THE VALLEY ULSTERMAN:
A CHAPTER OF VIRGINIA HISTORY...continued
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The Scotch Irishmen, however, were not the first who looked upon the promise of the fertile and well watered Valley. An expedition, starting from this city under the command of Gov. Spottswood, made the first entrance of white men into that section. But that this expedition was not of Ulstermen must be plainly evident to the most casual observer of the habits of that people, who reads what has been written by Mr. John Fontaine, record-keeper of the Horse shoe Knights: for says he. "we drank the King's health in champagne, and fired a volley; the princess' health in Burgundy, and fired a volley, and all the rest of the family in claret and a volley. We drank the Governor's health and fired another volley. We had several sorts of liquor, viz: Virginia red wine, Irish usquebaugh, brandy shrub, two sorts of rum, champagne , canary, cherry punch, cider, &c."
Yet Spottswood's party made no effort to settle the great Valley, whose broad acres were reserved for another people. The first settler and owner upon the lower Shenandoah was a Pennsylvania Dutchman named Joist Hite; but because of some defect in the title to the lands which he acquired, he could not dispose of his property; and the imigrants whom he had brought with him became discouraged, and either returned to Pennsylvania or pushed further south to Augusta. Of these latter John Lewis was the pioneer; and near the city of Staunton still stands upon the hillside the house which he built there as a settler. Following upon his track came a tide of Scotch-Irishmen of Ulster from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Their local historian says of them: "The majority of them were farmers and mechanics, a few had been merchants. There was not a sprig of nobility or a so called cavalier amongst them. One of them, whose immediate descendants were highly distinguished, was probably a house builder; another, whose posterity has graced the. pulpit, the bar and halls of Congress, was a ship-carpenter; and a third, whose descendants have been equally distinguished, was a weaver."
Wherever they settled, they located the log school house and the no less rudely constructed church, as soon as a safe shelter had been erected over the heads of their wives and children. They cleared away the virgin forest and tilled the land; depending much for their earlier subsistence upon the great variety of game which abounded in this new country. They were expert riflemen, hewers of wood and drawers of water, as need might be; inured to the hardy out-door life of the pioneer and frontiersman, homespun-clad, and lacking in general literary cultivation. For with all their log school houses and their churches, they were in the earlier days a little lettered people in the main. Life pressed upon them in many phases that were ill calculated to foster the graces and humanities; yet they were good judges of a sermon, they knew their Bible, and Rouse's version of the Psalms of David was "familiar in their mouths as household words."