The American writer Washington Irving, who died in 1859, described the Shenandoah Valley as "equal to the promised land in fertility and far superior to it for beauty." Just five years after Irving’s death, a local farmer deemed it a "desert." In the interim, the most beautiful valley in Virginia had become the focus of some of the fiercest fighting of the American Civil War, which culminated in ‘the Burning’ of 1864, when General Philip Sheridan and the Federal Army laid waste to the valley, leaving it a smoldering wilderness.
Shenandoah (meaning ‘daughter of the stars’) was the name the American Indians gave to the river that flows along the bottom of the valley. Shenandoah Valley is some 150 miles (240 kilometers) long and averages about 25 miles (40 kilometers) wide. Records indicate that more than a century elapsed between the arrival of white settlers in Virginia in 1607 and their discovery of this region. In 1716, an expedition across the Blue Ridge Mountains under the leadership of Alexander Spottiswood, the Governor of Virginia (who drank a toast in champagne and claret to the party’s good fortune in uncovering an area of such beauty), opened the way for white settlement. Until then, the valley had been the exclusive domain of the Shawnee and Iroquois native American peoples (who hold that the word Shenandoah derives from their language). The trail that they created along the bottom of the valley became a major route for further expansion westwards and is today an interstate highway.
The settlers who were attracted to the valley itself from the 1720s onwards were of three racial origins but came from two main areas; most were German Lutherans and Scottish-Irish Presbyterians from Pennsylvania, and there was a trickle of English from eastern Virginia. What they all had in common was their reliance on the family unit as a workforce (there was almost no slavery in the Shenandoah Valley) and their dedication to an agricultural way of life – the fertile soil was suitable for dairy and livestock farming, and for growing both fruit and grain.
The valley’s natural advantages made it an obvious location for the Confederate Army under General Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson – a Virginian himself – to shelter during the Civil War (1861-1865). Its soil provided all the food the soldiers needed (indeed they called the valley their breadbasket); the old Indian trails along its floor offered an ideal means of moving troops and supplies quickly and in secret; and the whole valley, sheltered by the Shenandoah and Allegheny Mountains to the west and the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east, was easily defended. Having suffered several crushing defeats in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862, and dismayed at renewed fighting in the area, on September 29, 1864 Sheridan ordered his cavalry to burn anything that might be of use to the Confederates. His troops took him at his word: crops, mills and granaries, farms, livestock, and homes were all set ablaze.
It must have seemed to the survivors of the war that the valley would never bloom again. But the healing forces of nature, combined with the perseverance and hard work of local people, in time re-created the landscape. Today, the valley’s orchards provide more than half of Virginia’s apples, its pastures produce all the state’s poultry and the majority of its beef and vegetables, and its vineyards yield many fine wines. Most of the trees in the valley have become re-established.
In 1926, 194,000 acres (78,000 hectares) of the Shenandoah Valley were designated a national park. In addition to woodlands and meadows, the park includes some 60 peaks over 2,000 feet (600 meters) in height, and every year thousands of visitors flock to enjoy the spectacular scenery only 75 miles (120 kilometers) from the nation’s capital city, Washington D.C.
The garden of Virginia, Shenandoah possesses many of nature’s bounties and it is a cradle of history. But, above all, it is proof of the power of nature which, in little over a hundred years, has restored what was ravaged so thoroughly.