VIRGINIA, MARYLAND, ET CAROLINA IN AMERICA SEPTENTRIONALI

In 1714, two critical events encouraged German settlement into the early southern Backcountry.  Alexander Spotswood, the royal lieutenant governor of Virginia, established the Germanna settlement in present-day Spotsylvania County, and John Baptist Homann, the famous cartographer of Nuremburg, Germany, published this map.  Homann’s map identifies Germanna as “Germantown,” or, in their native tongue, “Teutsche Staat.”  Over the following decades German settlers poured into western Maryland and Virginia and gradually down the Great Wagon Road into the Carolina Piedmont and East Tennessee.