Why did the settlers settle where they did in the US?

Heh, that’s true. The area of Virginia that would one day become West Virginia. :slight_smile:

That last one is important. My great-grandfather came over from Europe in the early 1890s (don’t know the exact year) and settled in the Green Bay area. Why there? It wasn’t the frontier with unclaimed land that could be homesteaded. There were still areas further west like that, but he didn’t go to one of those areas.

The reason is he was Belgian and there already was a large presence of Belgians in northeast Wisconsin. They’d been there since the 1840s or so. I don’t know the specifics in his case, but most likely there had been what we would call these days “networking”. People who’d settled in the US often wrote letters to friends and family in the old world telling them about their new circumstances and encouraging others to join them. So young people in Europe wanting their own land would move to be close to people they already knew who could help them get set up. They might not be able to homestead land for free, but it was still much cheaper land than there was in the old country.

While Green Bay today is a little more heterogeneous than it was when I was growing up there in the 1970s and 1980s (it finally has significant populations of African-Americans, Asians, and Hispanics), the Belgian influence there can still be seen. If one can still find a phone book with white pages, the “V” section of the book would still be huge (Van De , Van Den , and Van Der ), and it’s still a very Catholic city.

This. That’s why there are so many stone walls in New England – farmers were trying to get the rocks out of their fields. To this day, you see these ubiquitous stone walls all over the place in Connecticut, including in areas that are now heavily wooded. I often see these on hikes, and tell the younger ones that everywhere you see a stone wall (even in the middle of the woods), there used to be a farmer’s field there.

Many people are surprised to hear that the majority of Connecticut was clear-cut of trees by the mid-19th century, with most of the land being farmed. When the midwest opened up, the farmers left for better land with fewer rocks. Today most of this land has re-forested, and the state is actually more wooded than it has been in centuries (though this trend has now begun to reverse itself due to urban sprawl).

The funny thing about rocks in New England is that they never seem to run out. Even after you remove the majority of the rocks from your field (or backyard garden), new ones continually pop up due to the ground freezing and resultant ground heave.

Which reminds me of the old joke:
A newcomer to New England asks an old-timer, “Where’d all these rocks come from?”

The old-timer thoughtfully replies, “Glacier brought 'em.”

Newcomer follows up with, “What happened to the glacier?”

Old-timer thinks for a minute and answers, “…Probably went to get more rocks!” :smiley:

When my mother researched our family tree, she noticed a pattern.

A farmer marries.
His wife has a child every two years.
His wife dies (often in childbirth).

He re-marries.
His wife has a child every two years.
His wife dies (often in childbirth).

Repeat a several more times.

He dies.
His last wife inherits the farm.
The children of his earlier wives move west, to colonize the frontier.

And that, kids, is How the West was Won.
It was not because of Manifest Destiny.
It was because of Wicked Stepmothers.

Well, not at entirely. There was the unfortunate idea that rain follows the plow, i.e., if enough people build farms in a region, it’ll change the climate and become rainier there. In reality, the time when people started trying to settle these regions just happened to coincide with a rainier period of time. Then the climate reverted to the mean, much to the chagrin of the homesteaders who had settled there.

A New England history course I took mentioned that during the Civil War, many of the New Englanders who fought learned, for the first time, that farm land existed without rocks. After the Civil War ended many of the soldier-farmers relocated to the better soils of the midwest and west. And that is one of the reasons that so many stone walls are found in the middle of the regrown forests of New England!

Yes, but that was later on, in the late 1800s. In the early 19th century, that area was actually called the Great American Desert. But there were reports of a lush land way over on the other side of the continent. Once the South Pass, an easy way through the Rockies, was discovered, people started moving there in groups, bypassing that ugly desert. Hence the wagon trains on the Oregon Trail and all that stuff. That started in 1842, but then gold was discovered in California, so everyone switched to going there in 1849.

The history of New England settlement is an interesting one. In a nutshell:

precolonial/colonial periods – all the flatter alluvial land is cleared – the clearings kept open by the native peoples are taken over by the anglos. Most of the trees are cut down.

early industrial revolution – mills built on virtually all the streams. Sheep farming on the cleared hilly lands providing wool to the mills. No more trees to build fences so the piled rocks around the edges of the fields are used. Thousands of miles of stone walls are built. Hundreds of small thriving mill towns spring up all over.

mid-nineteenth century – the Erie Canal, railroads, and the resettlement of western tribes opens the plains. Pent-up demand for good farmland quickly moves westward. Mill towns perched in narrow ravines in the New England hills are abandoned along with the marginal farmlands.

Trees start covering the rocky steep fields, a process continuing today.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not the New England climate which drove people off. The upper Midwest has a significantly more severe climate in every respect, and the movement westward was quite horizontal – New Englanders did not move south. It is all about flat land with deep soil, and the ability to get products to market.

Note that a surprising amount of farmland in many states was passed up early on because it was basically swampland.

What you see now is the result of drainage projects, esp. in the late 19th century.

So if you look at an old map of settlement and compare it to a modern one you might be puzzled by large areas with virtually no one living in them then that seem perfectly fine now.

Of course the reverse is also true, esp. in the Western US, where vast tracks of dry land are now green due to irrigation projects.

