An accurate portrayal of life on the Virginia Frontier in 1754
As mentioned in a “The Americas Revealed” article in 2025, George Washington was the original owner of my former farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He received it at age 16 as partial payment for surveying land nearby. As best as the National Park Service historians could determine, he designed and supervised construction of the blockhouse fort immediately after the scenes portrayed in this short documentary.
As I was restoring the old colonial farm in Virginia, many of the most dramatic scenes in the blockbuster movie, “The Last of the Mohicans” was being filmed on the upper pasture above my former farmhouse in western North Carolina near Asheville. Simultaneously, National Park Service archaeologists found a cemetery from the French and Indian War Period immediately south of my Virginia house. I suspect those interred were victims of French allied Natives, who almost depopulated the Shenandoah Valley – which Virginia militiamen relocated to “Christian” burials. The combined experiences caused me to become very interested in the mid-1700s.
Bet your American History textbook never told you that the Shenandoah Valley lost 90% of its population during the French and Indian War! The landscape of the Valley is dotted with state historical markers denoting locations of massacres by the allies of the French.
The Americas Revealed 