Prior to the arrival of European colonists, the area was settled by the Native American Monacan people, who constructed a village called Mowhemcho above the falls of the James River.

Fellow Huguenots ultimately created the colony of Manakin on the banks of the James River in the cleared former location of the former native village.

[5] Thus by 1701 several hundred Protestant religious refugees emigrated to the Virginia colony via London based on the land promised from the British Crown.

[5] While they had expected to be settled near existing settlements of Jamestown or in Lower Norfolk County (both in the Tidewater region), officials gave them land in areas 20 miles above the falls of the James River in the Piedmont then sparsely occupied by the Monacan.

[7] Colonists increasingly developed the area as plantations, with planters shifting from tobacco to wheat and mixed crops in the eighteenth century as the market changed.