John Lederer

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John Lederer, was a nurse and an explorer of the Appalachian Mountains. Lederer was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1644, and studied medicine at the Hamburg Academic Gymnasium. He later migrated to the United States.

Lederer arrived in Virginia in 1669. Believing that the riches of California lay just beyond the mountains west of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, colonial governor of Virginia, commissioned him to make three expeditions into the Appalachians between 1669 and 1670.

In March of 1669 Lederer left Chickahominy, an English port near the headwaters of the York River, traveling northwest to Eminent Hill. He and the members of his party became the first Europeans to see the Blue Ridge Mountains, perhaps traveling as far as present day Mineral County, West Virginia. Some sources say that Gabriel Arthur, sent by Abraham Wood, was the first European to see West Virginia in 1673 or 1674.^[1]

In May of 1670 he left Fort Charles (now Richmond) and followed the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains south into what is now North Carolina. Twenty-one members of the party turned back, but Lederer pushed on with an American Indian guide, exploring North Carolina to the Catawba River near what is now Charlotte. In mid-July he reached Fort Henry, a frontier post on the Appomattox River.

In late summer of that year he set out from Talifer's House, a settlement south of the Rappahannock River, followed the Rappahannock River valley north, climbed the Blue Ridge, and sighted the Appalachian Mountains beyond the Shenandoah Valley.

John Lederer settled in Maryland in 1671. In 1672 his observations were translated from Latin and published along with a map of his expeditions by Sir William Talbot, the governor of Maryland.