ting the Indian trade from
their posts at the "heads" of the rivers, and combining frontier
protection, exploring, and surveying--make known the more distant
fertile soils of the Piedmont. Already in the first part of the
eighteenth century, the frontier population tended to be a rude
democracy, with a large representation of Scotch-Irish, Germans, Welsh,
and Huguenot French settlers, holding religious faiths unlike that of
the followers of the established church in the lowlands. The movement of
slaves into the region was unimportant, but not unknown.

The Virginia Valley was practically unsettled in 1730, as was much of
Virginia's Piedmont area and all the Piedmont area of the Carolinas. The
significance of the movement of settlers from the North into this vacant
Valley and Piedmont, behind the area occupied by expansion from the
coast is, that it was geographically separated from the westward
movement from the coast, and that it was sufficient in volume to recruit
the democratic forces and postpone for a long time the process of social
assimilation to the type of the lowlands.

As has been pointed out, especially in the Carolinas a belt of pine
barrens, roughly eighty miles in breadth, ran parallel with the fall
line and thus discouraged western advance across this belt, even before
the head of navigation was reached. In Virginia, the Blue Ridge made an
almost equally effective barrier, walling off the Shenandoah Valley from
the westward advance. At the same time this valley was but a
continuation of the Great Valley, that ran along the eastern edge of the
Alleghanies in southeastern Pennsylvania, and included in its mountain
trough the Cumberland and Hagerstown valleys. In short, a broad
limestone band of fertile soil was stretched within mountain walls,
southerly from Pennsylvania to southwestern Virginia; and here the
watergaps opened the way to descend to the Carolina Piedmont. This whole
area, a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania, was rendered
comparatively inaccessible to the westward movement from the lowlands,
and was equally accessible to the population which was entering
Pennsylvania.[99:1]

Thus it happened that from about 1730 to 1760 a generation of settlers
poured along this mountain trough into the southern uplands, or
Piedmont, creating a new continuous social and economic area, which cut
across the artificial colonial boundary lines, disarranged the regular
extension of local governmen