The start of the recorded history of the northern Frederick County is intently tied to rivalry between England and France. When the first Europeans settled in the Emmitsburg space, within the early eighteenth century, the English government was casting a anxious eye at French strikes to claim the interior of the American continent. France's holdings there threatened to restrict English influence to the coastal strip east of the Allegheny mountains, and, thereby, prevent English dominance of northern America.
To counter French encroachment, the English authorities began an active coverage of selling settlement of the wilderness. Settlers had been organized into teams of lots of. The first settlers, within the area beneath active analysis by the Better Emmitsburg Area Historical Society, had been collectively generally known as the Tom's Creek Hundred. Their settlement encompassed land from simply north of current 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 either moved westward or died from European illnesses equivalent to small pox. Consequently, the land occupied by the Tom's Creek Hundred was nearly devoid of Indians and, subsequently, ripe for settlement by the English.
Whereas the Royal government opened the land to all settlers for a nominal price, it favored a couple of choose aristocrats by providing them large tracts of land in reward for their assist of the Crown. One of the 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 function within the typically-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 center Pennsylvania. This remained a dispute that was not settled till the Mason-Dixon line was laid out.
Diggs believed his right to land, based upon his aristocratic standing, entitled him to most of northern and western Maryland. In 1732, Diggs formally claimed, although with none authority, all of the vacant land on the Monocacy and its many branches, which included all of current day Emmitsburg. In July 1743, Diggs managed to obtain title to 3 raise alert tracts of land in the Emmitsburg area. Diggs' land grabbing was shortly mimicked by others, albeit in a smaller fashion.
Sadly for the land speculators and the settlers, the race between the French and English for the interior of the continent soon bought out of hand. In 1754, the English were not only combating the French, but their Indian allies as properly. While little fighting occurred within the Emmitsburg space, Indian raiding events periodically moved via the world. In consequence, many settlers withdrew to the relative safety of coastal cities.
With the end of the Seven Years Warfare in Europe, in which France ceded sovereignty of the interior of North America to the English, settlers once again cast their eyes toward the wilderness. Some fled from extreme spiritual persecution, others from the oppression of civil tyranny, and nonetheless others have been attracted by the hopes of liberty below the milder influence of English colonial rule. But for the greatest half, the settlers flocked to the American continent in the hopes of abandoning the crushing poverty of their homeland and for the chance to personal land and prosper by way of their