The North Carolina Fall Line
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Virginia settlers of Scotch-Irish Origin crossed the North Carolina Fall Line in search of new homes. The fall line was the westward boundary of the established settlements.
As new settlers poured to the North Carolina fall line, the more aggressive pioneers advanced to the frontier within fifty miles of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The settlement of families in North Carolina was so rapid that the population quadrupled between 1717 and 1732.
A map of the four colonial settlements in 1725 reveals a narrow strip of populated land along the Atlantic coast of irregular indentation, with occasional isolated nuclei of settlements further in the interior. Thus, The civilization continued to maintain close and unbroken communication with England and the Continent. As long as the settlers clung to the coast for economic reasons, they reacted slowly to the transforming influences of the frontier.
Within a triangle of continental altitude with its apex in New England, bounded east by the Atlantic and west by the Appalachian range, lay the settlements, divided into two zones—tidewater and piedmont. As no break occurred in the great mountain system south of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, the difficulties of cutting a passage through the towering wall of mountains proved a practical obstacle to crossing the mountain barrier.
The settlers of the Valley of Virginia and the North Carolina Piedmont region—English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Scotch, Irish, Welsh, and a few French—were the first pioneers of the Old Southwest. From the joint efforts of two strata of population, geographically, socially, and economically distinct—tidewater and piedmont, Old South and New South—originated and flowered the third and most incredible movement of westward expansion, opening with the surmounting of the mountain barrier and ending in the occupation and assumption of the vast medial valley of the continent.
Genealogy Tips: Use a map to track settlers through the Blue Ridge Mountains to the North Carolina fall line.
Source: The Conquest of the Old Southwest; the romantic story of the early pioneers into Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, 1740-1790 by Archibald Henderson.
