Virginia and the Westward Movement

From the Chesapeake, Virginians moved into the Piedmont, Shenandoah Valley, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Ohio Valley and farther west. Routes of migration carried family networks, plantation agriculture, evangelical religion, political habits and material culture into new regions.

Westward movement created opportunity for some settlers while extending slavery and accelerating Indigenous dispossession. Explorers, surveyors, soldiers, enslaved labourers and small farming families participated in different and often conflicting ways.

Bound Away uses objects, maps, landscapes and family histories to trace these movements and to interpret the frontier as a process of continuity, adaptation, conquest and exchange rather than a single national myth.