Even before they were called “Americans,” the English settlers who landed in the New World demonstrated what was to become a classic American trait - an inability to stay in one place for long.

To the east was the vast Atlantic from whence they had come; to the west, inland, was the seductive unknown. Facing a wall of thick forest, they quite naturally used the James River as their first westbound highway.

Less than 17 years after the Godspeed, Discovery and Susan Constant dropped anchor off the coast of Jamestown, subsequent newcomers had already established a presence as far up the James as Richmond.

Dr. John Woodson - an ancestor of former Virginia Gov. Mills Godwin, longtime state Sen. Charles Moses of Appomattox, Dolly Madison and the outlaw Jesse James - was typical, wasting little time upon his arrival in Virginia in 1620.

Woodson and his wife, Sara, had married in England, and she accompanied him on the voyage across the Atlantic. It was no honeymoon cruise, the passage lasting more than two months. The couple lived only briefly at Jamestown, then turned up at a place called Flowerdew Hundred in 1623, accompanied by six African slaves.

Also known as Fleur de Hundred, this sprawling plantation was a grant from King James I to Sir George Yeardley, the first governor of Virginia.

“He had fought in the religious wars in The Netherlands and pleased the king,” said Karen Shriver, curator of the Flowerdew Hundred plantation and museum near Hopewell, “and so he was given 1,000 acres. That’s how a lot of the early movement of settlers took place, through these land grants.”

Once a nobleman received such a gift, his next task was to entice as many of his countrymen as possible to live on that land. The term “hundred” referred to the critical mass of settlers required to form a named community.

Today, restored plantations like Shirley and Berkley and Flowerdew are strung along the section of the James from what is now Newport News all the way up to the outskirts of Richmond. Beyond that, however, the early Virginians discovered a formidable obstacle.

“The rivers and creeks in the Tidewater area formed a wonderful transportation network,” said Ann Woodlief, a retired Virginia Commonwealth University professor whose book “In River Time” is considered a classic natural history of the James River, “and the soil was good. What stopped the early explorers was the fall line at Richmond, and that stopped them for quite awhile.”

Captain John Smith made it to the falls in a small boat, and returned impressed by “these great craggy stones in the midst of the river, where the water falleth so rudely, and with such a violence, as not any boat can possibly pass.”

This turbulence was new and frightening to the English, but the lower James was something with which they were quite familiar - a tidal river, very much like the Thames of London.

“It’s very brackish down below the fall line,” said Woodlief. “I live up on the York River, and we find crabs in the river there. The high tide reaches all the way up to Richmond.”

A number of the Jamestown colonists died of “salt poisoning” from drinking that hybrid water, and even the wells they tried to sink on their low-lying peninsula produced water that was undrinkable except by the desperate. This made the more potable water above the fall line seem more and more like an oasis.

Still, it wasn’t until 1700 that a group of French Huguenots established a settlement called Manikan Town in Goochland County - the first one above the fall line.

This really wasn’t their idea. On the run from religious persecution in Europe, the Huguenots expected to be settled in a populated area that later became Norfolk. Instead, they fell under the guardianship of William Byrd, who owned land in what was to become Goochland County and wanted it colonized. Somewhat to their horror, the newly arrived Frenchmen found themselves portaging scary stretches of rapids and following a barely visible Indian trail 25 miles upriver.

The land they were destined to occupy had only recently been home to a group of Monacans.

“The Huguenots weren’t farmers,” said Woodlief, “and they weren’t used to living outside of cities, but they learned in a hurry.”

And word soon spread down below the fall line. Writes Woodlief in her James River history:

“Upstream settlement and trading grew quickly, as restless newcomers, inspired by the Huguenots’ success, lay claim to the more than a hundred miles of piedmont floodplain above the Fall Line. Although there were those who managed to patent large grants of land along the river, including some who, like Thomas Jefferson’s father, had dreams of establishing tidewater-style plantations, the settlement pattern was again dictated by the river.”

Only the land closest to the river was suitable for growing staple crops. Inland was rocky and acidic, giving way to the red clay of Southside.

“Because of that, the land grants tended to rather long and skinny, to fit the flood plain,” Woodlief said. “And each generation had to move farther upriver to the next section of flood plain.”

Back in 1634, the Colony of Virginia had already been divided into eight counties, or “shires” - one of which, Henrico, passed all the way through the center of the state with the James as its defining feature. In 1728, it was subdivided into Henrico and Goochland counties.

By that time, however, the migration toward the Blue Ridge had already begun.

“It really got started after the Massacre of 1644,” said Karen Shriver.

That event, in which Dr. John Woodson was killed, triggered a counterattack that broke the back of the Indian confederation. With Indian attacks now less of a threat, adventurous Englishmen fanned out throughout the western part of the state, often popping up in unexpected places like Hat Creek in Campbell County and New London and Big Island in what is now Bedford.

Through it all, the practice of land grants continued. One of them went to Charles Lynch, who established a home on the Amherst County bluff across the James from what is now Lynchburg.

At this point in history, the bridge reaching back from 2006 to 1607 has as its planks between 11 and 14 generations.

Marvin Peele of Monroe, whose ancestor was an early Jamestown colonist, said his brother Horace had identified upwards of 45,000 descendants along the line Richard Peele established.

“It’s hard to believe,” Peele said, “but there it is on paper.”

Darrell Laurant is a staff writer for the Lynchburg News & Advance.