Kanawha Tracts Survey

This survey, probably from around 1774, shows eight tracts of land along the Kanawha River granted to George Washington and other members of the Virginia Regiment for their service in the Seven Years’ War. Governor Robert Dinwiddie issued a proclamation in 1754 which promised a division of 200,000 acres of western land to people willing to fight in the Virginia Regiment. After the war, the King’s Proclamation of 1763 superseded Governor Dinwiddie’s promise, reserving all territory west of the Appalachian Mountains for Britain’s Indigenous allies. George Washington spent decades fighting for the titles to bounty lands on the Ohio River, and in the late 1760s, before he was legally allowed to do so, he collaborated with his fellow Virginia Regiment veteran William Crawford to survey and patent these lands. Washington wrote to Crawford in 1767 that he “can never look upon that Proclamation in any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedien to quiet the Minds of the Indians & must fall of course in a few years.” Washington ended up claiming for himself what he described as the “first choice” of the land—more than 19,000 acres “on the margin of the Rivers.”