Excellent points, ftg!

Fun fact - western Virginia, for a while at least, wasn’t the same area as that which became West Virginia. For a while, Virginia included Pittsburgh (well, technically, back then it was only Fort Pitt). Pennsylvania also included Pittsburgh. The two states accidentally defined their borders so that they overlapped, which wasn’t noticed until they actually surveyed and figured out where the border was.

At that time, Fort Pitt was a big up and coming settlement, and Wheeling was one of the biggest gateway cities for settlers heading west, since it had one of the few bridges across the Ohio River. Neither state thought that it was fair for the other state to end up with both Wheeling and Fort Pitt, so both states held on to their claim for the entire disputed area.

The disputed territory was eventually split down the middle. Virginia got the western side of the disputed territory, which eventually became West Virginia’s goofy northern panhandle. Pennsylvania got the eastern side.

Before the dispute was settled, there was also an attempt to create a state called Westsylvania, which would have included most of what is currently West Virginia (minus the eastern panhandle) along with the entire disputed territory and also part of what is now Kentucky.

Getting back to the OP, one of the things that determined where early settlers went was the fact that the Appalachian Mountains are a royal bitch to cross in a wagon. The Cumberland Mountain ridge line only has one decent pass through it, and that’s only because a decent sized meteor slammed into it a few hundred million years ago, helping to create the Cumberland Gap.

Hundreds of thousands of settlers made their way into the Ohio Valley through the Cumberland Gap.

So, in a way, you can thank an ancient meteor for helping to settle the Ohio Valley.

Back in the pioneer days, it would take you about six months via wagon to get from the east coast to the west coast, and it was a dangerous trip (just ask the Donner party). Alternately, you could take a sailing ship all the way around South America, which would also take you about six months. If you really wanted to get there in a hurry, you could sail down to Panama, travel overland to the Pacific, and then travel back up the coast, which could be done in only a few months, but it would cost you a lot more money.

Not to mention the threat of malaria and yellow fever.

Bring guppies.

It seems as though it would be difficult to be mistaken about the border of Pennsylvania.

No, it was really easy. The land grants were largely written in the 1600s before there was good surveying or even a good idea of the basic geography. The boundaries given were sometimes impossible. (An example is the southern border of Pennsylvania in the original 1681 charter appeared to be the 40th parallel, but it was worded that the border began at a circle with 12 mile radius centered on New Castle where it intersected with the beginning of the 40th parallel. New Castle is much farther than 12 miles south of the 40th, so such a place never exists. This caused a great deal of fighting between the Calverts of Maryland and Pennsylvania and even resorted in small scale warfare between the two colonies. This eventually led to the Mason Dixon line, but that line was an agreement between Pennsylvania and Maryland, not Virginia. Virginia still claimed that the southern border was the 40th parallel not the Mason Dixon line which was south of the 40th by quite a bit.)

To further confuse things, the charters gave land away which wasn’t necessarily land to give. Virginia’s big problem was that what is now Pittsburgh was owned by the Iroquois in 1681. Virginia bought it from them in the Treaty of Lancashire. They felt that they paid good money for land that the crown never had control over and was in fact settled by the French long after the charter of 1681, so what claim did Pennsylvania have on it? Eventually in 1779, they finally sat down and hammered out a permanent boundary that honored Virginia landowner claims, extended the Mason Dixon line to a point 5 degrees of longitude past the Delaware River (which seemed to have been the intent of the 1681 charter.) and we got the borders we have today.

Wheeling was never part of the discussion primarily because Wheeling didn’t exist until 1795 (although there was a small fort there called Fort Henry, but it wasn’t particularly important or radically different than the hundreds of other frontier forts at the time. In its most famous battle, it had 20 fighting age men defending it, hardly a metropolis.) The first bridge across the Ohio in Wheeling was built in 1849.

I reckon the Mormons settled in Utah to get the hell away from everybody else. When Brigham Young said “This is the place,” the unspoken rest of the sentence is “where nobody else would want to live.”

The area west of the Great Salt Lake below the mountains is fairly decent. Lots of small rivers to provide irrigation, etc.

Just not as great as the Willamette or Central Valleys.

It’s also farther away from navigable waters which made trade more difficult. But that might have been a plus. Reduced contacts with “outsiders”.

That explains plenty on the background of my birth city, founded by the Connecticut Land Company in 1796 in Connecticut’s Western Reserve. That was after Connecticutians were kicked out of northeast Pennsylvania (the Wyoming Valley) after the Revolution. They’d settled and claimed Pennsylvania north of the 41st parallel, and the Wyoming Valley was the first nice spot to settle when they headed west. Their backup plan was the Western Reserve in Ohio.

I’m curious now about the first settlers at the mouth of the Cuyahoga and which towns in Connecticut they came from, if there was a pattern of settlement originating from some particular place in England.

:smiley: That is a really good one. ::applause::

Now that’s what I call a fun fact! Science!

Similarly, there’s a region in the South called the Black Belt, originally due to the rich black soil, but now it’s just as much associated with the relatively large numbers of Black people who live there, largely descended from the slaves brought over to work the black soil.

It, too, has an origin in ancient geology: