Note (return) — Chapter XI

The Great Kanawha Valley long had a romantic interest for Englishmen concerned in Western lands. It was in the grant to the old Ohio Company; but that corporation, handicapped in many ways, was practically dead by the time of Lord Dunmore's war. It had many rivals, more or less ephemeral, among them the scheme of George Mercer (1773) to have the territory between the Alleghanies and the Ohio—the West Virginia of to-day—erected into the "Province of Vandalia," with himself as governor, and his capital at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. Washington owned a ten-thousand-acre tract on both sides of the river, commencing a short distance above the mouth, which he surveyed in person, in October, 1770; and in 1773 we find him advertising to sell or lease it; among the inducements he offered was, "the scheme for establishing a new government on the Ohio," and the contiguity of his lands "to the seat of government, which, it is more than probable, will be fixed at the mouth of the Great Kanawha." Had not the Revolution broken out, and nipped this and many another budding plan for Western colonization, there is little doubt that what we call West Virginia would have been established as a state, a century earlier than it was.A