LEGENDS OF LOUDOUN
Reprinting of this book has been granted to the Loudoun Museum by Mrs. Harrison Williams and Mr. and Mrs. Winslow Williams.
All proceeds from the sale of book will benefit the Loudoun Museum.
We are indeed grateful to the Williams family for this generous gesture and to the Loudoun County Independent Bicentennial Committee for assistance in making this possible.

John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun (1705-1782). Governor-in-Chief of Virginia and Commander-in-Chief of British forces in America, for whom Loudoun County was named in 1757.

LEGENDS OF
LOUDOUN

An account of the history
and homes of a border county
of Virginia's Northern Neck

By HARRISON WILLIAMS

GARRETT AND MASSIE INCORPORATED
RICHMOND VIRGINIA

COPYRIGHT, 1938, BY
GARRETT & MASSIE, INCORPORATED
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES

To
J. S. A.

PREFACE

Many causes have contributed to the great upsurge of interest now manifesting itself in Virginia's romantic history and in the men and women who made it. If, perhaps, the greatest and most potent of these forces is the splendid restoration of Williamsburg, her colonial capital, through the munificence of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., of New York, we must not lose sight of the part played by the reconstruction of her old historic highways and their tributary roads into the fine modern highway system which is today the Commonwealth's boast and pride; the systematic and constructive activities of the Virginia Commission of Conservation and Development of which the present chairman is the Hon. Wilbur C. Hall of Loudoun; and the excellent work done by the Garden Club of Virginia in holding its annual Garden Week celebration in each spring and the generous permission it obtains, from so many of the present owners of Virginia's historic old homes and gardens, for the public to visit and inspect them at that time and thus capture, if but for the moment, a sense of personal unity with Virginia's glamourous past.

The increasing flow of visitors to Loudoun and to Leesburg, its county seat, has developed a steadily growing demand for more information concerning the County's past and its charming old homes than has been available in readily accessible form. These visitors, in their quest, usually call at Leesburg's beautiful Thomas Balch Library which, during Garden Week, lends its facilities to Virginia's Garden Clubs for their Loudoun headquarters; and Miss Rebecca Harrison, its Librarian, has upon occasion found the lack of published information in convenient form somewhat a handicap in her always gracious efforts to welcome and inform our growing tide of visitors. Knowing as she did my lifelong interest in Colonial history and the lives and family stories of the men and women who enacted their parts therein (my sole qualification, if such in charity it may be called, for such a task) she, from time to time, had suggested that I prepare a book upon Loudoun, the people who built up the County and the old homes which they erected and in which they lived. The present volume has been written in an effort to respond to those requests. When some four years ago the work was contemplated, it was proposed to make it primarily a small, informal guidebook to Loudoun's older homes; but as my research into her earlier days progressed, I became deeply conscious that the people of Loudoun have forgotten much of her past that tenaciously and loyally should be remembered; and so the story of the County almost crowded out, beyond expectation, the story of the homes. It is hoped that, sometime in the future, another book pertaining wholly to these old plantations and their owners may be prepared and published.

Although there has been no very recent book devoted to her history, Loudoun has had her historians within and without her boundaries and, above all, has been fortunate in attracting the interest of that outstanding scholar and historian of the Northern Neck, the late Fairfax Harrison, Esq., whose beautiful country-seat of Belvoir is near by in the adjoining county of Fauquier. As the most casual reader of the following pages will quickly recognize, I have been under constant obligation, in the preparation of this work, to these earlier writers and can but here sincerely acknowledge the help I have derived from them.

The first published history of Loudoun was written by Yardley Taylor, a Quaker of the upper country, prior to 1853 in which year it made its printed appearance. With it was published a map of the County prepared by him (for his vocation was that of a land-surveyor) and both map and book are highly creditable to their author. The book, however, is not very large and, concerning itself somewhat extensively with the topography, geology, etc. of the County, it has less to say of Loudoun's history than its admirers could wish. The map, embellished with cartouches of old buildings, was the first county map to be prepared in this part of Virginia and so accurate was it found to be that it was used by both Federals and Confederates in the devastating War Between the States. That war, with its aftermath, set back the cultural activities of Virginia for a full generation; thus it was not until 1909 that the next Loudoun history appears, this time by Mr. James W. Head of Leesburg. His volume is more comprehensive than Mr. Taylor's but, again, it covers far more than the County's history, including carefully prepared surveys of its minerals, soils, farm statistics, commercial activities, and many other interesting and closely related subjects. In 1926 Messrs. Patrick A. Deck and Henry Heaton published their Economic and Social Survey of Loudoun County which is somewhat similar in its scope to the work of Mr. Head but not so large a volume. In the meanwhile, however, in 1924, Mr. Fairfax Harrison, himself a scion of the Fairfax family, had privately published his comprehensive Landmarks of Old Prince William covering the early history of all the territory originally comprised in old Prince William County; and thereby built an enduring monument to his own erudition and industry that will stand as long as there remains a man or woman who retains an interest in the fairest part of the princely Colepeper-Fairfax Proprietary. It remains a pleasant and grateful memory that I had the benefit of Mr. Harrison's personal suggestions and advice, as well as access to the overflowing treasury of his published writings, in my preparation of this volume.

In addition to the authors named, much help was derived from Mr. John Alexander Binns' treatise on his agricultural experiments, from the war-books of Major General Henry Lee, Col. John S. Mosby, Col. E. V. White, Rev. J. J. Williamson, Captain F. M. Myers and Mr. Briscoe Goodhart, although in the case of the two latter authors their writings are measurably impaired by the rancour which controlled their pens. Dr. E. G. Swem's Virginia Historical Index was of constant assistance as were the publications of the Virginia Historical Society, those of the College of William and Mary and similar historical magazines as well as Virginia's Colonial records and the records of Loudoun County. The resources of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and those of our little Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg have all been available to me. In short, I had intended to append a bibliography of volumes consulted and relied upon for many of the views hereafter expressed; but when those volumes grew in number to five or six hundred I realized that limited space would permit no such project. Therefore I have contented myself with frequently indicating in footnotes the principal sources from which my information has been derived.

To my acknowledgment of aid obtained from books, pamphlets, newspapers and magazines, official records and documents, must be added my appreciation of the help of many friends. Mr. Thomas M. Fendall of Morrisworth and Leesburg, of distinguished Virginia background himself, has made such careful and comprehensive studies of Loudoun's past that he was and is the logical prospective author of a book thereon; but his modesty equals his industry and scholarship to the very obvious loss, in this instance, to the County and its people. From him I have had such constant and constructive assistance and cheerful response to my frequent appeals that without his aid this book could not have attained its present form. To Loudoun's present County Clerk Mr. Edward O. Russell and to his deputy Miss Nellie Hammerley; to Mrs. John Mason; Mrs. E. B. White and Miss Elizabeth White of Selma; Mrs. Frederick Page; the Rev. G. Peyton Craighill, the present Rector of Shelburne Parish; the Rev. J. S. Montgomery; Miss Lilias Janney; Judge and Mrs. J. R. H. Alexander of Springwood; Mrs. Ashby Chancellor; Mrs. John D. Moore; Mr. Frank C. Littleton of Oak Hill, and his long studies of the history of that estate and of President Monroe; Trial Justice William A. Metzger; Mr. J. Ross Lintner, Loudoun's County Agent; Hon. Charles F. Harrison, Commonwealth's Attorney; Mr. Oscar L. Emerick, Superintendent of Schools, for permission to use the map of the County prepared by him; Mr. E. Marshall Rust; Mr. George Carter; Hon. Wilbur C. Hall and his efficient official staff; Mr. Valta Palma, Curator of the Rare Book Collection of the Library of Congress, and Mr. Hirst Milhollen of the Fine Arts Division of the same great institution; Mr. John T. Loomis, Managing Director of Loudermilk and Co. of Washington, as well as to very many others, my sincere thanks are again tendered for the valuable help they all so willingly have given me.

