UVA experts to research history and culture in America’s Great Valley

From the top of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Shenandoah Valley stretches almost as far to the west as the eye can see, from Waynesboro to Staunton to where it butts up against the Allegheny Front of the Appalachian Mountains.

But that’s not even the half of it. The valley also stretches from the deep South to the Great White North.

“The Shenandoah Valley is part of a large valley complex called the Great Valley, geologically, and it extends from Quebec to Alabama. It’s one geologic feature,” said Andrew Johnston, a professor with the University of Virginia School of Architecture. “I taught a class last fall called Cultural Landscapes of the Great Valley, and we broke it into 14 valleys, with the Shenandoah and the Cumberland kind of anchoring it.”

The Great Valley is a central feature of the Appalachian Mountains, a chain of lowlands stretching more than 1,000 miles. Andrew Johnston, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, says there are no large-scale social and cultural studies of the valley. (Photos by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)

The names differ, but the geologic feature remains the same. The Shenandoah Valley is connected to the Cumberland; the Cumberland is connected to the Lehigh; the Lehigh is connected to the Hudson, and it all starts in Quebec, Canada, with the Champlain Valley.

On the southern end, the Great Valley runs from Shenandoah to the James River, and from the New River to the Coosa Valley in Alabama. For centuries, it has been a stopping point for pioneers leaving the coastal settlements on their way west.

The Great Valley has served as a stopover for people moving into the mountains and foothills of Appalachia. And while Appalachian culture, from Alabama to Pennsylvania, has been studied and cataloged for years, less attention has been paid to the valley as a cultural region.

“There are geologic studies and ecological studies – plants and animals and such – but for a big-scale social and cultural study, no, I haven’t found one,” Johnston said.

That’s about to change. Johnston is joining UVA colleagues Jessica Sewell, a professor of urban and environmental planning in the Architecture School and associate director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes in the School of Architecture, and Jinny Turman, an associate professor of history and co-director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at UVA’s College at Wise, to spend the summer researching the region’s cultural landscape, the relationship between people and the valley’s environment and how the land shaped towns, architecture, agricultural practices, industry, and culture.

Jinny Turman is an associate professor of history and co-director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at UVA’s College at Wise. (Photo by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)

The project has received a $15,000 award from UVA’s 3Cavaliers program in the Office of the Vice President for Research. The program supports early-stage research collaboration between three UVA faculty members from at least two different disciplines.

The trio hopes their research will foster academic and public interest in the region, with Appalachia and the Great Valley being seen as interconnected. They want to understand how museums and historic sites in the Great Valley interpret their history and encourage them to consider expanding regional interpretations of the region’s history and its many cultures.

Jessica Sewell is a professor of urban and environmental planning in the UVA School of Architecture and associate director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes in the School of Architecture. (Photo by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)

“The Great Valley was the first frontier for so much of the nation’s development; the Hudson Valley was the frontier for people who came from around New York City,” Sewell said. “People were looking for land to farm, freedom of religion and freedom to follow cultural practices. What they had in common was they wanted to survive and thrive, and so it became a place of tolerance for different groups.”

From Native Americans to European settlers, English and Scots-Irish, the valley served as a new home or a stopover on the way to the mountains and further west. The diverse populations that shared the Great Valley created new ways of being American.

Colonization of the territory resulted in interactions between Europeans and Native Americans that created distinctive, blended cultural practices, but also resulted in cultural annihilation for certain tribes.

“We tend to see that people with more means settled in the richest valley bottoms, and they acquired large tracts of land,” she said. “Those who did well held onto their land, put up mills and had access to waterways. The others had to make a go of it in higher elevations and upper valley bottoms. There’s a lot of cultural blending, but economics is a factor in who gets to settle, where and when.”