The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley.

The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley. By Warren R. Hofstra (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xv plus 410 pp. $49.95).

The Shenandoah Valley was rich with towns by 1800, unlike the rest of Virginia. In this carefully researched study, Warren R. Hofstra asks why. As he explores the Valley's transformation from frontier to settled world, the author masterfully builds a "braided narrative of contingent events" to explain the development of the region's distinctive landscape of dispersed, enclosed farms producing for national and international markets, but with goods and services exchanged in towns (331). This same transformation was replicated more quickly on new frontiers further west, with a similar spatial organization eventually defining the multiple "Main Street" towns of the American midlands. The Valley's distinctive hierarchy of interlinked towns, crossroads hamlets, and dispersed farms woven into earlier open-country neighborhoods was what historical geographer Robert D. Mitchell has called a "settlement continuum." Yet, as Hofstra demonstrates, the settlement story here was not just confined to the Shenandoah Valley, and did not just express the imprint of its immediate occupiers. Strategic considerations and distant decisions of those in power also played a part. This is a story that is conceived on a grand scale, one that embraces the entire Atlantic world, and one that examines this layered regional landscape through both a magnifying glass and a telescope.

Geographers seeking to explain how settlements form have sometimes turned to central place theory, which posits that commerce transforms economic concentrations into service centers, with places becoming increasingly more central the more they can provide goods and services beyond what their own residents need. Yet although a central place system did eventually develop in the Valley, Hofstra argues that central place theory does not explain how this landscape emerged, or how the town of Winchester eventually became so important, or why the town grew when it did. The Valley's town and country arrangement matured in three phases. From the 1730s to the mid-1740s, dispersed agricultural settlements clustering along the Opequon creek at the contact point between shale and limestone lands created open-country neighborhoods. Between the 1740s and 1760s, the region consisted of open-country neighborhoods and a county town dominated by an exchange economy. The period from the 1760s to 1800 saw multiple towns form and a commercial economy gradually replace the exchange economy as a consumer revolution swept the Atlantic world. Yet, the first centralizing tendencies appeared only after skirmishes between Native Americans and settlers led colonial officials to consider peopling the region as a buffer to avoid further conflict.

Hofstra begins by recalling a violent skirmish in 1742 on the Virginia frontier between white settlers and a group of Oneidas and Onondagas traveling from their homelands in New York to the Carolinas. Fearing that the resulting repercussions might mean an enlarging war between the Six Nations and Virginia, imperial officials decided to encourage backcountry settlement, thereby preventing future conflicts. An earlier report issued by the Board of Trade in London that examined French and Indian threats to the colonies had also recommended expanding frontier settlement. The decisions that emerged from this general consensus ultimately imposed new political and physical forms on the countryside. Colonial officials orchestrated the peopling of the Shenandoah Valley with settlers who were mostly white, Protestant, and engaged in diversified grain-livestock agriculture that was distinctive from the tobacco and plantation system further east.

Settlers who read land for quality according to its cover and nearness to water, surveyors who fashioned the developing cadastre, and those who dispensed land by mixing good and poor tracts in compact, contiguous settlements all shaped the dispersed, open-country landscape. When officials established county boundaries, created a county court, formed Frederick Town, and resurveyed the land, they transformed this vernacular landscape into an official one. Still, Frederick Town (later Winchester) functioned at first as an extension of the countryside rather than a central place. The prevailing exchange economy knit town and countryside together into multiple, broadly dispersed reciprocal relationships and obligations for goods and labor, embracing places as far-flung as Philadelphia. Winchester became a central place only after Fort Loudoun was built to garrison the Virginia Regiment there. This military presence pumped cash into the town, and initiated the region's slow transition from exchange to commercial economy. By the 1760s, wheat drove this changing economy, and farmers increasingly focused on market production. The grain economy also fueled town formation. Unlike tobacco economies, grain economies required multiple ancillary specialists involved with processing, storing, or transporting flour. Such specialists, along with merchants, clustered in backcountry towns, and Winchester and other Valley towns grew as the grain trade expanded. Beyond Winchester, at least fourteen new towns emerged after the Revolution, creating the Valley's signature landscape of enclosed farms and market towns. And as merchants, artisans, and tavern keepers increasingly concentrated in towns, they also became more central to the economy, making towns, in turn, central to the countryside. In the end, Hofstra maintains, what was "new" about new Virginia was that, to many, the Shenandoah Valley represented "the reality of republican society and hence the promise of American life" (337).

Using sources ranging from soil surveys to account books and court records, the author effectively integrates historical geography, narrative, and historical and landscape analysis into a complex whole that bristles with detail. Several early maps and plats richly amplify the author's argument. Hofstra builds upon his own considerable work on the Virginia backcountry as well as that of Robert Mitchell, Kenneth Koons, and others. Still, the author's most significant contribution here is to situate the story of the Virginia frontier within a much broader transatlantic context of imperial decisions and economic trade networks. In doing so, Hofstra both expands the compass of central-place analysis to include worldwide trade, and broadens the settlement story to consider the ramifications of actions that occurred far beyond the Valley of Virginia. The culmination of years of research, The Planting of New Virginia makes an important contribution to the growing body of literature on the backcountry, and will stand as the definitive work on the development of the Shenandoah Valley landscape for many years to come.

Gabrielle M. Lanier

James Madison University