What might be considered an exception to this rule was the body of men (among whom Washington was a generous, fearless leader) which sought to secure for the Virginia soldiers of the Fort Necessity campaign the bounty-land promised them by Governor Dinwiddie in 1754. Year after year, for twenty years, Washington was continually besieged by the soldiers he led West in 1754 or their relatives, who implored his aid in securing the grant of land promised, and there is no more interesting phase of his life during these years than his patient persistence in compelling Virginia to make good her solemn pledge. To impatient and impertinent men such as Colonel Mercer he wrote scathing rebukes; to helpless widows and aged veterans he sent kind messages of hope and cheer.
The trouble was that everybody was claiming the land beyond the Alleghanies; the Ohio Company was fighting for its rights until the London agent questionably formed a merger with the Walpole Grant speculators. This company had claimed all the land between the Monongahela and the Kanawha. Washington, accordingly, had attempted to secure the two hundred thousand acres for his Fort Necessity comrades on the western shore of the Kanawha. In 1770 he made his sixth western journey in order to view his own purchases and make a beginning in the business of securing the soldiers' lands. He left Mount Vernon October 5 and reached William Crawford's, on the Youghiogheny, on the thirteenth. On the sixteenth Washington visited his sixteen-hundred acre tract near by and was pleased with it. On the third of November he blazed four trees on the Ohio, near the mouth of the Great Kanawha. He wrote:
"At the beginning of the bottom above the junction of the rivers, and at the mouth of a branch on the east side, I marked two maples, an elm, and hoop-wood tree, as a corner of the soldiers' land (if we can get it), intending to take all the bottom from hence to the rapids in the Great Bend into one survey. I also marked at the mouth of another run lower down on the west side, at the lower end of the long bottom, an ash and hoop-wood for the beginning of another of the soldiers' surveys, to extend up so as to include all the bottom in a body on the west side."
From this time on Crawford was busy surveying for Washington, either privately or in behalf of the soldiers' lands, until the outbreak of Dunmore's War in 1774. For these bounty-land surveys, Washington was particularly attentive, writing Crawford frequently "in behalf of the whole officers and soldiers, and beg of you to be attentive to it, as I think our interest is deeply concerned in the event of your dispatch."
When Walpole's Grant was confirmed by King George, Washington greatly feared the loss of the lands promised to himself and his comrades of 1754. His own share was five thousand acres, and he had purchased an equal amount from others who, becoming hopeless, offered their claims for sale. This grant was bounded on the west by the old war-path which ran from the mouth of the Scioto River to Cumberland Gap. Accordingly, in September, 1773, Washington wrote Crawford to go down the Ohio below the Scioto. Washington did not know then that the purchasers of Walpole's Grant had agreed to set apart two hundred thousand acres for the heroes of 1754. It is significant that he was particular to avoid all occasion for conflicting claims; he originally wanted the soldiers' surveys to be made beyond the Ohio Company's Grant; later beyond the Walpole Grant. And while war and other causes put a disastrous end to the work of the promoters of all the various land companies with which Washington had nothing to do, the soldiers' lands were saved to them, and all received their shares. Washington also retained his private lands surveyed by Crawford, and owned most of them in 1799, when he died. In 1784, Washington had patents for thirty thousand acres and surveys for ten thousand more. Briefly, his possessions may be described as ten thousand acres on the south bank of the Ohio between Wheeling and Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and twenty thousand acres in the Great Kanawha Valley, beginning three miles above its mouth, "on the right and left of the river, and bounded thereby forty-eight miles and a half."
Washington's ethics and his enterprise with reference to his Western speculations were both admirable, but we can only hint of them here. He was strict with himself and with others, but he knew how to be lenient when leniency would not harm the recipient. To his later agent, Thomas Freeman (Crawford was captured and put to death by the Indians in 1782), he wrote in 1785: "Where acts of Providence interfere to disable a tenant, I would be lenient in the exaction of rent, but when the cases are otherwise, I will not be put off; because it is on these my own expenditures depend, and because an accumulation of undischarged rents is a real injury to the tenant." While his agents were ordered to use all legal precautions against allowing his lands to be usurped by others, Washington was particular that needy people, stopping temporarily, should not be driven off; and he was exceedingly anxious from first to last that no lands should be taken up for him that were anywise claimed by others. It is a fact that Washington had few disputes in a day when disputes over lands and boundaries were as common as sunrise and sunset. No landholder in the West had so little trouble in proportion to the amount of land owned.
The intensity of Washington's business energy is not shown more plainly than by his enterprise in finding and exploiting novelties. One day he was studying the question of rotation of crops; the next found him laboring all day with his blacksmith fashioning a newfangled plough. The next day he spent, perhaps, in studying a plan of a new machine invented in Europe to haul trees bodily out of the ground, an invention which meant something to a man who owned thirty thousand acres of primeval forest. He ordered his London agent to send on one of these machines regardless of cost, if they were really able to do the feats claimed. Again he was writing Tilghman at Philadelphia concerning the possibility and advisability of importing palatines from Europe, with which to settle his Western farms. Now he was examining veins of coal along the Youghiogheny and experimenting with it, or studying the location of salt-springs and the manufacture of salt, which in the West was twice dearer than flour. A whole essay could be devoted to Washington's interest in mineral springs at Saratoga, Rome, New York, and in the West, and to his plan outlined to the president of the Continental Congress to have the United States retain possession of all lands lying immediately about them. We do not know who built the first grist-mill west of the Alleghanies, but it is doubtful if there was another save Washington's at Perryopolis, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, before the Revolutionary War. "I assure you," wrote Crawford, "it is the best mill I ever saw anywhere, although I think one of a less value would have done as well." It is the boast of Ohioans that the millstones for the first mill in the old Northwest were "packed" over the mountains from Connecticut. Washington might have boasted, a score of years earlier, that he had found his millstones right in the Alleghanies, and they were "equal to English burr," according to his millwright. The mill which is still in operation on Washington's Run is on the original site of the one built by him in 1775. Portions of the original structure remain in the present mill, and it is known far and wide by the old name. The water-power, which is no longer relied upon except during wet seasons, still follows the same mill-race used in Revolutionary days, and the reconstructed dam is on the old site. The improvements on Washington's plantation here, overseer's house, slave quarters, etc., were situated near Plant No. 2 of the Washington Coal and Coke Company. It is known that Washington became interested in the coal outcropping here, but it is safe to say that he little dreamed that the land he purchased with that lying contiguous to it would within a century be valued at twenty million dollars. In view of the enormous value of this territory, it is exceedingly interesting to know that Washington was its first owner, and that he found coal there nearly a century and a half ago.
In 1784 Washington issued a circular offering his Western lands to rent:
"These lands may be had on three tenures: First, until January, 1790, and no longer. Second, until January, 1795, renewable every ten years for ever. Third, for nine hundred and ninety-nine years."
The conditions included clearing five new acres every year for each hundred leased and the erection of buildings within the time of lease. The staple commodity was to be medium of exchange. The seventh condition is interesting: