Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 4, 1993 TAG: 9311040011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANNE GEARAN Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
Like the McClures, most were fleeing tired soil and a sour economy for the dream of a better life on the frontier.
"Oh Home! How dear thou art. Oh! Ambition, how thou hast led me astray! I want to go back to Virginia," a homesick Elizabeth McClure wrote in her diary, one of hundreds of objects in a new Virginia Historical Society exhibit on the Virginia exodus.
Elizabeth McClure never made it home, nor did she strike it rich. She died of typhoid fever when she was 22. Her husband added a postscript to her diary: "This journal is done! The author being Elizabeth A. McClure, died March 28, 1848. Though happy in Christ being the only consolation left me. She was 22 years, seven months and 12 days old."
"Away I'm Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement" charts the exodus through letters, portraits and the personal possessions of the people who made the journey. The exhibit opened this month and continues through May.
"We talk about America being a mobile society today. Well, it has always been a mobile society," said Charles F. Bryan Jr., director of the Historical Society. "As soon as people got here, they started moving."
At the end of the Revolutionary War, Virginia was the most powerful and populous state. But the agricultural land on which the state's economy depended was overworked, and Virginia soon entered a steep decline, said Stephen Innes, an American history professor at the University of Virginia.
"Tobacco is tremendously destructive. You can only grow it about four years," Innes said.
Soil exhaustion was worst in the Tidewater area and erosion plagued the Piedmont. Land values plummeted from $207 million in 1817 to $90 million in 1829.
The census of 1850 found 388,000 native Virginians in other states, compared to 949,000 left in Virginia. The figure does not give a full picture of migration, because hundreds of thousands of Virginians who left earlier had died by 1850.
Beginning with European migration to Virginia in the 17th and early 18th centuries, the exhibit shows how settlers brought their culture with them and imposed it on a new landscape.
The earliest known piece of Virginia furniture is included, a chest dated circa 1660 designed to look English but made of American wood. A string gourd and banjo made by slaves show African craftsmanship.
By the time Virginians began leaving the state in large numbers, the culture they brought along had become distinctively American.
They took Virginia surveying techniques, art and architecture with them to Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, California and the Northwest.
There are Virginia-style cottages in Kentucky and copies of Virginia river plantations along the Ohio River.
The first stream of settlers wrote home with tales of grand opportunities, land and riches that spurred thousands more to follow them. Many died, and few found wealth. Most who left Virginia improved their circumstances only slightly, the exhibit notes.
"Whether they found a better life is enormously contested by historians," Innes said. "A lot depended on where they went."
The exhibit contains an original Virginia Conestoga wagon, compasses, traveling chests, surveying instruments, a tomahawk, a Kentucky rifle and household items. Tape-recorded readings of Elizabeth McClure's diary and other first-person accounts play in the background, along with the folk song "Away, I'm Bound Away," from which the exhibit takes its name.
The West was an escape for the disenfranchised and disadvantaged and also for many wealthy Virginians, the exhibit shows. Second sons who would not inherit the family land in Virginia frequently sought their fortune in the West, and in a few cases whole plantations broke camp when the Virginia soil became too poor to farm.
"Many migrants were yeoman farmers who worked their own fields, perhaps alongside a slave or two," notes accompanying the exhibit say. "A larger number were tenant farmers."
A third of those who left were black. Some fled slavery or bought their freedom to move west, but far more were sold south to work in the emerging cotton industry. Many Virginia planters found it more profitable to sell slaves than keep them working poor soil.
Virginians also brought along Jeffersonian ideals and a long tradition of democratic government. The exhibit includes a map showing 232 men born in Virginia before 1810 became congressmen from other states.
Virginia also contributed to nomenclature across the West. Jesse Reno, James Denver, San Houston and Stephen Austin were all Virginians.
The migration west depleted Virginia's population severely, and the state suffered economically and politically. Virginia did not fully recover until World War II, Bryan said.
"It took the Pentagon being built, the war, the shipyards and people moving to Virginia in large numbers," he said.
by CNB