Goochland County, Virginia: History
=== Native Americans ===
See Native American tribes in Virginia
Long before the arrival of Europeans in the 17th century, all of the territory of Virginia, including the Piedmont area, was populated by various tribes of Native Americans. They were the historic tribes descended from thousands of years of succeeding and varied indigenous cultures. Among the historic tribes in the Piedmont were the Monacan, who were recorded as having several villages west of what the colonists later called Manakin Town on the James River.
They and other Siouan tribes traditionally competed with and were in conflict with the members of the Powhatan Confederacy, Algonquian-speaking tribes who generally inhabited the coastal Tidewater area along the Atlantic and the rivers feeding it. They also were subject to raids by Iroquois nations from the north, who were based south of the Great Lakes in present-day New York and Pennsylvania.
By the end of the 17th century, the Monacan had been decimated by warfare and infectious diseases carried by the mostly English colonists and traders; their survivors were absorbed into other Siouan tribes.
Portions of the historic Three Chopt Trail, a Native American trail, run through a large portion of the county. The trail was marked by three hatchet chops in trees to show the way. The modern-day U.S. Route 250 roughly follows this route from Richmond to Charlottesville.
In 1634, the colonial government organized the territory of Virginia into eight shires, to be governed as shires in England. Henrico was one of these shires.
Among the earliest European settlers in this area of the Piedmont were several hundred French Huguenot religious refugees, who were given land in 1700 and 1701 by the Crown and colonial authorities about 20 miles above the falls of the James River. They settled the villages collectively known as Manakin-Sabot in this area. Soon they moved out to farms and plantations they developed. In neighboring Powhatan County, to the south across the James, they settled Manakin Town, but by 1750 had mostly moved out to farms.
Goochland was founded in 1728 as the first county formed from Henrico Shire, followed by Chesterfield County in 1749. Goochland originally included all of the land from Tuckahoe Creek, on both sides of the James River, west as far as the Blue Ridge Mountains. In its original form, Goochland contained the modern counties of Goochland, Powhatan, Cumberland, Fluvanna, Buckingham, Nelson, and Amherst, in their entireties. In addition, the northern sections of Appomattox, Campbell, and Bedford, and the southern two-thirds of Albemarle County were also within Goochland's original boundaries. The creation of Albemarle County in 1744 and Cumberland County in 1749 removed most of Goochland's southern and western territory, reducing it to its modern size and boundaries.
The county was named for Sir William Gooch, 1st Baronet, the royal lieutenant governor from 1727 to 1749. The nominal governor, the Earl of Albemarle, had remained in England. As acting royal governor, Gooch promoted settlement of the Virginia backcountry as a means to insulate the Virginia colony from Native American and New France settlements in the Ohio Country. As the colonists moved into the Piedmont west of Richmond, they first developed tobacco plantations like those in Tidewater Virginia. Following the American Revolutionary War, tobacco did not yield as high profits as markets changed. …