CHAPTER XIV.

'The New State, West Virginia.

T

KliMANS, ami especial]) 7 Pennsylvania-Germans, largely participated in the settlement of the western mountain region of Virginia, now known as “ West Virginia,'' the “Little ^Mountain State,” or “the Daughter of the Old Dominion.” Portions of West Virginia adjoining the Ohio, Potomac, Kanawha and New river show to this day many traces of an early German immigration, reinforced at the close of the last century by the numerous colonization of German prisoners of war. It has already been stated that Gen. Washington valued the Germans as desirable colonists, and donated in 1770 by the English government with 10,000 acres of land south of the Ohio, and by purchase the owner of large estates on the Kanawha and Greenbrier rivers, he intended to colonize these with German settlers. The realization of his

plan was delayed by the Revolutionary War; but after its close he invited the Germau prisoners of war to stay in the New World, and a very large number of them accepted his favorable proposal and built their cabins in Greenbrier, Pocahontas, Nicholas, Fayette and Kanawha counties.

The very first German immigration to the wild and roman­tic valleys of the Alleghanics occurred about the middle of the last century. The oppression of the English High Church and large land owners had driven them from their homesteads in Pennsylvania and Pastern Virginia. Separated from the civilized world, exposed to the attacks of the treacherous In­dians, they became a hardy, independent and even rough people. In the first part of this history it is stated that the