SETTLEMENT
Although Spotswood's treaty, as we now know, had finally ended the Indian menace in Piedmont, the Colonists had to be convinced of that fact by reassuring experience before any great movement to the upper lands would begin. There had been other treaties and, as they well knew to their cost, Indian promise and performance were not always consistent. The first ten years following the treaty, or from 1722 to 1732, are a twilight zone for Loudoun in which one has to depend on fragmentary traditions and comparatively few grants as to actual settlement; but after the latter year the records become increasingly numerous and tradition more definite and the student stands on progressively firmer ground. Slowly there grew a steady increase in trappers and hunters to the cismontane region and then, gradually and cautiously, the landless men, the poorer whites from the lower settlements, the redemptioners or indentured servants who had fulfilled their contracts of service, began to make their way by Indian trail or through the untravelled woodlands. Very soon, however, there were purchases of substantial tracts by a more prosperous class who began to seat themselves upon their new possessions. They were a rough and sturdy folk, those first poorer arrivals, illiterate for the most part, bred to primitive conditions of living, many accustomed from birth to self-reliance in meeting the problems of existence on a sparsely settled land and wholly ignorant of the relative comforts of life enjoyed by the prosperous planters in tidewater. They built their rude cabins of logs in such places as seemed best to them, paying scant attention to land titles and being in fact, for the most part, mere squatters on their holdings; and there they planted small patches of corn and beans which, with the abundant game in the woods and fish in the streams, provided their liberal and hearty fare. It has been traditional that these earliest pioneers found many open spaces burned over before their arrival; for so prevalent had been the Indian habit of firing the woods, that historians have suggested that had the coming of the Europeans to Virginia been delayed for a few more centuries, its great forests would have vanished before their arrival. Taylor records that the early whites found the timber (probably second or younger growth) "far inferior in size and beauty to what it is at present. Indeed it has been asserted that in clearing ten acres of land there could hardly be obtained from it sufficient material to enclose it;" but as he was a Quaker, living in the midst of the Quaker settlement between the Catoctin range and the Short Hills in the northern part of the county, whose people were in habits and daily life somewhat isolated and up to Taylor's time at least, given to keeping largely to themselves, we may assume that his tradition applied more particularly to his locality. However, the present writer, some twenty years ago, while improving a farm then owned and occupied by him in the Catoctin hills, about four miles northeast of Leesburg, had occasion to clear woodland for roads and gardens, he found that none of the larger trees, many of them oaks, had rings indicating an age of over two hundred years. Taylor, and following him Head, places the responsibility of burning the forests upon the hunters (ranging over the ground before the first settlers) who are said to have fired the underbrush "the better to secure their quarries;" but it is unquestionable that the Indians had preceded them in the practice. It will be remembered that more than a hundred years before, Smith's Manahoacs could not inform him of conditions beyond the mountains "because the woods were not burnt;" obviously in contrast to conditions on the Piedmont side; and Beverly in his history, written in 1705, amply confirms the Indian usage.
Although tradition tells us, and the absence of recorded grants confirms, that these earliest settlers were mostly squatters, there had been acquisition of large tracts within present Loudoun from the Proprietor of the Northern Neck long before their arrival.
In an earlier chapter the title to the Northern Neck has been traced down to the year 1681 when it vested for the most part in the second Lord Colepeper and it is now time to continue its history. Upon Colepeper's death, in 1689, his only child Catherine, with her mother, inherited the Proprietary. This second Lady Culpeper, or Colepeper as the name was then also spelled, was something of a character. By birth, it seems, she was Dutch and had inherited from her own family both a large fortune and an independent spirit, not infrequently found together; and it was this fortune
"which enabled Lord Colepeper to hold together his large properties, particularly the vast Northern Neck proprietary in the Colony of Virginia. It was also her fortune which rescued from bankruptcy the English property of her son-in-law, the fifth Lord Fairfax.... Lady Colepeper, it appears, never succeeded in mastering the English language. She both spoke and wrote it very imperfectly."[9]
Lady Culpeper died in 1710. The daughter Catherine had, some years before, married Thomas, fifth Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron in the peerage of Scotland and, on her mother's death, the grant rested in them; for in the meanwhile Alexander Colepeper also had died (1694) and left his one-sixth interest to Lady Margaret Colepeper, the second Lord's widow. The fifth Lord Fairfax, dying in 1710, left three sons (all of whom later died without issue) and it was the eldest of these, Thomas, who inherited the title and became the sixth Lord. This sixth Lord Fairfax had been born in England in 1691 and came later to Virginia, living out his long life as something of a misogynistic recluse (due, it is said, to an unfortunate love affair in early life with a mercenary adventuress) at his seat Greenway Court, then in the wilderness of Frederick County, where he died in 1781. Today his body rests in Christ Church, Winchester. He it was who became the friend and patron of the youthful George Washington and who fills so large a part in the history of the Northern Neck.
