The start of the recorded historical past of the northern Frederick County is closely tied to rivalry between England and France. When the primary Europeans settled within the Emmitsburg area, within the early eighteenth century, the English authorities was casting a frightened eye at French moves to say the inside of the American continent. France's holdings there threatened to restrict English influence to the coastal strip east of the Allegheny mountains, and, thereby, forestall English dominance of northern America.
To counter French encroachment, the English authorities started an active policy of promoting settlement of the wilderness. Settlers had been organized into teams of lots of. The first settlers, in the area beneath active analysis by the Better Emmitsburg Space Historic Society, have been collectively generally known as the Tom's Creek Hundred. Their settlement encompassed land from just north of present day Thurmont to the old Pennsylvania border, from the Monocacy to the Catoctin Mountains.
The Tom Indians, who occupied the Emmitsburg space, had by this time both moved westward or died from European ailments reminiscent of small pox. Consequently, the land occupied by the Tom's Creek Hundred was practically devoid of Indians and, due to this fact, ripe for settlement by the English.
Whereas the Royal government opened the land to all settlers for a nominal fee, it favored just a few select aristocrats by providing them giant tracts of land in reward for his or her support of the Crown. One of many earliest land barons in the valley was John Diggs.
Diggs, a grandson of the Royal Governor of Virginia, was a rich Catholic who performed a dominant role within the generally-bloody border dispute between the Maryland and Pennsylvania governments. With ownership of the Chesapeake and the mouth of the Susquehanna, Maryland pressed its declare of what's now middle Pennsylvania. This remained a dispute that was not settled until the Mason-Dixon line was laid out.
Diggs believed his proper to land, based upon his aristocratic standing, entitled him to most of northern and western Maryland. In 1732, Diggs formally claimed, although without any authority, all of the vacant land on the Monocacy and its many branches, which included all of present day Emmitsburg. In July 1743, Diggs managed to obtain title to three tracts of land in the Emmitsburg space. Diggs' land grabbing was quickly mimicked by others, albeit in a smaller trend.
Unfortunately for the land speculators and the settlers, the race between the French and English for the interior of the continent quickly obtained out of hand. In 1754, the English weren't only preventing the French, however their Indian allies as properly. Whereas little fighting occurred in the Emmitsburg area, Indian raiding events periodically moved via the realm. In consequence, many settlers withdrew to the relative safety of coastal cities.
With the top of the Seven Years Battle in Europe, by which France ceded sovereignty of home security the interior of North America to the English, settlers as soon as again forged their eyes towards the wilderness. Some fled from extreme religious persecution, others from the oppression of civil tyranny, and still others were attracted by the hopes of liberty beneath the milder influence of English colonial rule. But for the greatest part, the settlers flocked to the American continent in the hopes of abandoning the crushing poverty of their homeland and for the prospect to own land and prosper by way of their