Fellow List Members:
The Virginia chapter of the "Atlas of Historical
County Boundaries" is a welcome addition to our
arsenal of on line resources for carrying out
Virginia history research. The Atlas will no
doubt provide good service when used in
conjunction with other Virginia County resources
such as Martha Hiden's "How Justice Grew" and the
on-line county road order files provided by the
Virginia Transportation Research Council.
Because I am particularly interested in the exact
location of the 1772 Botetourt-Fincastle county
line, which runs through present-day Montgomery
County, I downloaded and examined the 72 megabyte
zipped Virginia County file provided on line by
the William M. Scholl Center for American History
and Culture at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
By way of illustration, I note that the Virginia
County pdf file provides nineteen versions of
Montgomery County outline maps, beginning with
the county's formation on 31 December 1776 from
Fincastle County and concluding in 2000 with the
post 1977, 1980, and 1986 annexations of parts of
the county by the City of Radford. Interestingly,
the authors of the Atlas cite 1994 correspondence
with the Radford City Zoning Department in 1994
as authority for their map making decisions in
versions 16, 17, and 18, and 2002 correspondence
with the Radford City cartographer as authority
for their map making decisions in version 19. So
doing shows an impressive level of commitment to scholarship.
On page 91 of the pdf file, version 2 of the
Botetourt County outline map correctly cites
Hening Volume 8, pp. 601-602 as the source of the
southwestern border of the then Montgomery
County. At that citation, which describes the
boundaries of Fincastle County, we read in part
"…within a line, to run up the east side of New
River to the mouth of Culbertson's creek, thence
a direct line to the Catawba road, where it
crosses the dividing ridge, between the north
fork of Roanoke and the waters of New River...."
The location of the boundary-defining
Culbertson's Creek is not well settled. Mary
Kegley (Kegley and Kegley 1980: 22) notes a land
grant on Culbertson's Creek that does not mention
the Greenbrier River. The Greenbrier River is
near the Googlable Culbertson Creek in
present-day Greenbrier County, West Virginia.
This Greenbrier County Culbertson's Creek does
not geographically fit the above language
specifying the boundaries of Fincastle County.
My present guess is that there was a
now-forgotten Culbertson's Creek not too far from
the present day Glen Lyn power plant on the New
River at the Virginia-West Virginia border. It's
just a guess, but it would fit the above cited language.
In any event, looking at the map on page 91 of
the pdf file one can see the dilemma facing the
team of dozens of researchers who put together
the nationwide "Atlas of Historical County
Boundaries" over a period of more than thirty
years: They had to draw the lines, even when their evidence was vague.
So congratulations to them for their
accomplishment and grateful thanks to them for
making their work available under a Creative
Commons license. To have completed this job nationwide is a huge undertaking.
However, on the basis of the one example I have
examined, Virginia users of the data base should
be aware that while the Atlas makes reasonable
interpretations of historical evidence, the shown
county boundaries are just an interpretation, and
that for early Virginia the mere availability of
lines does not call for suspension of our judgment and appropriate skepticism.
Jim Glanville
Blacksburg-in-former-Fincastle-County (I think)
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