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Disclaimer
The opinions and choices of material to include
in this manuscript are those of the author. The US Government, the
US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Conservation Training
Center did not design or direct the writing of this manuscript and
are not responsible for the accuracy, opinions or choice of materials.
The author undertook this project solely to satisfy his curiosity,
working on it intermittently during the occasional free moment of
work time, as well as evenings and weekends over a several-year
time span. As with any written history, the topics that are featured
and the interpretation of events in this work are influenced by
the biases and perceptions of the author, which include having grown
up in a Scandinavian farming community in west-central Wisconsin.
I have strived to be as inclusive as possible, so attention to certain
cultural and socio-economic groups in this history should not be
misconstrued as cultural myopia, but is instead an artifact of when,
how, and for whom, public records were archived and indexed, as
well as the tendency of our culture to follow and record the activities
of limited members of a community or family. There are many voices
missing in this work, not because these voices are unimportant or
uninteresting, but because of the great difficulty, perhaps impossibility
in many cases, of locating their words or accounts of their activities
in the Terrapin Neck area. As I continue to search for information
to fill some of these gaps, I make no claim to having written the
history of the NCTC property, but merely a history that is at best
incomplete, yet hopefully still interesting and useful. Tracking
down and presenting the recorded history of the NCTC property has
been a continual challenge, and has caused the author’s wife
to use the word “obsessed” on several occasions. Tracking
down and presenting the un-recorded history of the Terrapin Neck
area, in order to capture those missing voices, is a challenge that
may only be accomplished with your help. Copies of the manuscript
have been made available by NCTC as a courtesy to guests and others
who may be interested in local history.
Preface
My purpose for writing this history of the
NCTC property and surrounding lands has been to describe the families
that lived here, their strategies for making a living from the natural
resources it had to offer, and their activities during the time
they occupied the land. Most of my professional career has been
spent as a field biologist, and I don’t have a long list of
credentials as either a writer or historian. I simply ran across
a story that intrigued me more and more as the details fell in place,
and felt compelled to share it with others who might be interested
in local history. My curiosity was first piqued during several afternoons
I spent rambling over the property documenting the presence and
distribution of plants. Old foundations and fence lines, broken
pottery, bits of brick and glass all suggested a long history of
use. Who were these people? What did the landscape look like before
and after they arrived? Archaeological reports describing thousands
of years of human occupation, the results of surveys and research
conducted prior to the construction of NCTC facilities, also furthered
an interest in who had lived here in the past. Local histories sometimes
mentioned the people who had lived in the Terrapin Neck area, and
I thought it might be interesting and useful to put these anecdotes
and histories in a more systematic framework that would draw a more
complete picture of their lives here. To the extent possible I have
tried to make flesh and blood people- with motivations and real
family histories- out of names, dates and various legal documents.
For source materials I wanted to utilize reliably documented accounts
and public records, which has led to many hours in archives, libraries
and courthouses in West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania
and Kentucky researching land grants, deeds, wills, letters and
family genealogies; much time was also spent double-checking other
authors’ citations. Published “family lore” accounts
tended to be riddled with uncertainties and outright impossibilities
and were therefore avoided unless the accounts were confirmed by
other evidence. Even so, I expect that there are mistakes and misinterpretations
in this work, and though the writing style may seem confident of
the facts, I remain open to other lines of evidence that may present
alternative views. I started this project a tabula rasa with no
particular historical axe to grind other than a desire for an accurate
portrayal based on objective data.
