"In 1700 the frontier was still just upstream
a ways, in the more hostile world of granite, islands, and
rapids above the tidewater. In July a ship
sailed into Hampton filled with 207 Huguenots, exiled for
years from their cozy, prosperous villages
in France, who hoped to build a French Protestant town in
the Norfolk area. They were welcomed by Governor
Nicholson with disturbing news; their
destination had been changed and they were
to go up the James. William Byrd I, inheritor of land in
the Falls area and influential in the colony,
had had the last word on their fate. They were to settle in
the wilderness above the Fall Line, securing
that land for the white man.
The omens were all foreboding at Jamestown
where the prospective settlers had to transfer to
smaller boats that could negotiate the curls.
The town had recently burned for the third time and so
had been abandoned as a capital. Sickness
was still prevalent, and many of the French proved as
vulnerable as the earlier settlers. As they
learned more details about the requirements of survival on
the frontier, especially without a navigable
waterway, they became even more apprehensive, for
their skills were those of business, not farming.
Not surprisingly, many chose to desert here. Only
120 trusted themselves to the small boats
and the currents of the James. Almost immediately a boat
that was filled with goods sank, claimed by
the rough waters.
This last leg of the voyage, overcast by dread
and illness, must have been the worst. They passed
the site of an earlier settlement called World's
End, made the left turn into the Fall zone, and landed
at the tiny trading outpost of rude houses
around Shockoe Creek. Loading what was left of their
supplies onto borrowed wagons, they trudged
through the thick forests, following a faint path more
than twenty miles into land long ago cleared
by the Monacan Indians on the south bank of the river.
Their ears still rang with the rushing of
water over granite that would block their boats from the
outside world of commerce. But the key to
their survival lay in the unusually fertile floodplain of that
same river.
It was a desperate fall and winter as the ill-prepared
settlers used up their meager supplies,
especially when another group of more than
a hundred Huguenots arrived in October expecting to
find a thriving town. Friction developed between
the leaders, meaning that the new group had to
hack out a settlement several miles downstream.
Soon, though, Byrd and Governor Nicholson
proved their support by soliciting charitable
donations throughout the colony. The ensuing generosity
proved justified, for within a year the French
had learned to be adept farmers, growing fruit and fat
cattle on their bottom land, and establishing
trade, not warfare, with neighboring Indians.
Although plans had been drawn for a French-style
village around a central square, with outlying
farmland along the river, these never proved
practical. The fertility of the piedmont floodplain
encouraged the Huguenots, like the Monacans
before them, to live more separately than they had
intended, becoming a segmented agrarian society
which stretched back from five miles of river
bank. In time, they too lost their cohesive
identity by intermarrying and moving to other rivers. They
opened the way for settlement of the piedmont,
but today there is as little trace of their half century of
settlement as there is of the Monacans' longer
tenure." |
