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 stands about twenty miles distant from the mountain, and about fifteen south of Fluvanna River. It 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 neighbourhood 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 track of land which runs through the upper part of Maryland, and from thence behind the Blue Mountains to the most southern parts of Virginia. These people, as I before mentioned, keep very much together, and are never to be found but where the land is remarkably good. It is singular, that although they form three fourths of the inhabitants on the western side of the Blue Ridge, yet not one of them is to be met with on the eastern side, notwithstanding that land is to be purchased in the neighbourhood of the South-west Mountains for one fourth of what is paid for it in Bottetourt County. 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, and the injury it was exposed to from the mountain torrents always appeared to them an insuperable objection to settling in that part of the country. The difference indeed between the country on the eastern and on the western side of the Blue Ridge, in Bottetourt County, is astonishing, when it is considered that both are under the same latitude, and that this difference is perceptible within the short distance of thirty miles. On the eastern side of the ridge cotton grows extremely well; and in winter the snow scarcely ever remains more than a day or two upon the ground. On the other side cotton never comes to perfection, the winters are severe, and the fields covered with snow for weeks together. In every farm yard you see sleighs or sledges, carriages used to run upon the snow. Wherever these carriages are met with, it may be taken for granted that the winter lasts in that part of the country for a considerable length of time, for the people would never go to the expence of building them, without being tolerably certain that they would be useful. On the eastern side of the Blue Ridge, in Virginia, not one of these carriages is to be met with.