My direct line on my father's maternal side was John Hale is told on this website D:\GENEALOGY\HALE\Descendants of John Hale Sr_ (Frontiersman) - Hale Roots.mht It's my ggrandparents in the upper left corner. Here is our frontiersman.
According to the book, Roots in Virginia (1948) by Nathaniel Claiborne Hale, John Hale Sr., "the Frontiersman" homesteaded on Bent Mountain in the Blue Ridge, later Roanoke, VA-- where the Staunton flows east out of the mountains at Big Lick gap. Other family members settled nearby on the Piedmont plateau. I don't have a date for John Hale's arrival at the western Virginia border, but "Roots" tells us: "In 1752, the County of Halifax was formed from Lunenburg for the convenience of the inhabitants in the fork between the Staunton and Dan Rivers. The western limits of the new county were the Blue Ridge Mountains dividing it from Augusta. There on Bent Mountain John Hale, was relatively an old resident. He had been listed several years earlier, with his neighbors of Augusta County about the headwaters of Little River and Back Creek, in Captain Martin’s Company for purposes of mutual defense against the Indians. The List of Souls, Tithes and Taxable Property in this company shows him as a slave owner and possessed of a quantity of livestock. John Hale, who was born about 1706, had probably left Tidewater from Baltimore County, Maryland, about 1727 and spent some years on the northwest frontier before joining the migration up the Shenandoah River."
