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(bailors note: the following is taken from a presentation given by students Brendan Finnerty and Anthony Fudd at the September School Board meeting.)
This summer, five RCHS students — Matt Eidson, Susan Estes, Brendan Finnerty, Anthony Fudd and Douglas Kilpatrick — took part in Rappahannock’s first in-county summer program for gifted and talented youngsters. Through interviews with 14 experts as they listened, took notes, asked questions and wrote journal entries, they tried to see beyond simple daily routines to understand the interconnections between people, places, politics and nature here in Rappahannock County and the Blue Ridge.
From author Darwin Lambert, the students learned that Indians first settled at the base of the mountains near Front Royal 11,500 years ago. These native Americans hunted mastodon with hand spears and clovis points, stone weapons sharper than steel. None of those points have been found within Shenandoah National Park’s boundaries, indicating that little hunting or living occurred then in the mountains. However, palmer points from about 10,000 years ago have been discovered in the park, so by then settlement had begun.
In 1669 John Lederer climbed High Top, or Oakbill Mountain, with three Indians and the following year, the explorer scaled Compton Gap near Front Royal, accompanied this time by 11 white men. Although they left no records of their travels through this rough land, no doubt hunters and trappers were in the mountains even earlier, spurred by the profits to be had from sales of deer hides to Europe.
They were followed by others: Englishmen from Tidewater and Pennsylvania; indentured servants who were carpenters, tinsmiths and blacksmiths. Often working with the Indians and sometimes marrying Indian women, they learned to grow com and to hunt, fish and trap.
During the early 1700s, huge tracts of land were granted to a few of these new people who settled mostly in the valleys, and by the mid-1700s, they owned 90 percent of the land in and around the park. They cleared mountaintops to make pastures for livestock, creating big bare patches on a skyline that is today again thick forest.
New developments — like the New Market to Sperryville turnpike completed in 1786 — brought more people, and some settled in the remote regions that are now part of the park. It was these mountaineers who were displaced when the park was created a half century ago.
Between 1935 and 1937, Mr. Lambert lived from time to time with a mountain family, Daisy and
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