Knights of the Golden Horseshoe

D-10

On 5 Sept. 1716, in this region, it is believed, Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood and his party of government officials, gentry, Native Americans, soldiers, and servants crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Shenandoah Valley. Their adventure into Virginia's western lands began at Germanna late in Aug. and ended when they returned there on 10 Sept. According to legend, Spotswood gave his companions small golden horseshoes on their return and the group became known as the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe. The journey has been fictionalized and mythologized in literature since the 19th century.

Department of Historic Resources, 2004

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Edward Porter Alexander, ed., The Journal of John Fontaine: An Irish Huguenot Son in Spain and Virginia, 1710-1719 (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation distributed Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 12-19, 101-109, 136-137, 163-169; Matthew Page Andrews, Virginia the Old Dominion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1937), 185-187; Charles Campbell, History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co., 1860), 387-390; Delma R. Carpenter, “The Route Followed By Governor Spotswood in 1716 Across The Blue Ridge Mountains,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 73 (October 1965): 405-412; Randolph W. Church, “Tidewater to Shenandoah Valley: A Cameraman Retraces Spotswood’s Famous Expedition” Virginia Cavalcade 1 (Winter 1951): 19-26; Curtis Carroll Davis, “The Virginia ‘Knights’ and Their Golden Horseshoes: Dr. William A. Caruthers and an American Tradition,” Modern Language Quarterly 10 (December 1949): 490-507; Leonidas Dodson, Alexander Spotswood: Governor of Colonial Virginia: 1710-1722 (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1932), 238-241; Clifford Dowdey, The Virginia Dynasties: The Emergence of “King” Carter and the Golden Age (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1969), 277-278; Charles E. Hatch, Alexander Spotswood Crosses the Blue Ridge: “A Great Discovery of the Passage Over the Mountains”: Blueridge Parkway (Washington, D.C.: Division of History, Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, National Park Service, 1968);Walter Havighurst, Alexander Spotswood: Portrait of a Governor (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg; Distributed New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1967), 68-72; Douglas W. Sanford, “Conceptualizing the Frontier: Popular and Professional Interpretations of Germanna, An Early Piedmont Virginia Settlement,” paper delivered at Upland Archaeology in the East: Symposium IV, February 16 Through February 18, 1990 at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia; William M. Thornton, “Spotswood’s Expedition of 1716,” National Geographic Magazine 8 (August 1896): 265-269; John Walter Wayland, Germanna: Outpost of Adventure, 1714-1956 (Staunton, Va.: The McClure Printing Company, 1956), 26-39.