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Convinced that settlements were essential to controlling land, Virginia promoted western expansion by offering speculators a thousand acres for every family they could place west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Andrew Lewis, a young surveyor, mapped fifty thousand acres in the Greenbrier Valley for a land company owned by his father and other wealthy Virginia planters.

Explorer Christopher Gist claimed two hundred thousand acres for the Ohio Company which promised to settle one hundred families in the Ohio Valley and build a fort for their protection.

Virginia’s greatest landowner, Lord Fairfax, hired an ambitious seventeen-year-old to survey his western lands. After three years, George Washington knew western Virginia as well as anyone and was determined to own some of it himself.