"IV And whereas it is expedient that trustees should be appointed to regulate the buildings in the said towns of Stephensburg, Winchester and Leesburg: Be it therefore enacted by the authority aforesaid, ... And that the honorable Philip Ludwell Lee, esquire, Thomas Mason, esquire, Francis Lightfoot Lee, James Hamilton, Nicholas Minor, Josias Clapham, Aeneas Campbell, John Hugh, Francis Hague, and William West, gentlemen, be constituted and appointed trustees for the said town of Leesburg; and that they, or any five or more of them, are hereby authorized and empowered, from time to time, and all times hereafter, to settle and establish such rules and orders for the more regular and orderly building of the houses in the said town of Leesburg, as to them shall seem best and most convenient. And in the case of death or removal, or other legal disability of any one or more of the trustees above mentioned, it shall and may be lawful for the surviving or remaining trustees of the said towns of Stephensburg, Winchester, and Leesburg, respectively, from time to time, to elect and choose so many other persons in the room of those so dead, removed or disabled, as shall make up the number of ten; which trustees, so chosen, shall by all intents and purposes be vested with the same power as any other in this Act particularly named."[85]
Of the members of the Lee family participating in the early affairs of the town and county or owning land in Loudoun, it is generally held that the new town was named in honour of Francis Lightfoot Lee, the first county lieutenant. Thus the Lees are appropriately and locally commemorated, though their river still remains Goose Creek and the county of their large holdings goes by another and less congruous name.
Now it must be remembered that in this year of 1758 which marked the formal recognition and naming of Leesburg, the French and Indian menace was a very real and terrible anxiety in the minds of the Loudoun settlers and had been responsible for the erection of the small frontier fort at this point which has been mentioned. The local tradition that the little town, when first built, was surrounded by a timber stockade seems not only plausible but highly probable.[86] It was a well established custom of the English Colonists on the Indian frontier, north and south, to protect their outlying villages in that manner. Leesburg people always insist that the noticeable crowding together of houses in the older part of the town and the pronounced local custom of building immediately on the street line is a survival of this very early need of concentration for protection.
Where the two main roads, to which the town owes its existence, passed through its future site, they followed the old Virginia custom in being decidedly indefinite in their bounds; and their condition was further complicated by the ground at this point being marshy and fed by numerous springs. Therefore even before Leesburg was laid out or Loudoun organized, the people living in the neighborhood had petitioned the Fairfax Court for the construction of a highway at that point in such manner as would be most convenient for the travel from Noland's Ferry to the Carolinas. When Loudoun was organized the petition was certified to the court of the new county which, in its November term of 1757, ordered that the roads leading from Alexandria to Winchester and from Noland's Ferry to the Carolinas be opened to go through that neighbourhood "in the most convenient manner;" and James Hamilton, John Moss and Thomas Sorrell were ordered "to view the most convenient way for the same and make report to the Court." These viewers proceeded to so efficiently fulfill their duties that when they eventually reported to the court, on the 12th April, 1758, that they had "viewed the most convenient way for the Roads to pass through the Town and find them convenient and good with proper clearing,"[87] a corduroy road had been constructed through the marshy ground and Hough was thus able to have his King Street in definite bounds when he mapped his survey for Minor.
CHAPTER X
ADOLESCENCE
Our upper country, at last, has graduated from being classified as merely part of the backwoods of Lord Fairfax's Northern Neck and is now enrolled in the rapidly growing roster of colonial Virginia's counties. Unfortunately the conferring of that dignity did not alter the social problems of the frontier nor change, to any great degree, the turbulence and heterogeneous character of its population. The Irish element, particularly, appears to have been pugnacious and lawless, if one may judge from the frequency of proceedings before the Court for "battery" wherein defendants carry distinctly Hibernian names. There was no dearth of business, civil or criminal, awaiting the court's sessions.
Those of the poorer class, however, were not alone in taking the law into their own hands. Cameron Parish, as heretofore appears, was set up in 1748. Whether its vestry was more arbitrary and tenacious of office or merely less diplomatic than was the rule elsewhere is not clear; but that there developed great dissatisfaction with its activities the records show. The Parish vestry, it will be remembered, exercised many powers of civil government. Originally the vestry of twelve gentlemen and their successors were chosen by vote of the parishioners; but gradually the practice developed in existing vestries, upon the death or resignation of a member, for the survivors themselves arbitrarily to appoint his successor. There never was unanimity of religious belief in Cameron the Parish nor in Loudoun the county. From the very beginning, as we have seen, the land was peopled by men and women of definitely divergent religious views—the Churchmen from Tidewater with some Baptists and Presbyterians, a large number of Quakers from Pennsylvania, Germans from overseas and no small number whose religious convictions, if existent, were of nebulous tenuity. Had the vestries stood annually for election the populace might have felt more closely represented; but with their membership exclusively taken from the landowning class which had migrated from the lower country, the Quakers, the Scotch-Irish, the Germans accepted a somewhat arbitrary rule less willingly than were they all churchmen and meeting together in common worship. The friction was not confined to Cameron. Similar troubles had developed elsewhere and petitions had been sent to Williamsburg for relief. In 1759 the Legislature decided to act. "Whereas" reads the preamble to Chapter XXI of the Laws of 1758-59