Early in my life I learned that people that owned land had a title to their land in the form of a deed and that they received this deed from the party they purchased the land from. I wondered who made the first deed and how it was all started. I learned it came about in this manner. There were some men in Virginia who through some influence they had with the Governor of Virginia could obtain from the Governor a grant for a large boundary of land in the section of Virginia west of the Allegheny Mountains. These men were called land speculators.

The first speculator to get a grant on the upper section of Paint Creek was a Mr. Reed. He came into this section sometime near the beginning of the nineteenth century and discovered the Indian camp ground at what is now Sweeneyburg and found the trees and rocks all decorated with red paint. I suppose it was Mr. Reed that gave the stream the name of Paint Creek.

He started his survey at the Indian campground and surveyed off a large territory, including all the tributaries of Paint Creek. Most of the older settlers of this section knew just where the Reed line ran and many of the early deeds recorded in the Raleigh County Clerk's office call for lines running with the Reed line.

The system used by the speculator for the disposal of his land was like this: He would go back to his home in Virginia, advertise his land west of the mountains, and try to induce settlers to come and establish homes on his land grant. A settler would come in and select a site for his cabin, build and move in. When the speculator came around, he would survey off as much land as the settler wanted to buy and he would make the settler a deed for it. Until the speculator or his agent came around to sell him the land, the settler was considered a squatter but he had squatter's rights and no other settler would settle on land that an earlier settler intended to buy. There were quite a few settlers who built cabins and started to establish a home that became discouraged, left their cabins, and went back to Virginia before the speculator came around to sell them the land. It was not unusual to find a deserted cabin in the region of Upper Paint Creek.

After the battle of Point Pleasant where Colonel Andrew Lewis with his Virginia Militia defeated the Indians under Chief Cornstalk, he obtained a treaty with the Indians in which they agreed to permit the whites to come in and establish homes and the whites agreed to permit the Indians to hunt in the territory. To the sorrow of many settlers, neither side kept the agreement of this treaty mainly because there were a lot of white men whose theory of the Indians was that the only good Indian was a dead Indian and they insisted on making a good Indian of every one they met. So the Indians continued to raid and steal the livestock of the settler, to burn their cabins, and to kidnap and kill. It was quite a while before it was safe for a white man to try to settle in this section of the country.