The illustrations used to embellish the text deserve a word of comment. The portrait of the Right Honourable John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun, Captain-General of the British forces in America and Governor-in-Chief of Virginia, in whose honour the County of Loudoun was named, is reproduced from an engraving that appeared in the London Magazine of October, 1757, when Loudoun was at the height of his career. It was copied from the engraving by Charles Spooner of an earlier painting of the Earl by the Scotch artist Allan Ramsay (1713-1784), who later became the principal portrait painter to King George III and his court. I have in my collection two copies of this London Magazine engraving, one of which I found in the hands of a dealer in New York and the other in London. No other copies, so far as I can learn, have recently been offered for sale.

The fine portrait of the Right Honourable William Petty-FitzMaurice, Earl of Shelburne and 1st Marquess of Landsdowne, for whom Shelburne Parish was named, is by Sir Joshua Reynolds and is now in the National Portrait Gallery in London to which it was presented by his son Henry, 3rd Marquess of Landsdowne, K. G., in June, 1858. I obtained an official photograph of this painting at the National Portrait Gallery in the summer of 1937, and permission to reproduce it in this book.

The portrait of Sir Peter Halkett, Baronet, of Pitfiranie, Scotland, who commanded that part of Braddock's army that passed through the present Loudoun on its way to the fatal battle near Fort DuQuesne, is from P. McArdell's engraving of the portrait painted by Allan Ramsay in 1740, and is considered by me one of my most fortunate discoveries.

The pictures of Oak Hill in the body of the book and that of the meeting of the Middleburg Hunt on its spacious lawns, reproduced on the dust-jacket, are from the extensive collections of Mr. Frank C. Littleton. The original of the portrait of General George Rust of Rockland (1788-1857), builder of that cherished family seat in 1822, belongs to and is in the possession of a grandson, Mr. John Y. Rust of San Angelo, Texas, but a carefully executed copy hangs on Rockland's walls. During the two administrations of President Andrew Jackson, General Rust was in command of the United States Arsenal at nearby Harper's Ferry and for many years he was one of the most respected and influential of the County's citizens. The photograph of the original portrait herein used I owe to another grandson, Mr. E. Marshall Rust of Leesburg and Washington, as I do the picture of Rockland itself and that of the old John Janney residence in Leesburg, later so long the home of the late Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W. Edwards, the latter a sister of Mr. Rust. They were all photographed in this masterly fashion by Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston of Washington. The pictures of Foxcroft, Oak Hill and the old Valley Bank in Leesburg are from the Pictorial Archives of Early American Architecture in the Division of Fine Arts of the Library of Congress and the negatives are also the work of Miss Johnston.

Reproduction of the portrait of Nicholas Cresswell, the Journalist, is due to the courtesy of the Dial Press, of New York, publishers of the American edition of his journal. The original portrait is owned by Mr. Samuel Thorneley of Drayton House, near Chichester, West Sussex, England, a descendant of Cresswell's younger brother, Joseph Cresswell. The map of Loudoun is based on that prepared by Mr. Oscar L. Emerick in 1923, and is used by his kind permission.

And now, gentle reader, step with me into the pleasant land of Loudoun.

Harrison Williams.

Roxbury Hall
Near Leesburg, Virginia
March, 1938.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

LEGENDS OF LOUDOUN

CHAPTER I

THE EARLIER INDIANS

Loudoun County, Virginia

The county of Loudoun, as now constituted, is an area of 525 square miles, lying in the extreme northwesterly corner of Virginia, in that part of the Old Dominion known as the Piedmont and of very irregular shape, its upper apex formed by the Potomac River on the northeast and the Blue Ridge Mountains on the northwest, pointing northerly. It is a region of equable climate, with a mean temperature of from 50 to 55 degrees, seldom falling in winter below fahrenheit zero nor rising above the upper nineties during its long summer, thus giving a plant-growing season of about two hundred days in each year.

