[161] The vestrymen were "the foremost men ... in the parish ... whether from the point of view of intelligence, wealth or social position." (Bruce: Inst., i, 62; and see Meade, i, 191.)
[162] Bruce: Inst., i, 62-93; and see Eckenrode: S.C. & S., 13.
[163] Bruce: Inst., i, 131 et seq.
[164] Meade, ii, 219. Bishop Meade here makes a slight error. He says that Mr. Thompson "lived at first in the family of Colonel Thomas Marshall, of Oak Hill." Thomas Marshall did not become a colonel until ten years afterward. (Heitman, 285.) And he did not move to Oak Hill until 1773, six years later. (Paxton, 20.)
[165] James Thompson was born in 1739. (Meade, ii, 219.)
[166] Ib.
[167] Forty years later La Rochefoucauld found that the whole family and all visitors slept in the same room of the cabins of the back country. (La Rochefoucauld, iv, 595-96.)
[168] "I have not sleep'd above three nights or four in a bed, but, after walking ... all the day, I lay down before the fire upon a little hay, straw, fodder or bearskin ... with man, wife, and children, like a parcel of dogs and cats; and happy is he, who gets the berth nearest the fire." (Washington to a friend, in 1748; Writings: Ford, i, 7.)
Here is another of Washington's descriptions of frontier comforts: "I not being so good a woodsman as ye rest of my company, striped myself very orderly and went into ye Bed, as they calld it, when to my surprize, I found it to be nothing but a little straw matted together without sheets or any thing else, but only one thread bear [sic] blanket with double its weight of vermin such as Lice, Fleas, &c." (Washington's Diary, March 15, 1747; ib., 2.) And see La Rochefoucauld, iii, 175, for description of homes of farmers in the Valley forty years later—miserable log huts "which swarmed with children." Thomas Marshall's little house was much better than, and the manners of the family were far superior to, those described by Washington and La Rochefoucauld.
[169] Meade, ii, 219.