Court houses and public records are excellent sources for objective
facts, but have a drawback in that they tend to narrowly focus on
the activities of landowners who, in this case, have been mostly
relatively wealthy Caucasian males (with some notable exceptions);
this history would be much richer and would benefit greatly from
an equal amount of detail concerning Native Americans, female family
members, the slaves, the indentured servants and hired help, the
subsistence farmers, renters, and other cultural groups who spent
a significant part of their lives in the Terrapin Neck area, but
whose thoughts and activities went unrecorded. I have included their
stories when they could be found, but unfortunately most of the
details of their lives can only be imagined or extrapolated from
other sources in the region. (If you are aware of sources I could
use, please let me know). The public records I used may also leave
the impression that family life centered around the acquisition,
disposal or debated ownership of various pieces of property, which
is of course misleading. Again we are left with trying to imagine
their daily activities, their hopes and dreams, and what brought
joy, frustration and meaning to the families and individuals herein
described.
While reading the following Eurocentric version of events keep in
mind that for a significant period of time after the arrival of
Europeans, the most common faces on the property were not white.
One of the nearly invisible groups in the historical record from
about 1750 through at least the 1850’s is also likely to have
been the largest – the enslaved people of African descent.
Almost 40 percent of the people living in Virginia at the time of
the first census in 1790 were held in slavery, while free blacks
made up an additional 2 percent of the populace. Probate inventories
and census records show that 10 to 20 slaves were based at the Springwood
property at any one time, and an equal number were associated with
the RiverView Farm portion of the property. This suggests that on
the property that has become the National Conservation Training
Center, for about one hundred years the number of people living
in chattel slavery outnumbered those of European descent by a ratio
sometimes larger than 2:1. We get an occasional glimpse of their
existence from probate inventories or tax assessments that include
such information as first names, ages, and changes of ownership,
but details of their families and experiences are mostly missing.
That’s a lot of missing history, and I have tried to honor
their lives by including their names whenever I could find them.
I wish to thank several people who encouraged me in this work, including
Mark Madison, FWS historian at NCTC, Karel Whyte, Swearingen family
genealogist, Don Wood and Galtjo Geertsema at the Berkeley County
Historical Society who were generous in helping me locate maps and
innumerable details, and André Darger, former NCTC course
leader who provided a forum for some of this information in his
Employee Foundations course; the course provided a strong incentive
to try to get the details right. Jessie Hendrix and Elizabeth Hyman
were among those who were generous in taking the time to check for
accuracy, and were themselves significant sources of information.
Any mistakes that remain are all mine.
A note about the maps:
surveys and maps obtained from Galtjo Geertsema,
surveyor from Martinsburg, WV, were very valuable. Further deed
descriptions obtained in the Berkeley (WV) Jefferson (WV), Frederick
(MD and VA), Washington (MD) County courthouses, also were used
to help decipher what sometimes amounted to a quagmire of distances
and bearings used to describe new property boundaries, portions
of which were just copied verbatim from earlier surveys, mistakes
and all. By using both early and later surveys, and surveys from
adjacent properties that described the same lines, I have a reasonable
degree of confidence in the maps, especially those near present-day
NCTC. The property boundaries for Thomas Swearingen’s heirs
west of Shepherdstown in the enclosed 1770 map are based on Fairfax
grants in the 1750s and 1760s and assume that parcels were not sold
or added to in the meantime. The archives in the Kentucky History
Center in Frankfort, Kentucky were invaluable in locating various
land grants and other details related to the Revolutionary War period.
A note
about names:
Several of the family names prominent in
this history have been standardized to a common spelling. John Van
Meter’s name in other publications and documents may be spelled
in various ways including Van Metre, Vanmater and Vanmetre. Joist
Hite usually spelled his name Jost Heydt, but records may show Joost
Heyd and other combinations. Swearingen may appear as Swaringen,
Sweringen, VanSwearingen and other phonetic characterizations.
