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Timelines of Important Events in the County
1600's — Indigenous People & Settlers

1000 Loudoun is a hardwood forest with some grassland. Average temperatures are a few degrees colder than they are today. Indigenous Peoples plant corn and beans, and live in villages until soils wear out. Then they move on. Other Indians hunt with spears and bow and arrow, the latter invented about 400 A.D. To attract large game to grassland, they burn the forest. Buffalo provide food, clothing and shelter.
1500 Migrating northern Indians tell of people from across the ocean coming to conquer. Local Indigenous Peoples begin to fear neighboring tribes. Villages shift and populations migrate. Native crafts decline in number and quality. Designs of previous cultures are lost in the shiftings and uprootings. The stability of prehistory has ended.
1607-1609 John Smith's voyages to the falls of the Potomac River at Key Bridge and Rappahannock River at Falmouth verify, through meetings with Indigenous Peoples, that Sioux live in the Virginia Piedmont (west of Catoctin and Bull Run mountains) and that the area is largely grassland. To the east live Algonquin-speaking tribes. The Sioux hunt and are nomadic. The Algonkians farm and are semi-nomadic. Both fish, using V-shaped rock traps built across rivers and streams. More than 50 of the traps survive, mostly in the Potomac.
1619 The first representative assembly in America meets in Jamestown. First people from Africa arrive in the colonies as slaves.
1624 The Virginia Company of London charter is revoked under King James. The colony becomes royal property of the king. Early-to-middle 1605: Throughout this period, early settlers begin to displace the native Powhatan Indigenous people in the "Northern Neck" area between the Potomac (River of Swans) and the Rappahannock (Quick-Rising River).
1649 King Charles II gives a grant totaling five million acres in the Northern Neck Proprietary to seven English noblemen.
1649 King Charles I is beheaded for treason. Parliament does not recognize Charles II as king. Despite this, Charles II grants seven English noblemen 5 million acres of the Northumberland Proprietary (the Northern Neck Proprietary). Eventually, five of the six shares are acquired by Thomas, second Lord Culpeper.
1660 Charles II is restored to the throne. His land grants finally have legal authority.
1664 The Dutch Wars cause severe losses' to the tobacco fleets.
by 1670 The predatory Susquehannock have driven the peaceful Sioux from western Loudoun. Two centuries later, Gen. George Armstrong Custer will test the Sioux's mettle far to the west, at Little Bighorn. The Susquehannock now have the bellicose Iroquois to grapple with. They vie for control of "plain paths" (trails) to the south. This route follows the east slope of Catoctin and Bull Run mountains; there the climate is mild, the springs flow and the rivers are fordable.
1672 The Colonial Assembly attempts to purchase the rights of the proprietors, but Charles II had already assigned the lands to Thomas, Lord Culpeper and Henry, Earl of Arlington.
1675 Susquehannock depredations against settlers in Stafford County prompt Nathaniel Bacon's troops to massacre the tribe's main body on the Carolina border. The Susquehannock forces had been depleted by fighting with the Iroquois, who had usurped their north-south migration route.
1677 Ambassadors from Virginia and Maryland, hearing of Iroquois forays against colonists in central Virginia and along the lower Potomac, conclude a treaty of alliance at Albany, N.Y., near the Iroquois' Finger Lakes homeland. The Iroquois call their forays isolated acts by 'irresponsible young men."
1684 A second Treaty of Albany stipulates that the Iroquois can continue to migrate east of the Blue Ridge, but they "must not come near the [navigable] Heads of Rivers, nor near Plantations, but keep at the Foot of the Mountains." The Iroquois establish additional plain paths through the "Indian thoroughfares," later known as Ashby's and Williams' gaps-where Routes 50 and 7 now cross the Blue Ridge. Their paths are forerunners of the Harry Byrd Highway and Snickersville Turnpike.
1688 Lord Culpeper receives undisputed proprietorship of the entire Northern Neck region.
1689 The Revolution of 1689 marks a struggle between the Virginia governor and the legislature.
by 1690 The main trading area among Indigenous peoples of Loudoun, who now number perhaps 1,000, is along the Potomac near Point of Rocks, Md. White trappers and adventurers share in the barter. Potomac, in the Algonquin language, means "great trading place." A second major place of trade is at the juncture of the James Monroe Highway and Braddock Road. An old-timer told me it was "the crossroads of the Indian world."
1692 David Strahan and his “Rangers of the Pottomack” explore what was to become Sugarland Run in Eastern Loudoun. They noted that "we came to a great Runn that made into the suggar land, & we marcht down it about 6 miles." The rangers, one of several patrols combing the frontier to monitor Indigenous peoples' activity, "observed an inspissate Juice, like Molasses, distilling from the Tree. They found it sweet and by this Process of Nature learn'd to improve it into Sugar."
1697 The Piscataway, an Algonquin-speaking tribe from southern Maryland, settle by Little River south of Middleburg. Marylanders visiting their fort describe it as "built between the two mountains [the Bull Run and Blue Ridge mountains] and corn planted on the West side." The paucity of area fish - hence the stream name, Hunger Run-prompt the Piscataway to move to Conoy Island, just east of Point of Rocks, in 1699. Vandercastel and Harrison describe the Piscataway settlement on Conoy Island: "The forte is about fifty or sixty yardes square and theire is eighteen Cabbins in the forte and nine Cabbins without. As for Provitions they have Corne, they have Enuf and to spare
1699 Explorers Burr Harrison and Giles Vandercastle reach interior of what was to become Loudoun County, and encounter Piscataways, the region’s native Indians.

Part of what Is now Route 7 is laid out by a mission sent by the governor of Virginia to the emperor of the Piscataway tribe on Conoy Island near the present-day Point of Rocks.