Charlottesville: Three Notch'd Road

Introduction

Originally an Indian footpath, Three Notch'd Road became a thoroughfare for white settlers traveling between Richmond and the Valley in the 1730s. In 1762 when the city of Charlottesville was chartered, Indians had been traversing the trail underneath a primeval broad leaf canopy of oak, maple, beech, chestnut, hickory, elm, linden, walnut, and sweet gum for ten thousand years.  Along the way they hunted mostly deer, and elk, and turkeys, and sometimes bear, timber wolf, mountain lion, bob cat, opossum, and raccoon.
 
Before Europeans ventured west from the Virginia coastal plain, the Siouan Indians of the Monacan and Mannahoac tribes formed a confederation that settled on ground between the Roanoke River Valley and the Potomac River in the north, and from the Fall Line at Richmond and Fredericksburg west through the Blue Ridge Mountains. An agricultural people, they grew corn, beans and squash, and also domesticated  sunflowers, fruit trees, grapes, and nuts. They traded with the Powhatans to the east and the Iroquois to the north.  Like us all, the Indians of the Piedmont and Blue Ridge worked and loved and fought, largely innocent of threats to their civilization.
 
In European Tidewater Virginia, younger sons, whose oldest brothers had inherited the land cultivated by their fathers, began to move west to find a living.  These men with their inheritances—farming tools and sometimes enslaved African workers, cleared the Indian path of trees and other impediments to horse and wagon travel, eventually wresting Virginia's Piedmont and mountains from the Indians.  Over a hundred years, Indians, Indian villages along with their crops, trees, and game animals were winnowed as Europeans moved west along the road. In the ages-old human practice of alien invasion, men whose ancestors had toiled in the fields and hills and bogs of England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, and also in the Germanic low and highlands sacked Siouan civilization and built on top of it their own society.
 
Not so gradually, where Indians had lived in villages with palisaded walls, and in homes shaped like domes and made of bark and reed mats and where they had worked in small fields of corn and beans, and hunted in dense and towering forests, there appeared vast fields of grain and tobacco with arresting views of the Blue Ridge, and farmhouses with cows and chickens and hogs.  By the Rivanna River, which snakes off the James, white men built Charlottesville with wood from the surrounding forest and bricks from the red clay soil exposed in forest clearings. Charlottesville became what the farmers needed: a market center, and headquarters for the law enforcement.  As the population of merchants, sheriffs, and lawyers grew, the town took on a life of its own.  For merchants and lawyers, commerce and law became their livelihoods and the purposes of their lives.