Until 1765 the Baptist congregations in Virginia were united to the Philadelphia Association but in that year obtained their dismissal and set about the task of building their own association in Virginia. Their first convention was held "in Ketocton in Loudoun" the old church there thus giving the first Baptist Association in Virginia its name. At that time the Colony had only four Baptist churches but all of them were represented at this first convention by the following delegates
Ketocton: John Marks and John Loyd.
Smith and Lynsville Creek: John Alderson.
Mill Creek: John Garrard and Isaac Sutton.
Broad Run: David Thomas and Joseph Metcalf.
A resolution was adopted to seek from the parent association in Philadelphia instructions for the guidance of the new organization. As their association grew in membership, it "was divided into two in 1789 by a line running from the Potomac a south course." The westerly portion retained the Ketocton name and that to the east was known as the Chappawamsick. This division continued until 1792 when the districts were again united.[57]
It is believed that a congregation of the German Reformed Church at Lovettsville was organized before 1747 and possibly at once on the arrival of the first German settlers in the Lovettsville neighbourhood, about 1731. Again we are faced with the loss or destruction of early records; but the Rev. Michael Schlatter, one of the early founders of the Reformed Church in America, kept a journal from which it appears that he preached to a Reformed congregation in our German Settlement at the home of Elder William Wenner in the month of May, 1747. It is believed that there was, at a very early day, a building of logs used as a church and as a schoolhouse as well and that this continued to serve its congregation until 1810, when a larger brick building was erected which gave way in 1901 to another structure.[58]
By patent dated the 7th day of December, 1731, Rawleigh Chinn of Lancaster County acquired from Lord Fairfax 3,300 acres near Goose Creek and adjacent to a huge patent of 13,879 acres lying along the east side of Goose Creek which already had been granted to Colonel Charles Burgess, also of Lancaster. This grant to Chinn was on the Proprietor's usual terms, reserving to the latter "yearly and every year on the feast day of Saint Michael the Archangel the fee rent of one shilling sterling money for every fifty acres of Land hereby granted and so for a greater or lesser quantity"; and also meticulously reciting, "Royal mines excepted and a full third part of all lead, copper, tin, coals, iron mines and iron ore that shall be found thereon." Raleigh Chinn had married Esther, a daughter of Colonel Joseph Ball of Epping Forest, Lancaster County, an older sister of Mary Ball who was to marry Augustine Washington; and he, although never living on his purchase of forest lands in the "upper country," appears to have been so well pleased with his investment that he subsequently added heavily thereto; so that at the time of his death in August, 1741, he left to his children a large estate in what later became Loudoun and Fauquier Counties. One of Raleigh Chinn's sons, Joseph, in January, 1763, sold to Leven Powell 500 acres of his inheritance and on a part of this land Colonel Powell later (1782) laid out the town of Middleburg. Thomas Chinn, a brother of Joseph, lived on the land on Goose Creek he had inherited from his father and according to family tradition, employed his young cousin, George Washington, to survey it for him, Washington occupying "an office on a beautiful hill," built for him by Chinn. Another surveyor who had run out the Chinn lines was Colonel Thomas Marshall who was the first county surveyor of Fauquier, subsequently became its burgess and sheriff, played a most gallant part in the Revolution and became the father of the famous Chief Justice.[59]
Leven Powell, at the time of his purchase from Joseph Chinn, was no stranger to Loudoun, for his father, William Powell, had acquired land in the neighbourhood of the present Middleburg as early as 1741. Although these lands had been repeatedly surveyed from the time of the original patents to Raleigh Chinn, Charles Burgess and others, in a day when forest surveys customarily ran to a red or white oak, an ash or a walnut tree, it may be supposed that boundary lines, in spite of "processioning," not infrequently became the subject of vigourous dispute; so in the Middleburg neighbourhood the Chinn and Powell heirs fell out, in 1811, over their dividing lines and the accuracy of the survey made in 1731 by John Barber for Charles Burgess, William Stamp, Thomas Thornton and Rawleigh Chinn the burgess. About 500 acres of arable land and 500 acres of forest were involved and hot was the legal warfare and very numerous the depositions from distant witnesses in Virginia and Kentucky obtained and filed in Loudoun's Superior Court. At the end, the litigation appears to have resolved itself into some sort of compromise; for on the 7th April, 1814, we find the Superior Court ordering "this Day came the Parties by their Attorneys and this suit is discontinued being agreed between the Parties."[60] But the memory of their warfare still ruffled the litigants' minds; for upon the settlement being effected, "Sailor" Rawleigh Chinn, grandson and namesake of the patentee, proceeded to build upon the land set off to him "Mount Recovery" which, burned in the Civil War, was afterwards rebuilt and became the home of Mr. Thomas Dudley, subsequently being sold to Mr. Oliver Iselin; while Burr Powell, the other litigant, built on the tract set off to him a house he called Mount Defiance which in later years was owned by the Thatcher and Bishop families.
In 1744 John Hough, according to family tradition, settled in these Fairfax backwoods "and served for many years as surveyor for the vast estate of Lord Fairfax." He became the progenitor of the family which has become numerous in Loudoun and includes Emerson Hough, well known American novelist, though the latter was born in Iowa.[61] His surveys were much needed, for by 1750 the pressure of settlers for grants in these uplands had so increased that "Lord Fairfax's land office was crowded with applicants" we are told.[62]