Tracing the earliest German Settlers in the Shenandoah River Valley.
By Robert A. Selig
Unless you are deeply invested in the history of Colonial Virginia during the early 18th century you probably never heard the name of Adam Müller or Muller or Miller. Müller is reputed to have been the first European settler in the Shenandoah River Valley in 1716 or 1717. But if you have ever driven through the beautiful Shenandoah Valley on US Route 340 from Winchester through Page County and Massanutten toward Waynesboro, you will find it easy to understand why German immigrants such as Adam Müller wanted to settle and raise their families there. So, we know when Müller and fellow Germans arrived in the valley, but then the question arises: why did it take settlers almost a century to move the not quite 200 miles from Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, founded in 1632, to the northward and into the Shenandoah River Valley with its rich soil and lush pasture? Or the equally 200 miles or so from Lancaster in Pennsylvania? The short answer is: what kept white settlers out of the 70+-mile long valley stretching from Fort Royal to the Potomac River at Harper’s Ferry were the Blue Ridge Mountains. The first European to cross the Blue Ridge to explore the valley was the German physician Johann Lederer. Born in Hamburg around 1644, Lederer, medical degree in hand, arrived in Virginia sometime before 1670. That year Virginia Governor Sir William Berkeley (1605-1677) commissioned Lederer to cross the mountains and find a passage to the Great Lakes and on to the Pacific Ocean, which he believed lay just a few weeks’ journey beyond the mountains. Setting out from Chickahominy on 9 March 1669/70, Lederer and the three members of his expedition on 19 March were the first Europeans to map the Shenandoah Valley and the Alleghenys. In May and August 1670 Lederer conducted two more expeditions. His map, printed in London in 1672, and the description of the Native Americans he encountered provide invaluable information about the area and its people before European settlement. Lederer decided to return to Germany sometime in early 1675; his date of death is unknown, but about 35 years later in 1706 and 1712, Swiss explorers Franz Ludwig Michel (ca. 1680–Post-1714) and Christoph von Graffenried (1661-1743) mapped the Shenandoah River Valley with the aim of settling Swiss and German immigrants there.
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