Indian old field


Indian Old Field, or simply Old Field, was a common term used in Colonial American times and up until the early nineteenth century United States, by American explorers, surveyors, cartographers and settlers, in reference to land formerly cleared and utilized by indigenous or previous occupants for farming or occupation. The term appears in many old maps and land documents, often persisting for many decades. It also remains in a number of present-day place names of the Eastern US.

History

Pioneer settlers, in applying for their land grants, exhibited a strong preference for sites located along major trails and particularly those coinciding with these Old Fields, as the Native Americans had often prepared land for settlement. Thus, early land survey plats emphasized these features and many place names from New England south to Florida represent vestiges of these places.
The earliest white settlers of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, which had been vacated by the Indians, noted "Indian old fields". On the earliest Virginia map to show the upper Chesapeake watershed and Allegheny Mountains in any detail an extensive area of "old fields" known as "Shawno Fields" was designated at the mouth of the South Branch of the Upper Potomac River.
In the 1750s, the explorer and surveyor Christopher Gist, traveling near the Ohio River in what later became western West Virginia, wrote in his journal of "Indian old fields." He described "large meadows, fine clover Bottoms & spacious Plains covered with wild Rye".
A 1761 visitor to the colony of South Carolina noted:
There are dispersed up and down the country several large Indian old fields, which are lands that have been cleared by the Indians, and now remain just as they left them. There arise in many places fine savannahs, or wide extended plains, which do not produce any trees; these are a kind of natural lawns, and some of them as beautiful as those made by art.

As recently as 1912, a genealogist in northern West Virginia published the following definition:
"Old Fields" is a common expression for land that has been cultivated by the Indians and left fallow, which is generally overrun with what they call "broom grass".

"Old Field" place names

Alabama
Tennessee
Georgia
North Carolina
Kentucky
Maryland
New York
West Virginia:
Pennsylvania