwiddie Papers, Introduction, XI.

4 Boogher, Gleanings of Virginia History, 11; George Washington Diaries, Vol. I, 58.

5Dinwiddie Papers, Vol. I, 49, note 40.