Page News & Courier
Heritage and Heraldry
Was John Lederer the first European to lay eyes on Page?
Article of December 2, 1999
While not receiving wide acclaim for his explorations during his
lifetime, physician John Lederer has only in this century been given praise and credit for having been the first white man to lay glimpse upon the area that became known as the Shenandoah Valley. A native of Hamburg, Germany and former student of the Hamburg Academic Gymnasium, Lederer was originally commissioned by Governor William Berkeley to make explorations into the frontier beyond Virginia's Tidewater settlements. His first expedition to the Blue Ridge leaves a question as to exactly what portion of the Shenandoah Valley he actually had an opportunity to behold.
In his book A History of Rockingham County (1912), John W. Wayland explained that Lederer March 1669 journey brought him to the area at or near Waynesboro. However, forty years later, with the publication of A Short History of Page County, Virginia, Harry M. Strickler made a different claim, stating that Lederer's first march landed him in the neighborhood of Big Meadows. Being a native of Page, had Strickler been writing on wishful thinking and did his inspiration rest upon the marker that honors Lederer in the vicinity of Big Meadows?
Five years later, Wayland's Twenty-Five Chapters on the Shenandoah Valley, included more detailed information on Lederer's expedition.
Whether the two Valley authors had come together in discussion over the matter is not readily known, however, Wayland had shifted Lederer's 1669 arrival some distance to the north along the Blue Ridge. Specifically, Wayland wrote:
"From Lederer's narrative . . . as well as from his map it seems that he reached the top of the Blue Ridge on his first tour at or near Swift Run Gap. He had come up the Pamunkey River and followed its main branch, the North Anna, to its first spring. There or near there he first described that Apalataean mountains. The next day he passed over the south branch of the Rappahannock River (the Rapidan), evidently near its head. There he must have been near the site of Stanardsville. Within the next three days he climbed to the top of the mountain, where he wandered around for several days, seeing higher mountains to the north and west."
Of his discoveries on March 18, 1669, Lederer wrote:
". . . to the north and west my sight was suddenly bounded by mountains higher than that I stood upon. Here did I wander in the snow, for the most part, till the four and twentieth day of March, hoping to find some passage through the mountains; but with the coldness of the air and the earth together, seizing my hands and feet with numbness . . . I returned back the way I went."
Whether Lederer had wandered north or south along the Blue Ridge was never made clear in his journal, leaving historians with the question as to what areas of the Valley he had the opportunity to view from the crest of the mountains.
Lederer's three expeditions were covered in a journal that was translated from Latin to English and published by Sir William Talbot in London in 1672. Not until 1902 did the work resurface in a reprinted edition limited to 300 copies. While not specifically commenting on his expeditions, Lederer's comments on another similar situation mirrored his efforts and lack of recognition in the explorations he made beyond the Blue Ridge: "I have lost nothing by what I never sought to gain--popular applause."
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