This website is to share information that I've gathered while researching the Williams family in Greenbrier County. If you have any information on any of the people in these files, please email me (greg@gregsmith.info) and share what you know. I would like for this to be a communal resource to help everyone researching these families.

Surnames I'm researching : Williams, McCoy, Ocheltree, Blake

Pages 21-23

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In 1763 the Indians completely destroyed two of the earliest settlements in Greenbrier County, the one on Muddy Creek and the other at the home of Archibald Clendenin, three miles southwest of Lewisburg, in the famous bluegrass plateau called The Levels. The men were all massacred except one, who, luckily, escaped. The women and children were taken as prisoners to the Indian towns in Ohio. The name "Savannah," given to The Levels by the Indians, was a word meaning "a cleared field or prairie."

In ages past this area was a vast lake, and, when first seen by the Indians, the tall trees ceased at its boundaries, and the many rich acres of the former lake bed contained only low scrub growth. At once the pioneers saw this advantage in the heavy task of felling trees and clearing land, and many of the first settlements were in this section.

There were no Indian towns in this region, but the dense forests, teeming with game, were a favorite hunting territory in which the Indians wished no interference. Every cabin and its occupants represented a threat which they determined to obliterate. Later settlers, profiting by the warning of these first tragedies, built sturdy log forts and stockades near their homes, and many lives were saved during later raids through the protection afforded by Fort Donnally, Fort Stuart, Fort Savannah, and other forts.

These pioneers were a staunch people, Scotch-Irish for the most part, and a few German, with persecution behind them and a determination in their hearts to be free. Having fled from Europe to Pennsylvania, they formed a part of the great westward movement coming to the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, between 1732 and 1745. Still eager for a country they could make their own, the more vigorous of the young men pushed from Augusta County west over the mountains into the wilderness that was to be Greenbrier.

It was not until after the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774, with its decisive defeat of the Indians, that the settlers felt really secure and the settlements became more permanent in character. One of the earliest and most important settlements had been at Frankford, ten miles northwest of Lewisburg. Colonel John Stuart, Robert McClanahan, William and Thomas Renick, William Hamilton, and others settled there in 1769.

Another settlement was made about the same time in the Williamsburg region, and some even earlier were in existence on Anthony Creek and also on Big Cleark Creek, in the remote western end of the county. Dr. Thomas Walker, exploring the western side of the Alleghanies in 1750, spoke of settlers on Anthony Creek. Captain Matthew Arbuckle, Captain Samuel McClung, Colonel Andrew Donnally, builder of Fort Donnally in Rader's Valley, which successfully withstood a determind Indian attack and seige in 1778, James Callison, Patrick Lockhart, Peter Van Biber, John McCoy, David Keeney, from whom Keeney's Knob takes its name, John Patton, and William Lewis were a few of the settlers in this region from the period from 1769 to 1773.

The first semblance of a road, little more than the trail made long before by the herds of buffalo in their yearly migrations to graze in The Levels, and used by the bands of Indian hunters, was more definitely cut through the mountains in 1774 by the army of General Lewis when it blazed the way to Point Pleasant. There after the road was known as "Lewis Trace." Steps were begun to secure a wagon road from Warm Springs to Lewisburg in 1781, and the road was built the following year.

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