The family of Fairfax had long been seated in Yorkshire where the men were something more than typical English squires, often rising to positions of much national as well as local importance. It traced its descent from Richard Fairfax, Lord Chief Justice of England in the reign of Henry VI. Sir Thomas Fairfax accompanied the Earl of Essex to France and was knighted for bravery in the camp before Rouen. On the 4th May, 1627, he was created a Baron of Scotland with the title of Lord Fairfax of Cameron, which not very glorious honour he purchased for the sum of £1,500.[10] His son, Sir Ferdinando, was a general in the Parliamentary Army during the English civil war, becoming the second Baron, and the latter's son Sir Thomas, later third Baron, was commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary Armies and a most capable soldier. Becoming dissatisfied with the extreme policies of the Parliamentary party, he resigned his position in 1650 and was succeeded by Oliver Cromwell. This third Baron died in 1671, without male issue, and the title then passed to his cousin Henry, grandson of the first Lord. Upon his death, in April, 1688, he was succeeded by his son Henry as the fifth Lord Fairfax who has already been mentioned as the husband of Catherine Culpeper.
The fifth Lord Fairfax, although his marriage brought the great Proprietary into the family, seems to have been dissolute and extravagant. When he died in London, on the 6th of January, 1710, his affairs were in great disorder and it is said that at that time "his servant who attended him robbed him of the little money he had left." His widow, however, was a woman of thrift and character and intent on guarding her Virginia patrimony for the benefit of her sons. In 1702 Robert Carter had been appointed local agent for the Proprietary; but after her husband's death Lady Fairfax became dissatisfied with his conduct of its affairs and the revenues she was receiving and appointed in his place Edmund Jenings and Thomas Lee (then only twenty-one years of age) as resident agents. As Jenings was unable to go to Virginia at the time, young Lee found himself for four years in sole charge; and a most conscientious and capable agent he became and continued until Jenings came to Virginia in 1717 and took matters into his own hands. This Jenings was a man of considerable prominence who later was to serve, for a short time, as acting governor awaiting the arrival of Spotswood. After the death of Lady Fairfax, her testamentary trustees "turned again to Micajah Perry[11] for help and he pursuaded Robert Carter to agree once more to assume the agency"[12] (1722) which he continued to hold until his death ten years later. The Virginia office of the estate then remained closed until 1734 when Lord Fairfax appointed his cousin William Fairfax (whose son Bryan by his second wife Deborah Clarke of Salem, Massachusetts, was eventually to succeed to the title as the eighth Lord and in whose descendants the title still remains) to act as collector of rents. In 1736 Lord Fairfax himself assumed the management in Virginia for a short time; once more the office was closed until in 1739 we find William Fairfax again in charge, this time with more extensive powers until Lord Fairfax returned to Virginia in 1745 and took upon himself control for the rest of his life.
We are thus introduced to two more men who, in themselves and their families, had paramount rôles to play in and about the territory now Loudoun; and between whom there was to develop no little rivalry and conflict of personal ambitions and interests. Lee, himself between 1717 and 1719 a purchaser of several thousand acres of wilderness lying on either side of Goose Creek, had been born in 1690 at the family home Mt. Pleasant in Westmoreland County and eventually became "President[13] and Commander-in-Chief" of Virginia, as he is described in his will. He was a grandson of that Richard Lee of a family long in possession of the estate of Coton in Shropshire who, coming to Virginia sometime prior to 1642, first settled in that part of York which subsequently became Gloucester, later moved to Northumberland and became the progenitor of a family ever since of outstanding importance in the Northern Neck and Virginia. Carter, a later purchaser of land on a truly vast scale, whose father Colonel John Carter, believed to have been the son of William Carter of Carstown, Hertfordshire and of the Middle Temple, had come to Virginia prior to 1649 and first settled in upper Norfolk, now Nansemond County, came to wield an even greater power than his long-time rival. Our Robert Carter, (1663-1732) the "King Carter" of towering memory, was the second surviving son, and his residence Corotoman was in Lancaster County. The descendants of both Lee and Carter continued for many years to hold great estates in Loudoun. One of Lee's grandsons, Thomas Ludwell Lee, built Coton (long since vanished) about 1800 and another grandson Ludwell Lee built about the same time and just across the highway, the beautiful Belmont, that home of irresistible charm; while in 1802 George Carter, great-grandson of the mighty Robert, built and occupied Oatlands. Both Lee and Carter and their families and the great mansions built in Loudoun by their descendants will receive later mention.[14]
Unfortunately for the development of parts of the southern and southeastern portion of the county, the purchase of these great tracts by Lee, Carter and others greatly delayed their settlement and this to the disadvantage of the owners as well as the neighborhood. Even Lord Fairfax is found setting off to himself large specific tracts.[15] It was their intention to create hereditary landed estates, modelled on those existing in England and to be farmed by a numerous class of yeoman tenantry. But as the very type of farmer-settler most desired as tenants by the great owners came in, they early and strongly evinced that determination, common to all in the Colonies, to hold their land in a freehold that could be passed on indefinitely to their children and thus insure to them the benefit of their parents' industry and thrift rather than to become tenants for a limited period of any great estate; and this no matter how advantageous or tempting the proffered terms of tenancy. Under then existing conditions, with the supply of new and cheaply purchasable land seemingly inexhaustible if one had but the determination and courage to push on to the newer frontier, they went beyond the great manors, as they came to be called, and seated themselves in the upper lands or crossed the Blue Ridge to the Shenandoah Valley. Eventually and much later, when parts of the manors were sold, it was often in comparatively large parcels and these and the remaining portions were, as a rule, farmed with slave labor, a custom practically nonexistent in the northwest part of the county. Thus the relative thinness of settlement, persisting to this day, of much of the lower lands of Loudoun may be attributed not wholly to the fact that the stronger and more fertile lands lay above Goose Creek but in part to the social history of those early days as well.