Settlers thronged into the country, the roads were well travelled, and the clearings became very numerous.

The villages began to feel safe without stockades, save those on the extreme border, which were still built in the usual frontier style.

The scattering log school-houses and meeting-houses increased steadily in numbers, and in 1783, Methodism, destined to become the leading and typical creed of the west, first gained a foothold along the Holston, with a congregation of seventy-six members.

[Footnote: "History of Methodism in Tennessee," John B.M'Ferrin (Nashville, 1873), I., 26.] These people of the upper Tennessee valleys long continued one in interest as in blood.

Whether they lived north or south of the Virginia or North Carolina boundary, they were more closely united to one another than they were to the seaboard governments of which they formed part.
Their history is not generally studied as a whole, because one portion of their territory continued part of Virginia, while the remainder was cut off from North Carolina as the nucleus of a separate State.