in fee simple. Litigation kept land titles uncertain
here, for many years. Similarly, Beverley's manor, about Staunton,
represented a grant of 118,000 acres to Beverley and his associates on
condition of placing the proper number of families on the tract.[93:1]
Thus speculative planters on this frontier shared in the movement of
occupation and made an aristocratic element in the up-country; but the
increasing proportion of Scotch-Irish immigrants, as well as German
settlers, together with the contrast in natural conditions, made the
interior a different Virginia from that of the tidewater.

As settlement ascended the Rappahannock, and emigrants began to enter
the Valley from the north, so, contemporaneously, settlement ascended
the James above the falls, succeeding to the posts of the
fur-traders.[93:2] Goochland County was set off in 1728, and the growth
of population led, as early as 1729, to proposals for establishing a
city (Richmond) at the falls. Along the upper James, as on the
Rappahannock, speculative planters bought headrights and located
settlers and tenants to hold their grants.[93:3] Into this region came
natives of Virginia, emigrants from the British isles, and scattered
representatives of other lands, some of them coming up the James, others
up the York, and still others arriving with the southward-moving current
along both sides of the Blue Ridge.

Before 1730 few settlers lived above the mouth of the Rivanna. In 1732
Peter Jefferson patented a thousand acres at the eastern opening of its
mountain gap, and here, under frontier conditions, Thomas Jefferson was
born in 1743 near his later estate of Monticello. About him were pioneer
farmers, as well as foresighted engrossers of the land. In the main his
country was that of a democratic frontier people--Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, and other sects,[94:1] out of
sympathy with the established church and the landed gentry of the
lowlands. This society in which he was born, was to find in Jefferson a
powerful exponent of its ideals.[94:2] Patrick Henry was born in 1736
above the falls, not far from Richmond, and he also was a mouthpiece of
interior Virginia in the Revolutionary era. In short, a society was
already forming in the Virginia Piedmont which was composed of many
sects, of independent yeomen as well as their great planter leaders--a
society naturally expansive, seeing its opportunity to deal in
unoccupied lands along the frontier w