Native Americans in the Shenandoah Valley
Early Archaic points (8,000-1,100 BC), Clermont Foundation Collections
The earliest immigrants to North America were the Native American peoples, whether by land bridge from Eurasia or an early land-water crossing of Clovis-like people from Europe. While still visible in passage through the Shenandoah Valley and during the war, under pressure from colonists, they had largely moved out of the Valley west to the Ohio country by the time George Washington surveyed “Clermont” in 1750. One of Washington’s successes during the French and Indian War (while Clermont was being built) was to recruit up to 1,000 Indian allies from the west to help garrison Fort Loudoun, which he was constructing in Winchester in 1756-58.
Native Americans left sites and artifacts in western Virginia dating back as early as 16,000 years ago. At Clermont, two Early Archaic points suggest that native peoples used the land up to 10,000 years ago.
In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, use of the Great Warrior Path (what we know as Rt.11, next to Interstate 81) was very active, connecting the Northern tribes (Six Iroquois Nations, Shawnee, Delaware, others) and Southern ones (Cherokee, Catawba, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, others), whether for trade, seasonal hunting and fishing, access to quarry and tool manufacturing sites (such as the jasper quarries at Front Royal), or raiding parties. After the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744, when the Iroquois ceded the Shenandoah Valley to the Colony of Virginia, a pass was required for Indians to travel on the Path, though not always respected, as when a party of 20 Cherokees with a pass was attacked and some killed on their way north to Winchester in 1765 by colonists. Developed by settlers as the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, that Path/Road/Highway/Interstate is a Native American legacy, ten miles from Clermont, and has always been a crucial economic and social artery for the farm, as well as the roads to Baltimore and Alexandria, which pass by the farm’s front gate.
Another Native American legacy is part of what attracted John Vance first to squat on (1742) and then to ask Lord Fairfax for a grant (1750) of the specific land which forms Clermont’s 362 acres today, the combination of open oak woodlands and rich grassland savannahs. This topographical combination was not an accident of nature, but the result of the systematic burning of wildlands by Native Americans over hundreds of years throughout the Valley, for four primary purposes: agriculture, hunting and game production, range management, and travel (to maintain unobstructed travel paths). In the field notes of his survey of Clermont, George Washington specifically described the presence of both hardwood forest and of areas called “rich barrens” (barren of trees), valuable grassland savannahs, all watered by a creek.
