Legends of the Skyline Drive and the Great Valley of Virginia

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Etta Belle Walker. Legends of the Skyline Drive and the Great Valley of Virginia

Foreword

Knights of The Golden Horseshoe

Adam Miller and His Neighbors

Joist Hite, the Pioneer

German Neighbors

The Scotch-Irish in the Valley

Indians

Indian Tales

The Moore Massacre

Washington's Boyhood Friend—Lord Fairfax

Winchester—The Frontier Town of the Valley

The Valley Pike

Front Royal

Flint Hill

The Skyline Drive

Strasburg

Orkney Springs

Stephens City

Middletown

The Story Teller of the Valley—Samuel Kercheval

Woodstock

New Market

Luray

Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign

Belle Boyd, the Spy

Harrisonburg

Staunton

Waynesboro and Afton

Natural Bridge

Rockbridge

Valley Inventions

Lexington

Culpeper Minute Men

Blind Preacher

Hebron Church

Hoover's Camp on the Rapidan River

Charlottesville and Albemarle County

Fredericksburg

Kenmore—1752

The Mary Washington House

Rising Sun Tavern

Roanoke

Draper's Meadow

Washington County

Hungry Mother State Park

White Top

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Alexander Spotswood was the first Virginia Governor to become interested in the glowing accounts which the hunters and trappers brought back from the hill sections of the colony. He determined to see for himself those distant blue ridges.

And while historians have not told us who guided him to the upper or western boundary of what was then Essex County, we are told that he became enthusiastic over the rich iron ore which he found in the peninsula formed by the Rapidan River. He decided to build iron furnaces at a point near the river. Later he had his agent, Baron de Graffenreid, go to Germany and bring master mechanics and their families to Virginia.

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It was thirty-six days after leaving Williamsburg that the party finally reached the mountain and scaled Swift Run Gap and for the first time a group of Englishmen looked down into the fertile valley beyond.

The Governor was a romantic person, as well as practical, so he wanted to have something tangible by which all of his party might remember their thrilling trip. He asked some of his men what they thought of the idea and someone suggested, no doubt in fun, that they call themselves the "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe".

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