Page News & Courier
Heritage and Heraldry
The trek of the Nicholson Family - Whitehaven, England to Virginia and the Valley
Article of July 1, 1999
Early portrayals of Madison County�s Nicholson family show them as an illiterate, �back-woods� sort of people that were removed from the property that became the Shenandoah National Park. However, recent research and archeology being conducted in that county by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is proving quite the contrary. Most prominent in that area east of the Blue Ridge, many of the family eventually found their way across the mountains and into Page County (my own Nicholson lines did this around 1880). Some contemporary Page County residents with both the surnames of Nicholson and Nichols are the remnants of that line.
At the very earliest, the Nicholson family roots can be traced to Thomas Nicholson. Listed as mariner from Whitehaven, Cumberland County, England, Nicholson came to Virginia around 1732 and bought 1,000 acres in Spotsylvania County (the area that would later become Madison and Rappahannock counties) �near the great fork of the Rappahannock River.�
While the original tract of land was sold by 1750 and in the wake of the progenitor�s demise, John Nicholson, son of Thomas, remained in the area until he purchased 327 acres on the Hughes River near the mouth of what would later become known as �Nicholson Hollow� in 1797. He later bought an additional 170 to add to the �family homestead.� In time, John�s sons bought portions of that land as homes for their own families. Thomas� and John�s descendants remained in this area until the relocation.
In October 1886, sixteen year-old George Freeman Pollock - the founder of �Skyline�- ventured out to explore the area around Stony Man. In his wanderings, he came upon the area known as Free State Hollow. Pollock�s memoirs distinctly gave the impression that it was an area in its most primitive state with residents to meet the same description. A �center of the moonshine business . . . Very few of the dwellers in Free State Hollow had ever been to the town of Luray, the women and children and most of the men had never even seen a locomotive and there was no reading or writing, the people being absolutely illiterate. Old Man Nicholson was the �grandaddy� of the entire clan and for that reason Free State Hollow was also called Nicholson Hollow.�
Likewise, in 1933, in their sociological study known as �Hollow Folk�, journalist Thomas Henry and University of Chicago sociologist Mandel Sherman supported Pollock�s findings, perhaps justifying the relocation of the family from the area upon the establishment of the park. They described the residents as �unlettered folksheltered in tiny mud-plastered log cabins and supported by a primitive agriculture,� in communities which were �almost entirely cut off from the current of American life.�
As mentioned earlier, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has taken on the project of doing archeological work in the area of Nicholson Hollow, as well as Corbin and Weakley Hollows. In their diggings, and as opposed to Pollock�s descriptions, the findings show that the residents were quite in step with the times and �residents did, in fact, wear shoes, cured their sore throats not only with cherry tree bark but with patent medicines, . . . ate their meals off of a variety of imported and domestic ceramics, listened to records on the phonograph, slept in fancy brass beds . . . . owned the same types of goods which are found on archaeological sites of the same era throughout the United States�many no doubt originating from the Sears and Roebuck Company.� As the author of this article and descendant myself from the same Nicholson line, I have clear evidence in my own possession in family papers from the time that support the same findings.
For further reading of interest regarding the archeology being conducted, visit the Foundation�s web site at: http://www.history.org/cwf/argy/argyshen.htm.
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