John Smith’s map of Virginia, engraved by William Hole and published in 1612. Public domain.
Virginia gentlemen took a huge grant on the Ohio, and the fort they were required to build helped start a world war.
A family that went to settle the company’s land walked into country France and several Native nations already claimed.
A planter’s son who went west as a surveyor or a settler was paid in a promise of acres that a war could wipe out.
Partners in the company, including men of the Lee and Washington families, treated two hundred thousand acres as property to survey, settle, and sell.
In 1749 the Ohio Company of Virginia received a grant of two hundred thousand acres near the forks of the Ohio, with more land promised if it built a fort and seated families.
France claimed the same rivers and answered with forts of its own.
The company’s surveys and Virginia’s militia turned a land speculation into the fight that opened the Seven Years’ War.
Ohio Company grant (1749); Fred Anderson, Crucible of War (2000)