When Virginia Claimed Pittsburgh The 981 Project Podcast

The more I learn about the European kings who colonized the world, the more they blow my mind. For example, I was just in Barbados and picked up a book about its founding. Essentially, one of King James’s buddies fell into debt with some London merchants and figured the best way out was to start a colony in the Eastern Caribbean, as one does. He asked his king if he could have one, and the sovereign basically said, “Sure, take ‘em all.”
It’s always who you know.
Something not dissimilar happened when that same King James claimed North America from sea to shining sea and called it Virginia, after his cousin, Elizabeth I. Never did James mind the French and Spanish who had been there long before Jamestown failed, or the native people who’d been there for thousands of years before that. Colonizing kings were like toddlers, claiming everything as mine, mine, mine!
We’re on a roll here, so let’s talk about how William Penn got that huge land grant for the colony of Pennsylvania. Once again, debt was a factor. King Charles II of England (grandson to James I) had a large loan with Penn's father (also named William). When Penn pere died, the king settled the debt by granting Penn fils about 40,000 square miles west and south of New Jersey. Penn called it the “sylvania” (Latin for “woods”). Penn + sylvania = Pennsylvania.
Now, to the promised story about Virginia and Pittsburgh. This map will help. As you can see, there were boundary disputes aplenty, including the one in the southwest corner that’s of interest to us.
To set the stage, the French and Indian Wars, which ended in 1763 with The Treaty of Paris, included a proclamation from King George III that forbade all settlements west of a line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains. The Ohio Country was delineated as an Indian Reserve.
Surprise, surprise, white settlers kept exploring and moving into these western lands, leading to a series of conflicts, mostly with Shawnee people, who had historical hunting rights south of the river, from which they launched cross-river attacks.
Enter Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of the colony of Virginia. In early 1774, he directed the Virginia militia to seize Fort Pitt and rename it Fort Dunmore to prepare for marching into war with the Shawnee. Dunmore used shrewd logic to justify this power play against Pennsylvania. He admitted that the land once belonged to Pennsylvania, but claimed that they lost the claim during the long French and Indian War, and the crown naturally absorbed title. Bottom line: Dunmore said Pittsburgh belonged to Virginia as a crown colony (Pennsylvania was a “restoration” colony). As the kids would say, what a baller.
Dunmore/Virginia/Britain prevailed against the Shawnee Chief Cornstalk at the Battle of Point Pleasant in October, 1774. Before all of his troops arrived home, the Revolutionary War had kicked off with battles at Lexington and Concord. Dunmore, a British loyalist, was now in trouble.
I can’t tell you Dunmore’s story any better than the The Baltzer Meyer Historical Society Library and Museum:
Dunmore’s British Royal Governorship made him loyal to the crown. As a result, he became an adversary of the colonists. The day after the beginning of the Revolutionary War in April 1775, Dunmore ordered the seizure of weapons and gunpowder from the colonial magazine in Williamsburg, Virginia and had them transferred to a British ship. His deceptive reasoning for this action was his concern that rebellious slaves might get their hands on the arms. Furthermore, on November 7, 1775 Dunmore issued a proclamation offering freedom to all slaves if they became members of the British military and declared their loyalty to the British resistance. Because slavery was the dominant form of colonial labor in Virginia, Dunmore concluded that the fear of emancipation and the arming of slaves would quash colonial insurrection. These contradictory measures, indicating his British allegiance,