Page:A Guide to the Preparation of County Road Histories.pdf/14

 not been prepared a useless trip to the courthouse of Augusta County might have been made.

The second step preparatory to the writing of a county road history, an outgrowth of and a useful adjunct to the provenance chart, is the construction of a developmental map or maps of some sort. This may be only an elemental county-outline map of the form shown in Figure 3, a larger composite, or a set of them, made up of several county road maps, or an even larger set of geological survey maps. It is even possible to conceive of a situation in which all three might be necessary in order to gain an adequate understanding of the development of a particular county or tier of counties somewhere in Virginia.

While the provenance chart for a county can usually be constructed without undue difficulty using the Acts of Assembly and the various books on the formation of Virginia's counties, drawing the developmental map or maps can become a much more complicated task. This can occur because of the difficulty in ascertaining the exact location of county lines at a given period, if through later separation or evolution of the county they were altered. Although defining the county line created no real problem in the Albemarle project, our experience might be cited here as an example of the sort of thing which will often occur.

That the western portion of Louisa was incorporated into Albemarle in 1761 is a fact known and cited by both authors and authoresses of many of the articles and books written over the years on the history of Albemarle County. The exact location of the line erased by this amalgamation, as well as the magnitude of that portion of Louisa amalgamated, remained a matter of conjecture until very recently. Even the most recent full-length history of Albemarle County, published in 1976 (John H. Moore, ) gave no indication of the true size of the area given to Albemarle by Louisa. Other authors earlier had indicated that there had been no county line in this area or that it had remained indefinite up to the year 1761.

With the recent publication of abstracts of Louisa deeds 1742-1774 all of these statements were invalidated. (, by Rosalie Edith Davis). These abstracts showed quite clearly that a line had existed prior to 1761, and that it ran straight in what might appear to be a rather illogical manner, crossing and recrossing a river so as to cause certain areas one would normally expect to fall within the adjacent county to fall within Louisa.

Fortunately, as stated, this was an interior line destroyed by the alterations of 1761. Had such been the case with one of the lines constituting the present outer boundary of Albemarle County, drawing an accurate developmental map would have been made considerably more difficult, and would have involved research in the deeds of Albemarle and the county adjacent on – 8 –