OF WASHINGTON COUNTY, MARYLAND.
 

17
 

CHAPTER II
 

iHE pioneer who first ascended to the crest
of South Mountain and cast his eyes over
the valley stretching away to the foot
of North Mountain, which bounds the
landscape in front of him, viewed a picture to
which no descriptivre pen could do justice. IS
he had climbed up the eastern slope of the
South Mountain, above the present site of
Wolfsville, and through the gap until he came
out at the Black Rocks, a spot, which in its
romantic grandeur of ruggedness, has undergone
no sort of change since that hour, he must have
been indeed insensible if he did not pause here,
spell-bound at the scene which presented itself to
his eyes. If it appeared less beautiful to him
than the promised land did to Moses as he viewed
its vine clad hills and fertile valleys and streams
of running water from the summit of Nebo, it was
because he had not for forty years been traveling
through hot sands and naked rocks.

He stood upon the summit of a cliff one hun¬
dred feet down perpendicular; and from the base
of the cliff stretched a steep declivity, bearing no
vegetation, because among the huge rocks piled
and strewn and hurled against each other in some
volcanic upheaval, there is no earth in which it can
take root. To his right hand and to his left
stretched away mountaintop after mountaintop
covered with trees of great variety and form, and
reaching north and south, to the limits- of vision^
Away to the west stretched a beautiful plain —the
valley of the Antietam and the Conococheague,
covered with waving grass six feet in height.
Here and there the course of a stream was marked
by trees which fringed each bank.    He could have
 

seen columns of blue smoke ascending from clumps
of trees whicli surrounded gushing limestone
springs, marking the location of an Indian wllage.
He might have seen, away off in the distance,
where it breaks through the North Mountain on
its way to the sea, a small portion of the Potomac
or "Cohongoruton" river shimmering in the sun
like molten silver. The awful silence around him
would be broken only by the Cry of the eagle over
his head or the howl of the wolf, or perhaps the
whoop of a savage, resting in a suiDposed secure
possession of this beautiful hunting ground, un¬
mindful of the wave of humanity which was slowly
but surely coming upon him to wipe out almost
the remembrance of his name and nation from
the face of the country. He might have heard
with prophetic ear

''The first low wash of waves, where soon
Shall roll a human sea.''

Such was the valley of which Hagerstown is
now the centre, in the early years of the eighteenth
century. The mountains and the rugged western
part of Washington County were covered with tim¬
ber but the main valley was largely without trees,
except alo'ng the water courses. We meet with fre¬
quent references, in contemporary writings, to the
high grass vhicli covered the country and the
present state of the forest is ample proof of this
fact. For it is rarely that an oal^ is seen in our
forests, which are composed principally of oak and
hickory, which has any appearance of being over a
hundred years old. Speaking of the land just
aaross the river from us in the valley of Virginia,
a continuation of our own valley, Samuel Kerche¬
val says that "at this period (1763, when the first