Given here are four idealized images that construct a sequence of settlement. Each is based upon the same terrain that undergoes development over a century or more. The terrain illustrated here could include the settlement sequence around Jamestown, Charleston, Savannah, or Boston. Along the Atlantic Coast, the mouths or rivers were often the locations of the first European outposts, and the rivers subsequently became avenues into the interior. From consolidated coastal outposts or villages, further outposts were projected inland or upriver and a new consolidation begun both there and in the area between the original settlement and the second outpost.
Although the Atlantic tidewater rivers supported an initial linear settlement sequence, actual settlement was more complex even at early stages than can be suggested in these images. Jamestown was a primary English settlement from which upriver secondary outposts were projected, but the same area had also been a distal outpost of Spanish operations in Havana. Even under the primitive conditions of early settlement where there were few buildings constructed and where little land was explored or cleared, multiple vectors of settlement--geo-political, military, economic, religious, domestic--were already present and complex.
While the four images here represent a kind of idealized sequence that might apply to the Atlantic Coast, the settlement pattern is sharply different along the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River, in coastal California and in the Southwest. The southern Appalachian mountain region represents a good example of the complexity that can override the apparent simplicity suggested in these images. Older notions of "lateral migration" suggest accurately that many of the early settlers of Tennessee came from North Carolina and many of those of Kentucky came from Virginia. Census figures show that more Tennessee settlers arrived from North Carolina than from any other state.
In the case of Tennessee, early eighteenth century outposts and settlements in the mountain valleys around Asheville had access to the northerly and westerly flowing French Broad River which is eventually captured by the Tennessee River. Many Revolutionary War and post-war settlers entered the Tanase territory along this route. Others entered Tennessee from the Carolinas by following more mountainous routes that brought them into the headwaters of the Little Tennessee River. French Broad (and Pigeon River) settlers came in northeast of Knoxville while Little Tennessee settlers came in around Fort Loudon south of Knoxville. In a sense, all of these settlement processes are linear: the sequential staging from one outpost to another with later consolidation and further staging along the Tennessee River.
This relatively simple process, however, is made complex by both geographic and demographic factors. The east to west routes of the southern Appalachians were fractured by the southwesterly thrust of the greatly folded mountains. The larger southwestward tendency of the main ridges and the long southwestward corridor created by the Great Valley reached from Pennsylvania into Tennessee and brought a diagonal flow of settlers across the flow coming from Virginia and North Carolina. This diagonal flow originating in Pennsylvania brought settlers of German and Scandinavian background into contact with English and Scotch-Irish settlers moving into the Tennessee Country from the Carolinas. Both Lutheranism and German Pietism along with German barns and houses mix in this region with the religious and material artifacts of Great Britain.
The settlement of Nashville provides an interesting study of the complexity of settlement. If approached from the east via the Cumberland River, Nashville is a linear terminal outpost from settlements further to the east. Many people passed through the Appalachians at the Cumberland Gap and followed the Cumberland River westward toward what would be the Nashville Area. Yet when James Robertson, from a base in the Watauga settlement, sent a settlement expedition under Col. John Donaldson toward Nashville, they followed the Tennessee River--a route that took them southwestward into Alabama, then northwestward across Tennessee into Kentucky to the Ohio River and then up the Cumberland to approach the Nashborough (as it was called) settlement from the west. This was a long and difficult journey, but allowed Donaldson to protect his group in boats along the way and to arrive with a large and secure store of provisions. Nashville was settled from both the east and the west.
The settlement sequence is displayed in another way in the struggle to control the rich trans-Appalachian corridor. The geo-political tensions of the Ohio Valley prior to the Revolutionary War had involved the local Indian tribes in the rivalries of the British and French and then in the internecine rivalry of the British and the American colonials. The British employed the Indians in their sector of the North American fur trade but also as frontier mercenaries to interdict the expansion of colonists across the Appalachians. More than a half century of bitter struggle had preceded the wave of settlers that poured across the mountains in the years after 1775. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the typical outpost of settlement was as often the blockhouse or station as it was the cabin, church, or store deport. The first settler was as likely to be a soldier as a "pioneer."
The division and laying off of land grants to Revolutionary War soldiers combined with the active need of multiple points of defense against Indian resistance and retaliation led to the building of miniature forts, and hardened cabin or house compounds. Although seldom the actual garrison of regular army personnel, these fortified settlements were occupied by a former soldier or officer, perhaps other soldiers who had served in company with the soldier receiving the land grant, and multiple families. Such stations quickly became the germ of a settlement community, but preserved a military and sometimes quasi-official status well beyond the initial years. In the year 1800 there were dozens of such stations in east Tennessee, and 'station' was a more common place name than store, town, or church.
It should also be noted in these idealized images, that European settlement was not projected into a virgin wilderness. Although not depicted here, many of the European outposts were established near Indian towns or villages, and settlers often made use of the well-developed system of Indian trails. The Indians not only maintained cultivated fields and so contributed to the clearing of the land, but they had cleared fields for centuries preceding the arrival of Europeans. These "old fields" broke the original canopy of the forest and were sometimes re-cleared and used by settlers. In later years, commercial and domestic cooperation between Indians and Europeans led to joint ventures not only in the fur trade but in land speculation as well as timber and mineral extraction. Intermarriage led to hybrid forms of settlement as mixed families pioneered new settlements in the Appalachian mountains and beyond.
If we define the 'rural' as an area between the town and the wood, that is, as a narrower or broader zone of transition between space that is unsettled and space that is highly ordered by the conventions of the city, it is clear from the complexities suggested here that 'rural life' was no single, certainly no Edenic, enterprise of the rustic cabin in the virgin forest. The rural zone from the beginning was transversed by multiple and often conflicting vectors of interest. Again, the Tennessee territory is suggestive: much of the area west of the continental divide of the Appalachians was declared "Indian territory" by the new American government and a few military garrisons were established to regulate entry into Tennessee. Yet the existence and composition Watauga settlement suggests that a vigorous settlement population was flowing into Tennessee, essentially by-passing both the military regulations and the nominal political control of North Carolina. Some of the Wataugans, for instance, in the absence of legitimate land title procedures or permissions from either Washington or North Carolina simply negotiated directly with the Indians and bought land from them.
Other settlers such as the Moravians and some Presbyterians had strong convictions about converting the Indians and by-passed military regulations in order to establish missions in the Indian territory of Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. The durability of these missionary bonds with the Indians would become apparent a half century later in the conflict between missionary leaders and the federal judiciary and army over the Indian Removal Act. It became difficult to "unsettle" the Indians because of the support for their cause--and the interference--of certain church leaders and organizations. Religious factors as well as social, economic, and political factors helped shape the pattern of settlement across the Appalachians after the Revolution. The rural life of early Tennessee was sustained within multiple polarities that belied the simplicity of settlement romance and revealed sometimes sharp tensions between one group of settlers and another.
From another view, the abstracted images here can be used to understand the multiple layerings of development that take place in a settlement sequence. In a sense, the land is settled and then re-settled as subsequent use alters and overlays earlier patterns. Such re-use of the land is, of course, what is occurring in the current shift of town populations onto agricultural land, but this phenomenon is not of recent origin: such re-use occurred from the beginning of European settlement as colonists appropriated Indian fields, villages, and paths for their own purposes. Re-use and multiple layerings of development mean that there can be no simple spatial delineation of rural zones. A rural area now may be an irregular lens of surviving farms in a larger suburban sprawl or small pockets of undeveloped farmland surrounded by industrial and commercial development. While idealized schema can enable us to identify simple components of settlement, such idealizations always involve the risk of distorting the actual forms of settlement in a particular region.
Early Settlement
The Town
The Town and an Outpost Village
The City and its Network
