"May 1781. Thomas Respass, Esq., Major; Hugh Douglass, Gent. captain; Thomas King, lieutenant; William T. Mason, ensign; Samuel Noland, captain; Abraham Dehaven and Enock Thomas, lieutenants; Isaac Dehaven and Thomas Vince, ensigns; James McLlaney, captain; Thomas Kennan, captain; John Bagley, first lieutenant.
"June 1781. Enoch Furr and George Rust, lieutenants; Withers Berry and William Hutchison (son of Benjamin), ensign.
"September 1781. Gustavus Elgin, captain; John Littleton, ensign.
"January 1782. William McClellan, captain.
"February 1782. William George, Timothy Hixon and Joseph Butler, captains.
"March 1782. James McLlaney, captain; George West, colonel, Thomas Respass, lieutenant-colonel.
"July 1782. Samuel Noland, Major; James Lewin Gibbs, second lieutenant and Giles Turley, ensign.
"August 1782. Enoch Thomas, captain; Samuel Smith, lieutenant; Matthias Smitley, first lieutenant; Charles Tyler and David Beaty, ensigns.
"December 1782. Thomas King, captain; William Mason, first lieutenant and Silas Gilbert, ensign."
By a stroke of good fortune, there has been brought to light and published in recent years a journal kept by one Nicholas Cresswell, a young Englishman of gentle birth who, in 1774, at the age of 24 years obeyed a keen impulse to emigrate to Virginia with the expectation of buying a plantation and becoming a Virginia farmer.[102] His home in England was the estate of his father, known as Crowden-le-Booth, in the parish of Edale in the Peak of Derbyshire. The father seems to have been a somewhat stern disciplinarian, against the rigidity of whose rule and unhappy home conditions young Cresswell fretted; and that and an ambition to make his own way in the world, coupled with an appetite for adventure common to his age and race, induced Nicholas to his course. After many difficulties, he sailed from England in the ship Molly on the 9th of April, 1774, and thus began a series of adventures, his excellent record of which has been characterized as "a valuable addition to Revolutionary Americana" and, it may be added, is nothing less than treasure trove to the student of Loudoun's past. In the course of his ensuing experiences he met, among a multitude of others, Jefferson, Lord Howe, Patrick Henry, Francis Lightfoot Lee; was upon occasion Washington's guest at Mount Vernon and paints and proves Thomson Mason to have been one of the kindliest and most hospitable of men. His wanderings took him through many parts of Virginia and particularly Leesburg and its neighborhood, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York; on a voyage to Barbados to recoup his health and on an expedition as a viewer and surveyor of new lands, down the Ohio River into Indiana country, in an unsuccessful effort to recoup his fortune. An educated young Englishman, loyal to his King and country, arriving in the Colonies as the storm of the Revolution was about to break, he soon was suspected of being an English spy, was bullied and persecuted by some, befriended by others and, withal, records his experiences in a narrative of such fascination that one reads it from end to end with unabated interest. Of the Leesburg and Loudoun of the period he gives the best contemporary, if not always complimentary, account known to the present writer. Through the courtesy of the Dial Press, the publishers of his Journal in the United States, the following abstract of Loudoun material is permitted: