Tho’ these people are very poor, yet they seem very cheerful.

So, if any of you have talked to me at all this semester, I am at the earliest stages of my dissertation work. I am planning on looking at a community of French Protestants who settled at Manakin Town, near what is today Richmond. The land that the 250+ settlers were given through a royal land grant was intended to be in the Norfolk area, but upon their arrival, they were told that they were to settle a land previously occupied by Monocan natives west of the waterfalls on the James River. From my understanding of the formative years of the settlement, even though the land was arable and harvests were good, over half of the initial population perished within 2 years.

What they would have initially came upon was a thickly forested area along the river. Being French, the land that they occupied was divided up into this, long sections. All of the plots back up to the river, as the English hoped that the Huguenots would take place in commerce, as they did at their previous residence, London. These land divisions were doled out relatively equally, but owners did not possess necessarily contiguous plots. The English intercessor to the King, William Byrd, also held the best plot of land in the middle of the grant, which was by far the most flat and easily accessible to the river. Examining the DEM data by itself, it is clear that while the land was relatively flat, it would have been far more difficult to farm these plots in the way that they were arranged. The area of the land grant that lies along the James River, that would have been the most productive were in the hands of Byrd, while most of the French colonists only had a meager amount of flat land to settle upon.

Laying over a topo layer over the DEM data only reinforces this notion, as most of this area is forested still today. The white areas are those that are now open, illustrating how little progress the French and their modern counterparts made when it came to moving deeper into the forest to farm. There is currently a road, which shows up in the 1929 maps, where most of the developed and recognizable land development stops. This is unique, as many of the plots went far further than that road, but any sign of them is no longer present, whereas it is still obvious in the easily manageable land is cultivated even today. The importance of looking at the topo map, is that it includes the local features that currently exist, but rather places the topographical features of the landscape in the context of civilization.

Perhaps one of the most insightful overlays that I constructed was one that included a DOQQ (Digital Orthophoto Quarter-Quadrangle) layer. A DOQQ is a digitally compiled image that combines the visual elements of a photo with the geometric correction of a topographic map. Luckily for us, NSD has an option to use DOQ’s, and it will automatically place the layer exactly over the DEM data! The DOQ data that I used contains an artificial color scheme, which highlights and emphasizes the differences between soil, trees, etc. What the DOQ data reveals is the extent that the land was developed, and some of the remnants of three centuries of agriculture. This map was the most useful when beginning to understand the ways that the French refugees settled in the Americas. The resources that the French refugees had were poor, the land they were given was not easily adaptable to settlement, but they survived and eventually prospered. The rest of the story has yet to have been thoroughly analyzed, yet there are numerous passing references to the French Huguenots at Manakin Town.

Constructing these maps was a far more difficult task than I had originally thought. I began the project well over a week ago, playing around with NSD and trying to understand the “lay of the land”. What I did learn was how to import the DEM elevation maps, as layers from .jpg’s and how to adequately learn how to use the camera angles to illustrate the points that I wanted to highlight. At this moment, I still cannot utilize, or even access, the Light menu or the Background Trees option. For some reason, the OS X version is very picky on both of the machines that I have tried to use. Thus, my plain landscape does not have any trees, which is not from a lack of effort. Trust me.

It was only in the final stages of trying to figure out how these maps can be utilized for historical purposes that I really began to use some of the more advanced features of NSD, including the overlays of DOQ data, and topographic maps. Since the Sanford maps that we have used in class so often have little relevance to my area, using .jpg’s and resizing my data didn’t really help me. I initially started out with a screen shot of a Google Maps overview, and laid it over the topography to moderate success. I was going to use this is one of my examples until I found the DOQ data while searching in vain for the infrared maps we discussed a few weeks back.

I still think that I haven’t yet scratched the surface in terms of successfully using NSD and 3D representations of the area I’m studying. I think that I don’t yet know enough of the area to fully grasp what I need to study or analyze in terms of the topography. For my last shot (which is at 5x vertical exaggeration for effect), I took a shot of what the French settlers may have encountered as they were traveling up the James River in 1700. What the picture shows is an area that appears to be hospitable, but in fact would have been totally foreign to the religious refugees placed at the edge of the known world in the colonial wilderness.

They were described by Franz Louis Michel, a Swiss geologist in 1702, “Tho’ these people are very poor, yet they seem very cheerful.” The rich soil of interior Virginia was rewarding their efforts, and the French were beginning to integrate into the colonial frontier. Within 50 years of their arrival, most historians claim that they had completely integrated into English colonial society and were indistinguishable from their English neighbors.

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