The magazine of history with notes and queries, Vol. II, No. 4, October 1905

by Various

THE NORTHERN NECK OF VIRGINIA

PRESENT-DAY ASPECTS OF WASHINGTON’S BIRTHPLACE

Five Virginia counties lying between the Potomac and the Rappahannock constitute the Northern Neck, the region in which George Washington, Light Horse Harry Lee, and his more famous son were born and bred. There are a scant thousand square miles in these counties of King George, Westmoreland, Richmond, Northumberland, and Lancaster, and the population of the five is under fifty-five thousand. At no point are the rivers much more than thirty miles apart, and near the northern boundary line of King George the harbors on the two streams are only nine miles apart. Washington was born on a lonely plantation in Westmoreland County, bordering the beautiful Bridges Creek, within sight of the Potomac. At Colonial Beach, two or three miles across the mouth of Monroe Creek, also in Westmoreland County, stands a house in good repair, which is declared to have been the residence of Light Horse Harry Lee before he removed to Fairfax County. Washington as an infant was taken by his parents to their new home opposite Fredericksburg, in Stafford County, and at the age of twenty he inherited from his half-brother Lawrence the fine estate of Mount Vernon, in Fairfax County. Lawrence had named his estate in honor of Admiral Vernon, with whom the young Virginian had served as an officer in the campaign against the Spanish-American stronghold of Cartagena. It was Lawrence’s acquaintance with Admiral Vernon that won for George Washington the offer of a midshipman’s commission in the royal navy, an appointment that only his mother’s strong objection prevented him from accepting.

From the birthplace of Washington to his second home opposite Fredericksburg is hardly more than fifty-five miles as the crow flies, and from the birthplace to the scene of his death at Mount Vernon is under seventy miles. The triangle enclosed by the lines connecting these points includes a tract of Virginia that is full of historic interest, and singularly rich and beautiful as an agricultural region. Most of the counties of the Northern Neck are increasing in population, but they lie far from railways, and their mode of communication with the outside world is the steamboats that ply from Baltimore up and down the two rivers.

In spite, therefore, of the rolling years, and of civil war, and emancipation, the Northern Neck of Virginia is in many respects much what it was when George Washington and Light Horse Harry Lee were born a month apart in the quaint and lovely old Westmoreland of the year 1732. The visitor to Mount Vernon comes away with a strong impression of Washington, the local magnate and world-wide hero. But Mount Vernon, in spite of its tomb and its relics, many of them actually used and handled by Washington himself, can hardly give one the eighteenth century atmosphere. To obtain that one must make a pilgrimage to the region of Washington’s birth. A fair shaft erected by the Federal Government now stands on the spot occupied by the homestead of Augustine Washington, the birthplace of his mighty son. The spot is as remote and lonely as it was when Washington’s eyes first saw the light, and the aspect of the region must be much what it was in that day. Doubtless the woodland has shrunk in area and the plowed land has widened. But there, in full view from the monument, are the land-locked tidal waters of the little stream, and eastward lies the broad lazy flood of the Potomac, idly moving beneath the soft overarching sky. Everywhere are the marks of an old civilization. The road that leads from the wharf at Wakefield on Monroe Creek to the monument is lined with cherry trees escaped from the old orchards of the neighborhood. The mockingbird sings in all the woodlands as it must have sung in the ears of Augustine Washington as he moved about his fields, and gray old log granaries of the eighteenth century pattern still stand amid piles of last year’s corncobs. Even to-day brand-new corn cribs are built in the same fashion of partly hewn logs. The crops are also those of the earlier century. The monument itself stands in the midst of a waving wheat field, and acres of Indian corn rustle green and rich as they must have rustled in the first hot summer of George Washington’s infancy.

The reality of it all is increased by the bodily presence of Washington’s own kin, men and women bearing his name, the descendants of his collateral relatives. A little boat rocking at anchor off the wharf at Wakefield is the fishing dory of Lawrence Washington, commonly called “Lal” Washington by his neighbors. He is a man of substance and dignity. But he takes delight in fishing his own pound nets, and the unpretentious fishermen of the region tell how the old man’s enthusiasm was such that he rushed waist deep into the water to help three or four young fellows drag ashore a heavily laden seine. His brother was for years State’s Attorney of a neighboring county, and other members of the family are landholders in Westmoreland. Their neighbors accept these families of historic name in a simple, matter-of-fact fashion, and with no humiliating sense of inferiority. “They’re all smart people,” said the young fisherman that sailed us across Monroe Creek to the wharf at Wakefield, and that is what Westmoreland expects of the Washingtons.

Neighboring plantations are stocked with fine old European nut and fruit trees, such as the colonists with the increasing wealth of the third and fourth generations were accustomed to import. In some places the fig is cultivated, and within the shadow of the birthplace monument is a dense colony of young fig shoots which have sprung and resprung after every severe winter for perhaps more than a century and a half. The steep bank of Bridges Creek to the southeast of the monument is lined with cherry trees that to this day bear excellent fruit, to be had merely for the picking. One gathers from all the surroundings of the place a strong sense of the dignity and simplicity that mark plantation life in Virginia.

