A large percentage of the settlers of the Loop and of Elk Garden were Dutch.  The Hendricks were originally Hendricksons of New York.  Thomas’s wife was Sarah Van Hook, also Dutch.  The Vanhooks settled next to the Hendricks, on their eastern border.  These families were intermarried numerous times over.  A man named Nordyke, a Dutch name, is listed on a jury panel in early Elk Garden.  The families left Elk Garden / The Loop in the prelude to the Civil War, and settled as a group around Nordyke Creek in Washington County.  

The Surveys 

A - the earliest surveys of 1750’s to the mid 1780’s are accurate and well done, but those done in the 1790’s, especially in and about Corn Valley, Beartown, and the Loop, are very inaccurate.  The surveys became less accurate as the survey progressed.  Not only were angles badly wrong, but distances were also, the wrong target was shot, and the surveys badly overlapped, some land being in three different surveys.  The change in surveyors is very obvious.  In 1798 Samuel Vanhook signed a petition requesting some government office to grant “more time to complete land surveys” specifically stating that the reason for the request was that “the surveyor had been drunk”.  One of the Henry Smiths had been surveyor for the period of time 1789-1797, the period of time the flawed surveys were done. 

B - Russell Co. Law Bk (pgs 98, 147, 148 X 2) document legal proceedings (presentments) against the county surveyor for not keeping the roads in Elk Garden in repair.  In this case, the surveyor was Solomon Litton. 

C – some old names mentioned in surveys document Indian times: 

1)     “Paint Camp” at the sink hole east of the present Howard Cemetery and west of the Taylor Cemetery on Dry Branch is mentioned in several surveys, including “Paint Camp Ridge”, “Paint Camp Gap”, as well as the Camp itself.  Obviously it was a very important site to the Indians, and one to which they travelled from some distance.

2)     “War Gap” is documented numerous times, and is discussed in the body of this work.  The old path documented by several surveys to have passed through this gap in “War Gap Ridge”.  The Cherokee had captured Saltville and its center of commerce at Chilhowie from the Yuchi in 1714.  These conflicts described above, plus the use of the Cherokee word ‘Chilhowie’ for the old Yuchi commercial center, indicate that the Cherokee took over the salt works and their defense from the Yuchi for a few decades until the whole enterprise was taken over by white settlers. 

D – Geographic names are very plastic.  The old surveys of Elk Garden show the following name changes: