The Northern Neck could be compared with ancient Mesopotamia—a land between two rivers where a new civilization started.
The early settlers came to the wilderness in satins and velvets, they surrounded themselves with the niceties of living, as near like those they had left in England as was possible. They shopped in London as they had before and traded with the world directly from their own habitations.
But the conditions of their new wilderness home changed and moulded them and made them into something different—a new breed of men.
By the time unusual men were needed to shape an unusual type of government, descendants from this stock were ready for the undertaking.
In the Northern Neck there are still so many reminders of these remarkable people that it is not hard to imagine them as they might have been in their habitat several centuries ago—John Mottrom sailing into the Coan in his brightly-colored shallop; the Mottrom children playing their medieval games in the shadow of the primeval woods; Ursula twirling the venison roast on its hempen string before the fire; Hanna Neale passing the witchcraft test; young Jack Lee dashing down the forest aisles on his spirited mount; George Mason pulling the arrows from the "poor people"; Moore Fauntleroy measuring off his thirty arm's lengths of rhoanoke for the waiting Accopatough; King Carter rumbling down his avenue in his coach and six; Mary Ball on her dapple gray; James Monroe and John Marshall walking down the Parson's Lane with school books and muskets; Nelly Madison singing to her new baby; young George Washington riding down to see "Miss Betsy" on a fruitless mission, and little Robert E. Lee saying good-bye to the cherubs in the nursery fireplace....
INDIANS AND EARLY EXPLORERS
What men first knew this land between the Rappahannock and the Potomac Rivers?
It is believed that Indians lived along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay's tributaries three thousand years ago.
The Vikings may have entered the Bay and explored the nearby streams and lands in the eleventh century.
Cabot, an Italian seaman under commission from King Henry VII of England, may have entered the Chesapeake at the end of the fifteenth century.