Meanwhile Virginia had been encouraging settlements of refugee Europeans on her frontiers in an effort to form buffer groups between the inimical French and Indians to the north and the seated parts of her domain. In 1730 a grant of 10,000 acres on the Shenandoah River was made to one Stover for settlement by Germans who began to pour south from Pennsylvania and Maryland and soon the Valley was taking on that perceptible Teutonic colour with which it is still dyed.
In 1731 there came to the present Loudoun the first colony of Germans from the Valley. Of all the early settling it is doubtful if any was more intelligently planned or more reasonably could anticipate success. Instead of a few individuals pioneering in haphazard fashion, there was a compact and homogeneous group of about sixty families, the men almost without exception artisans of various trades or peasants skilled in thrifty farming; and their lot had heretofore been so harsh and their fortune so adverse that the hardships inseparable from making a new home in the wilderness were, by comparison, a kindly dispensation of a hitherto hostile fate. On crossing the Blue Ridge they and those following them settled the land between the Catoctin Mountains and the Short Hills, north of the present Morrisonville, which from that time on has been known as the German Settlement and than which no part of Loudoun has been more industriously and providently farmed. Little those early Teutons spent on luxury or even comfort; a sound and certain living was their objective and the land and its increase, rather than ornate dwellings, received their uttermost effort. Even as late as 1853, Yardley Taylor was moved to record that their "farms are generally small and well cultivated and the land rates high. This class of population seldom goes to much expense in building houses ... many old log houses that are barely tolerable are in use by persons abundantly able to build better ones." But if their houses were primitive, the occupants were generally prosperous and free from debt and in later years comfortable and commodious farmhouses have taken the place of the earlier cabins. These earliest Germans, having neither speech nor habits in common with their neighbours, developed a self-sustained and independent community wholly different and set off from those of others around them and to this day their locality measurably carries on its distinctive life.