When I started to look for images to illustrate our new entry about the Fincastle Resolutions, I figured that a map was a good place to start. Where was Fincastle County? What part of Virginia did it represent?
It turns out that Fincastle County, as a political entity, wasn’t just a portion of what I, or many of us, think of as “Virginia.” It sprawled into what is now the entire state of Kentucky and a big hunk of West Virginia.
I realized that this was an opportunity to represent part of the history of Virginia in the American Revolution that can be hard to wrap your mind around without visualizations. When someone like Thomas Jefferson wrote about “Virginia,” what did he mean?
Using some story mapping skills that I picked up in our recent series Urban Renewal in Virginia, I investigated how I could show the changing, hotly contested, western borders of Virginia. Using the incredible data provided by the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries compiled by the Newberry Library, I put together a visual narrative of Virginia’s western border claims up to and just after the 1774 Fincastle Resolutions.
Making this map helped me understand some of the complicated land claims that led to the American Revolution, but it also made me aware of the limits of this kind of spatial understanding. The men who signed the Fincastle Resolutions would not have understood the precise twists and turns of the Ohio River in the way that digital mapping can present them, even as they confidently claimed all territory up to that border. And the Indigenous people who lived and hunted in the territory Virginians called “Fincastle County” knew the land with an intimacy and detail that didn’t require the surveying equipment western settlers used to divvy up property.
I set out to answer the question of what Jefferson pictured in his mind when he talked about “Virginia,” and in the end I’m not sure I answered it. But even so, I hope to have made a useful tool for students of Virginia history. Check out our Fincastle County Story Map.