For the sake of simplicity I have referred
to the western portion of the NCTC property as RiverView Farm and
the eastern portion as Springwood throughout the document. It should
be understood that both these names are of relatively recent vintage:
RiverView Farm first appears on a deed in 1896, and Springwood is
probably mid 20th century. Springwood in the past has had other
appellations including Mapleshade (1920s) and Shepherd’s Lower
Farm (1870s-1890s). Nearby Shepherdstown has had other names such
as Mecklenburg or Packhorse Ford which will occasionally appear
in the text. Because property boundaries have changed over the years
I also occasionally refer to now-adjacent properties as being part
of RiverView Farm; for example the property now known as the Lost
Drake Farm southwest of the NCTC entrance was the former home of
Hezekiah Swearingen who eventually inherited the adjacent tract
to the north that became RiverView Farm, which was largely developed
by his son Van. The property now known as the Wild Goose Farm was
also Swearingen property from 1828 to 1838. So to reduce confusion,
in this document RiverView Farm will be used to describe those lands
that were acquired by Hezekiah Swearingen from his father (who once
owned both Springwood and RiverView Farm) in the late 18th century
and remained with his heirs through the Civil War, while Springwood
refers to the eastern portion of NCTC held by the Shepherds from
about 1807 to 1907 that now includes the campus and the Hendrix
life estate. How - and perhaps why - the Shepherd family acquired
the Springwood property in the 19th century is a major theme of
the following compilation.
A History
of the National Conservation Training Center Property Abstract
The following is a time line of significant
events that have affected the land and ownership of the property
now comprising the National Conservation Training Center (NCTC),
with an emphasis on the period from early European settlement until
shortly after the Revolutionary War. Included also are a few pages
on 19th and 20th century history. Archeological evidence has shown
that Native Americans utilized the site that became NCTC at least
intermittently for more than 8000 years, and suggests that seasonal
occupation ended about 700 years ago. European settlement of this
area began in the 1720s, with newly arrived German settlers most
recently from Pennsylvania, and other families especially from the
Monocacy River valley in Maryland taking up lands along the western
bank of the Potomac, then known as the Cohongoroota River. Some
early European settlers in this area experienced many problems acquiring
title to the land they occupied because of competing land claims
of the Hite family and the Northern Neck Proprietary of Lord Fairfax.
Two young Swearingen brothers, members of a slave-holding family
with plantations in Maryland, acquired land near present-day Shepherdstown
and on Terrapin Neck in the 1740s and 1750s, about twenty years
after Europeans first began occupying the area. They first acquired
patented property originally surveyed through the Hites and later
also acquired grants through Lord Fairfax. Living on the frontier
of a new country required an ability to run a self-sufficient plantation.
They raised dairy and beef cattle, hogs, sheep and horses, grew
corn, wheat, tobacco, rye and flax, and cultivated apple and pear
orchards. They also must have raised other crops such as hemp and
various other grains, fruits and vegetables commonly grown at the
time, both as cash crops and to feed themselves and their slaves.
Thomas Swearingen ran plantations, a mill near Scrabble and a ferry
service across the Potomac, while Van Swearingen was a sheriff,
militia leader, and owner of the plantation that became NCTC. The
Swearingens were intimately involved with the political, military
and ecclesiastical issues of the day, particularly at local and
regional levels. Their period of time here was a turbulent one,
both locally and throughout the colonies, characterized by over
40 years of strife beginning with the French and Indian War in the
1750s, with various family members engaged in military struggles
through the 1790s. Some of the Swearingen property and wealth was
lost after the Revolutionary War because of an ancient lawsuit between
competing land claims. The 1790s were years of transition, with
deaths and lawsuits bringing about changes in land ownership in
the Terrapin Neck area, though the Swearingens continued to run
a plantation later known as RiverView Farm - now the western section
of NCTC - until the Civil War. The eastern section of the NCTC property,
referred to as the Springwood estate in this document, became part
of the wealthy Shepherd family holdings at the beginning of the
19th century; they retained it for about a century. Parts of the
original Swearingen estate were consolidated into a single property
again in the early 1940s by the Hendrix family. A member of this
family sold the property to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in
March of 1992.
I consider this a work in progress and
welcome new sources of information and further details on any of
the topics I have written about.
Dan Everson
NCTC Course Leader
Phone: 304/876 7484
email: dan_everson@fws.gov
    
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