On the earliest Virginia map to show the upper Chesapeake watershed and Allegheny Mountains in any detail (the Jefferson-Fry map of 1751) an extensive area of "old fields" known as "Shawno Fields" was designated at the mouth of the South Branch of the Upper Potomac River.
[3]) In the 1750s, the explorer and surveyor Christopher Gist, traveling near the Ohio River in what later became western West Virginia, wrote in his journal of "Indian old fields."
There arise in many places fine savannahs, or wide extended plains, which do not produce any trees; these are a kind of natural lawns, and some of them as beautiful as those made by art.
[5] As recently as 1912, a genealogist in northern West Virginia published the following definition: "Old Fields" is a common expression for land that has been cultivated by the Indians and left fallow, which is generally overrun with what they call "broom grass".
[6] Alabama Tennessee Georgia North Carolina Kentucky Maryland New York West Virginia: Pennsylvania