“Having crossed the Southwest Mountains I passed along to Lynchburgh, a town situated on the south side of Fluvanna River. This town contains about 100 houses, and a warehouse for the inspection of tobacco, where about 2,000 hogsheads are annually inspected. It has been built entirely within the last fifteen years, and is rapidly increasing, from its advantageous situation for carrying on trade with the adjacent country. The boats, in which the produce is conveyed down the river, are from forty-eight to fifty-four feet long, but very narrow in proportion to their length. Three men are sufficient to navigate one of these boats, and they can go to Richmond and back again in ten days. They fall down with the stream, but work their way back again with poles. The cargo carried in these boats is always proportioned to the depth of water in the river, which varies very much. Along the banks I observed great quantities of weeds hanging upon the trees considerably above my head, though on horseback. A few miles from Lynchburgh, towards the Blue Mountains, is a small town called New London, in which there is a magazine and also an armory, erected during the war. About fifteen men were here employed, as I passed through, repairing old arms and furbishing up others. At one end of the room lay the musquets, to the amount of about 5,000, all together in a large heap, and at the opposite end lay a pile of leathern accoutrements, absolutely rotting for want of common attention. All the armories throughout the United States are kept much in the same style. “Between this place and the Blue Mountains the country is rough and hilly, and but very thinly inhabited. The few inhabitants, however, met with here are uncommonly robust and tall; it is rare to see a man amongst them who is not six feet high. These people entertain a high opinion of their own superiority in point of bodily strength over the inhabitants of the low country. A similar race of men is found all along the Blue Mountains. “Beyond the Blue Ridge, after crossing by this route near the Peaks of Otter, I met with but very few settlements till I drew near to Fincastle, in Bottetourt County. This town was only begun about the year 1790, yet it already contains sixty houses, and is most rapidly increasing. The improvement of the adjacent country has likewise been very rapid, and land now bears nearly the same price that it does in the neighborhood of York and Lancaster, in Pennsylvania. The inhabitants consist principally of Germans, who have extended their settlements from Pennsylvania along the whole of that rich tract of land which runs through the upper part of Maryland, and from thence behind the Blue Mountains to the most southern part of Virginia. They have many times, I am told, crossed the Blue Ridge to examine the land, but the red soil which they found there was different from what they had been accustomed to.