The Road to Black Ned's Forge by Turk McCleskey

Author:Turk McCleskey [McCleskey, Turk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775)
ISBN: 9780813935836
Google: uPZ1AgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2014-06-09T01:41:07+00:00

10

The Travelers

Accelerating Mobility—Integral Characteristics of Mobility—Social Consequences of Mobility—Racial Attitudes in Motion

Edward Tarr’s actions after his brush with the Convention Army in April 1780 are unknown. Like his antagonist Joseph Shute, Tarr disappeared from view without leaving a forwarding address. The absence of documentation about him does not necessarily indicate a departure, of course, and in any event Tarr was not soon forgotten. Indeed, memories of Tarr persisted long after his final exit.

A map based on 1804 surveys depicted what its draftsmen believed to be the original grantees in Benjamin Borden’s 92,100-acre grant (see figure 4). The surveyors appear to have consulted inhabitants about tract lines and former owners; the surveyors’ informants identified Edward Tarr as the first settler on his Mill Creek land.1 In their minds, Tarr, not the initial grantee Isaac Gray nor the second owner Jacob Gray, stood out as a pioneer. Tarr’s identification as an original settler is all the more remarkable for coming over four decades after he moved from Timber Ridge to Staunton.

Probably Tarr did not die in Augusta County, since the deaths of independent adult males typically generated documents that were well preserved in that locale. If he died after making a will, his heir or executor normally would have presented it in court for proof. If he died without a will, county magistrates should have followed English common-law practice for the administration of intestates’ property, just as they did in 1759 for “Jos[eph] Bell the Mallato” and for numerous white men who died without wills.2 No such documents exist, however. Perhaps Tarr died in Albemarle County after obtaining his 17 April 1780 search warrant and before June 1781, when British raiders burned the county court records. If so, records of his death are irretrievably lost. But if he moved from the Valley of Virginia after April 1780, additional records of his life or death may yet turn up in what would be just one more in a long string of far-flung destinations.

Tarr and most recurring figures in this book left few examples of their own words, but their travels by land or sea demonstrated both individual goals and collective trends. The Atlantic voyages of Thomas and Joseph Shute, wide-ranging wagon trips of William Davis, and remarkable journeys of Edward Tarr between Pennsylvania and Virginia all illustrate a vast but routine scale of travel in colonial North America. Ordinary people in peacetime as well as diverse belligerents in war traversed roads hundreds of miles in length. A skein of personal trajectories along a western crescent of trails and settlements bound together thousands of individuals and hundreds of extended families from Philadelphia through Virginia to Charleston.

Early American mobility’s origins, characteristics, and consequences are venerable issues in United States historiography. Novelists since James Fenimore Cooper, commentators since Alexis de Tocqueville, and historians since Frederick Jackson Turner have linked mobility to restiveness and economic ambition.3 For these nineteenth-century observers, mobility amounted to a self-fueling insatiable addiction; for some modern historians, the trait had an addiction’s deleterious antisocial effects.

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