A History of the National Conservation Training Center and surrounding area

The following is a time line of significant events that have affected the land and ownership of the property now comprising the National Conservation Training Center (NCTC), with an emphasis on the period from early European settlement until shortly after the Revolutionary War. Included also are a few pages on 19th and 20th century history. Archeological evidence has shown that Native Americans utilized the site that became NCTC at least intermittently for more than 8000 years, and suggests that seasonal occupation ended about 700 years ago. European settlement of this area began in the 1720s, with newly arrived German settlers most recently from Pennsylvania, and other families especially from the Monocacy River valley in Maryland taking up lands along the western bank of the Potomac, then known as the Cohongoroota River. Some early European settlers in this area experienced many problems acquiring title to the land they occupied because of competing land claims of the Hite family and the Northern Neck Proprietary of Lord Fairfax. Two young Swearingen brothers, members of a slave-holding family with plantations in Maryland, acquired land near present-day Shepherdstown and on Terrapin Neck in the 1740s and 1750s, about twenty years after Europeans first began occupying the area. They first acquired patented property originally surveyed through the Hites and later also acquired grants through Lord Fairfax. Living on the frontier of a new country required an ability to run a self-sufficient plantation. They raised dairy and beef cattle, hogs, sheep and horses, grew corn, wheat, tobacco, rye and flax, and cultivated apple and pear orchards. They also must have raised other crops such as hemp and various other grains, fruits and vegetables commonly grown at the time, both as cash crops and to feed themselves and their slaves. Thomas Swearingen ran plantations, a mill near Scrabble and a ferry service across the Potomac, while Van Swearingen was a sheriff, militia leader, and owner of the plantation that became NCTC. The Swearingens were intimately involved with the political, military and ecclesiastical issues of the day, particularly at local and regional levels. Their period of time here was a turbulent one, both locally and throughout the colonies, characterized by over 40 years of strife beginning with the French and Indian War in the 1750s, with various family members engaged in military struggles through the 1790s. Some of the Swearingen property and wealth was lost after the Revolutionary War because of an ancient lawsuit between competing land claims. The 1790s were years of transition, with deaths and lawsuits bringing about changes in land ownership in the Terrapin Neck area, though the Swearingens continued to run a plantation later known as RiverView Farm - now the western section of NCTC - until the Civil War. The eastern section of the NCTC property, referred to as the Springwood estate in this document, became part of the wealthy Shepherd family holdings at the beginning of the 19th century; they retained it for about a century. Parts of the original Swearingen estate were consolidated into a single property again in the early 1940s by the Hendrix family. A member of this family sold the property to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in March of 1992.