Between this place and the Blue Mountains the country is rough and hilly, and but very thinly inhabited. The few inhabitants, however, met with here are, uncommonly robust and tall; it is rare to see a man amongst them who is not six feet high. These people entertain a high opinion of their own superiority in point of bodily strength over the inhabitants of the low country. A similar race of men is found all along the Blue Mountains.
The Blue Ridge is thickly covered with large trees to the very summit; some of the mountains are rugged and extremely stony, others are not so, and on these last the soil is found to be rich and fertile. It is only in particular places that this ridge of mountains can be crossed, and at some of the gaps the ascent is steep and difficult; but at the place where I crossed it, which was near the Peak of Otter, on the south side, instead of one great mountain to pass over, as might be imagined from an inspection of the map, there is a succession of small hills, rising imperceptibly one above the other, so that you get upon the top of the ridge before you are aware of it.
PEAKS OF OTTER.
The Peaks of Otter are the highest mountains in the Blue Ridge, and, measured from their bases, are supposed to be more lofty than any others in North America. According to Mr. Jefferson, whose authority has been quoted nearly by every person that has written on the subject since the publication of his Notes on Virginia, the principal peak is about four thousand feet in perpendicular height; but it must be observed, that Mr. Jefferson does not say that he measured the height himself; on the contrary, he acknowledges that the height of the mountains in America has never yet been ascertained with any degree of exactness; it is only from certain data, from which he says a tolerable conjecture may be formed, that he supposes this to be the height of the loftiest peak. Positively to assert that this peak is not so high, without having measured it in any manner, would be absurd; as I did not measure it, I do not therefore pretend to contradict Mr. Jefferson; I have only to say, that the most elevated of the peaks of Otter appeared to me but a very insignificant mountain in companion with Snowden, in Wales; and every person that I conversed with that had seen both, and I conversed with many, made the same remark. Now the highest peak of Snowden is found by triangular admeasurement to be no more than three thousand five hundred and sixty-eight feet high, reckoning from the quay at Carnarvon. None of the other mountains in the Blue Ridge are supposed, from the same data, to be more than two thousand feet in perpendicular height.
COTTON.
Beyond the Blue Ridge, after crossing by this route near the Peaks of Otter, I met with but very few settlements till I drew near to Fincastle, in Bottetourt County. This town stands about twenty miles distant from the mountain, and about fifteen south of Fluvanna River. It was only begun about the year 1790, yet it already contains sixty houses, and is most rapidly increasing. The improvement of the adjacent country has likewise been very rapid, and land now bears nearly the same price that it does in the neighbourhood of York and Lancaster, in Pennsylvania. The inhabitants consist principally of Germans, who have extended their settlements from Pennsylvania along the whole of that rich track of land which runs through the upper part of Maryland, and from thence behind the Blue Mountains to the most southern parts of Virginia. These people, as I before mentioned, keep very much together, and are never to be found but where the land is remarkably good. It is singular, that although they form three fourths of the inhabitants on the western side of the Blue Ridge, yet not one of them is to be met with on the eastern side, notwithstanding that land is to be purchased in the neighbourhood of the South-west Mountains for one fourth of what is paid for it in Bottetourt County. They have many times, I am told, crossed the Blue Ridge to examine the land, but the red soil which they found there was different from what they had been accustomed to, and the injury it was exposed to from the mountain torrents always appeared to them an insuperable objection to settling in that part of the country. The difference indeed between the country on the eastern and on the western side of the Blue Ridge, in Bottetourt County, is astonishing, when it is considered that both are under the same latitude, and that this difference is perceptible within the short distance of thirty miles.
On the eastern side of the ridge cotton grows extremely well; and in winter the snow scarcely ever remains more than a day or two upon the ground. On the other side cotton never comes to perfection, the winters are severe, and the fields covered with snow for weeks together. In every farm yard you see sleighs or sledges, carriages used to run upon the snow. Wherever these carriages are met with, it may be taken for granted that the winter lasts in that part of the country for a considerable length of time, for the people would never go to the expence of building them, without being tolerably certain that they would be useful. On the eastern side of the Blue Ridge, in Virginia, not one of these carriages is to be met with.
It has already been mentioned, that the predominant soil to the eastward of the Blue Ridge is a red earth, and that it is always a matter of some difficulty to lay down a piece of land in grass, on account of the rains, which are apt to wash away the seeds, together with the mould on the surface. In Bottetourt County, on the contrary, the soil consists chiefly of a rich brown mould, and throws up white clover spontaneously. To have a rich meadow, it is only necessary to leave a piece of ground to the hand of nature for one year. Again, on the eastern side of the Blue Mountains, scarcely any limestone is to be met with; on the opposite one, a bed of it runs entirely through the country, so that by some it is emphatically called the limestone county. In sinking wells, they have always to dig fifteen or twenty feet through a solid rock to get at the water.
INSECTS.
Another circumstance may also be mentioned, as making a material difference between the country on one side of the Blue Ridge and that on the other, namely, that behind the mountains the weevil is unknown. The weevil is a small insect of the moth kind, which deposits its eggs in the cavity of the grain, and particularly in that of wheat; and if the crops are stacked or laid up in the barn in sheaves, these eggs are there hatched, and the grain is in consequence totally destroyed. To guard against this in the lower parts of Virginia, and the other states where the weevil is common, they always thresh out the grain as soon as the crops are brought in, and leave it in the chaff, which creates a degree of heat sufficient to destroy the insect, at the same time that it does not injure the wheat. This insect has been known in America but a very few years; according to the general opinion, it originated on the eastern shore of Maryland, where a person, in expectation of a great rise in the price of wheat, kept over all his crops for the space of six years, when they were found full of these insects; from thence they have spread gradually over different parts of the country. For a considerable time the Patowmac River formed a barrier to their progress, and while the crops were entirely destroyed in Maryland, they remained secure in Virginia; but these insects at last found their way across the river. The Blue Mountains at present serve as a barrier, and secure the country to the westward from their depredations[[24]].