[With John W. Wayland]:
“The facts concerning the " Order of the Golden Horseshoe " . . are so well known that they need not be repeated here.”
[If only the facts were well known. There still remains an element of mystery today about the " Golden Horseshoes ". The primary source of information which would vouch for their existence is Rev. Hugh Jones, who says they did exist. He was a contemporary, or at least he arrived on the scene not long after the event. He may be correct, but no substantiating evidence has ever been found, and he was sometimes wrong about what he said. When one considers that the real purpose of the trip over the mountains was to find land on the east side of the Blue Ridge Mountains for the members of the party to take up, one wonders if such an event would have merited something like the Golden Horseshoes.]
[Wayland mentions that Spotswood was English when Scottish would have been a better description. He, Wayland, returns to the German question by asserting Spotswood's wife was German, which is discredited today. For this reason, Wayland says Spotswood took a keen interest in the German settlers in Eastern Virginia. Of course, Spotswood was not married until after the Germans had left their first homes and had escaped his clutches.]
“(The first settlers of the Valley) were Germans from York, Lancaster and other counties of Pennsylvania. Settlers from the east side of the Blue Ridge did not go to the Valley until about 1760 [several Germanna people had pushed over the mountains at least fifteen years before this, including John Paul Vaught]. The majority of the people came from the northeast over the Potomac River near its junction with the Shenandoah River.
[Some of the earliest settlers were Germans who preceded Beverley with his claims. This led to several lawsuits as to who had priority.]
[At the start of the second part of the article, Wayland admitted there had been several errors in the first part. He anticipated more errors, and asked for corrections. So give the man some credit for his confessions.]
[Reference is made to the "lower Valley", which often confuses people. Wayland was correct in his use of the term; some people do not understand the distinction between a lower valley and an upper valley, especially when the river which drains the valley flows to the north. "Lower" refers to elevation and not to north or south. So "lower valley" refers to the direction that the river flows. Since the Nile, Rhine, and the Shenandoah Rivers all flow to the north, the lower valley is at the north, not the south. I have read genealogies which said our ancestors went up the Rhine River to Rotterdam. They, of course, went down the Rhine River toward a lower elevation.]
(13 Oct 01)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.