From that time onward he bought occasional tracts of lands in various parts of the country or acquired them in discharge of debts. By the death of his mother he acquired her land on Accokeek Creek in Stafford County, near where his father had operated an iron furnace.
Washington's landed estate as listed in his will amounted to about sixty thousand two hundred two acres, besides lots in Washington, Alexandria, Winchester, Bath, Manchester, Edinburgh and Richmond. Nine thousand two hundred twenty-seven acres, including Mount Vernon and a tract on Four Mile Run, he specifically bequeathed to individuals, as he did some of the lots. The remaining lots and fifty thousand nine hundred seventy-five acres (some of which land was already conditionally sold) he directed to be disposed of, together with his live stock, government bonds and shares held by him in the Potomac Company, the Dismal Swamp Company, the James River Company and the banks of Columbia and Alexandria--the whole value of which he conservatively estimated at five hundred and thirty thousand dollars. The value of the property he specifically bequeathed, with his slaves, which he directed should be freed, can only be guessed at, but can hardly have been short of two hundred and twenty thousand dollars more. In other words, he died possessed of property worth three-quarters of a million and was the richest man in America.
Not all of the land that he listed in his will proved of benefit to his heirs. The title to three thousand fifty-one acres lying on the Little Miami River in what is now Ohio and valued by him at fifteen thousand two hundred fifty-five dollars proved defective. In 1790 a law, signed by himself, had passed Congress requiring the recording of such locations with the federal Secretary of State. Washington's locations and surveys of this Ohio land had already been recorded in the Virginia land office, and with a carelessness unusual in him he neglected to comply with the statute. After his death certain persons took advantage of the defect and seized the lands, and his executors failed to embrace another opportunity given them to perfect the title, with the result that the lands were lost.
The matter rested until a few years ago when some descendants of the heirs set their heads together and one of them, Robert E. Lee, Jr., procured his appointment in 1907 by the court of Fairfax County as administrator de bonis non of Washington's estate. It was, of course, impossible to regain the lands--which lie not far from Cincinnati and are worth vast sums--so the movers in the matter had recourse to that last resort of such claimants--Congress--and, with the modesty usually shown by claimants, asked that body to reimburse the heirs in the sum of three hundred and five thousand one hundred dollars--that is, one hundred dollars per acre--with interest from the date of petition.
Thus far Congress has not seen fit to comply, nor does there seem to be any good reason why it should do so. The land cost Washington a mere bagatelle, it was lost through the neglect of himself and his executors, and not one of the persons who would benefit by such a subsidy from the public funds is his lineal descendant. As a mere matter of public policy and common sense it may well be doubted whether any claim upon government, no matter how just in itself, should be reimbursed beyond the third generation. The heirs urge in extenuation of the claim that Washington refused to accept any compensation for his Revolutionary services, but it is answered that it is hardly seemly for his grand nephews and grand nieces many times removed to beg for something that the Father of His Country himself rejected. One wonders whether the claimants would dare to press their claims in the presence of their great Kinsman himself!
CHAPTER III
VIRGINIA AGRICULTURE IN WASHINGTON'S DAY
The Virginia of George Washington's youth and early manhood was an imperial domain reaching from Atlantic tidewater through a thousand leagues of forests, prairies and mountains "west and northwest" to the South Sea. Only a narrow fringe along the eastern coast was settled by white men; the remainder was a terra incognita into which Knights of the Golden Horseshoe and Indian traders had penetrated a short distance, bringing back stories of endless stretches of wolf-haunted woodland, of shaggy-fronted wild oxen, of saline swamps in which reposed the whitened bones of prehistoric monsters, of fierce savage tribes whose boast was of the number of scalps that swung in the smoke of their wigwams. Even as late as 1750 the fertile Shenandoah Valley beyond the Blue Ridge formed the extreme frontier, while in general the "fall line," where the drop from the foothills to the coastal plain stops navigation, marked the limit of settlement.