It is a quiet life, indeed, that the people of these Westmoreland plantations lead. Even to this day sailing craft slowly worm their way far into the deep navigable inlets of the region, and carry freight to Baltimore and Washington. Each plantation has its own wharf, and each planter keeps a lookout for the coming schooner, just as their ancestors of Washington’s day must have watched for the slow and patient craft that plied up and down the Potomac, and away to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, or across the Atlantic to England, a voyage that might stretch out for six or eight, ten, or even twelve weeks.

The very speech of the people has a slightly archaic flavor, and family names are redolent of old English ancestry. Here still are the Kendalls, who like to boast that one of their ancestors was the earliest mail contractor in Virginia. The elder Kendall, a man of substance and fair education, found satisfactory reasons for selling all that he had and coming to Jamestown with Captain John Smith. In coming away he left behind a son just grown to manhood and some debts owing to the estate. The son was instructed to collect what he could of the proceeds, invest it in blankets and trinkets such as the Indians liked, and to follow the father to Jamestown. The young man obeyed the paternal instructions, but in sailing up the Potomac with his freight of gewgaws he mistook the Potomac for the James. After vainly looking for Jamestown, he concluded that the settlement had been destroyed by the Indians, and, having reached the present site of Alexandria, he made a settlement and called it Bell Haven. Some months later an Indian who visited Bell Haven made the settlers to understand that there were white men on a river further south. Young Kendall knew then that Jamestown was still in being. So he wrote a letter to his father and entrusted it to the Indian to be delivered at Jamestown, paying him for the service one gay woolen blanket. Father and son thus came into communication, but the son remained at Bell Haven, and from him are descended the Kendalls of the Northern Neck.

The whole region teems with traditions of Washington. Down in Northumberland County, the lovely little harbor of Lodge is named from the fact that here stood the Masonic lodge that Washington used to attend. The British destroyed the house during the Revolutionary War, but the cornerstone was found and opened not many years ago, and some of its treasures of old English money were placed in the cornerstone of the Masonic lodge at Kinsale, another charming little Virginia harbor. It is at Lodge that the maker of canceling dies for the Post Office Department, exiled from Washington because of the climate, has for nearly twenty years carried on his business with the aid of country youths trained for the purpose.

If the shore is much what it was in Washington’s infancy, the river and its tributaries are even more so. Those who know the Potomac at Washington or amid the mountains that hem it in further west and north, may well have no suspicion of the vast flood which it becomes in the lower part of its course. Fifty miles below Washington the river is from four to six miles wide. Sixty miles below the capital it has spread to a width of ten miles, and in the lower forty miles of its course it is from ten to eighteen miles wide, a great estuary of the Chesapeake, with tributaries, almost nameless on the map, that fairly dwarf the Hudson. The busy steamers plying these waters to carry the produce of the plantations to the markets of Baltimore and Washington leave the Potomac from time to time to lose themselves in its tortuous tributaries. Cape on cape recedes to unfold new and unexpected depths of loveliness; little harbors sit low on the tidal waters backed by wooded bluffs, behind which lie the rich plantations of Northumberland and Westmoreland. A soft-spoken race of easy-going Virginians haunts the landing-places. Fishermen, still pursuing the traditional methods of the eighteenth century, fetch in sea trout and striped bass and pike to sell them at absurdly low prices, and for nine months of the year oystermen are busy. Every planter who will can maintain his pound net in the shallows of the Potomac or one of its tributaries, and all along the lower course of the stream the planter may secure his own oysters almost without leaving the shore. The dainties that filled colonial larders in Washington’s youth are still the food of the region—oysters and clams, soft-shell crabs, wild duck, geese, and swan in winter, and a bewildering variety of fish.

Just across the Potomac from Washington’s birthplace is old Catholic Maryland of the Calvert Palatinate, settled almost exactly a century before his birth, and still rich in the names and traditions of that earlier time. The great width of the separating flood makes one shore invisible from the other, and the only means of communication are either the local sailing craft or the steamers that weave from side to side of the river and lengthen the voyage from Baltimore to Washington to a matter of thirty hours. Communication between Maryland and Virginia was almost as easy in Washington’s day, for the steamboats have an annoying habit of neglecting many miles of one shore or the other, and there are days when no steamer crosses the stream. A man living in one of the little harbors of the Northern Neck, being in a hurry to travel northward, found his most expeditious mode of travel to be a drive of seventy miles to a railway at Richmond. Shut in thus, the people of the Northern Neck have nursed their traditions and held hard by their old family names, so that the visiting stranger, if he have any touch of historic instinct, finds himself singularly moved with a sense of his nearness in time to George Washington and his contemporaries. The telephone, indeed, has brought these people into tenuous communication with the modern world, but he that looks out upon the sea-like flood of the Potomac from the mouth of one of its many navigable tributaries in the Northern Neck can hardly persuade himself that the capital of 80,000,000 people lies less than a hundred miles up stream. Washington the man seems vastly more real and present than Washington the city.

E. N. Vallandigham.

Evening Post, N. Y.