The county exhibits the typical topography of a true piedmont, a rolling and undulating land broken by numerous streams and traversed by four hill-ranges—the Catoctin, the Bull Run and the Blue Ridge mountains and the so-called Short Hills. These ranges are of a ridge-like character, with no outstanding peaks, although occasionally producing well-rounded, cone-like points. The whole area is generously well watered not only by the Potomac, flowing for thirty-seven miles on its border and the latter's tributary Goose Creek crossing the southern portion of the county, but also by many smaller creeks or, as they are locally called, "runs"; and by such innumerable springs of most excellent potable water that few, if any, of the farm-fields lack a natural water supply for livestock. These conditions most happily combine to create a climate that for healthfulness and all year comfortable living is without peer on the eastern seaboard and, indeed, truthfully may be said to be among the best and most enjoyable east of the Mississippi.

Before the advent of the white man, the land was covered by a dense forest of oak, hickory, walnut, sycamore, locust, ash, pine, maple, poplar and other varieties of trees—not by any means unbroken, for here and there the Indian tribes that roamed the area, had burned out great clearings for grazing-grounds to entice the wild animals they hunted and in which the native grasses then quickly and indigenously sprang up; attracting particularly the buffalo, in those days, and at least until as late as 1730, to be found in vast numbers all through the Piedmont region and always in the forefront as an unending supply of flesh-food to their Indian hunters. With the buffalo were great herds of "red and fallow deer" and wolves, foxes in abundance, bears in the mountains, opossum, racoons, and, along the streams, otter and beaver (later to be so greatly valued for their pelts) and whose presence, with that of other fur-bearing animals, was to have its influence on the history of the region.

When in 1607 the doughty Captain John Smith—in writing of any part of Virginia one sooner or later is certain to shake hands with that amourous hero—when Captain Smith made his first voyage to Virginia and came in contact with her aboriginees, the latter were, in a broad sense, of several stocks or nations, distinguishable principally by linguistic affinity and more or less common cultural idiosyncracies rather than by close alliances; and indeed frequently appearing to cherish their bitterest enmities among their own blood-kindred. Along the coast, in what we now know as Tidewater, the territory running from the Chesapeake to those rocky outcrops making waterfalls in all the great rivers flowing from Virginia into the Bay, the Indians were generally of the Algonquin stock, a tribe covering an enormous territory along the Atlantic seaboard from the neighborhood of Hudson's Bay southerly to at least the Carolinas but by no means monopolizing the regions where they were found.

To the north, in what is now New York, centred the Iroquoian tribes, with ramifications as far south as Virginia and North Carolina. Among these more southerly Indians of the Iroquoian stock were the fierce and powerful "Susquehannocks" along the river we still call by that name who later were to play a prominent rôle in our Loudoun yet to be; the Nottoways, occupying a part of southeastern Virginia; the Cherokees, occupying the area in Virginia and North Carolina west of the Blue Ridge, extending north as far as the Peaks of Otter near the headquarters of the James; and the Tuskaroras of famous and bloody memory, who were paramount in North Carolina until their conquest and all but annihilation by the English in 1711. What were left of the fiercest and most implacable of the Tuskaroras after that crushing defeat, retreated to New York where, as the sixth nation they joined the Iroquois Confederacy of their near kinsmen of the Long House. A few of the more friendly were removed to a local reservation in 1717 but gradually, in small parties, says Mooney, they too moved to join their kindred in the north.

Both Algonquins and Iroquois were to be classed as barbarians rather than savages. The former have been described as having generally "found locations in permanent villages surrounded by extensive cornfields. They were primarily agriculturists or fishermen, to whom hunting was hardly more than a pastime and who followed the chase as a serious business only in the interval between the gathering of one crop and the sowing of the next." The Iroquois, who found their highest development in their confederacy of the Five Nations of the Long House in central New York (the Massawomecks so dreaded by the Powhattans and Manahoacs of Smith's narratives) were even further advanced. Described by historians as the Romans of America, they led all other Indians of what is now the United States in their powers of organization and extraordinary political development. They lived in cleverly and strongly palisaded villages and their agricultural activities, falling to the women's share of tribal work, were probably further advanced than those of any other Indians north of Mexico. Our earliest knowledge places them on the banks of the St. Lawrence, in the neighborhood of the present Montreal, whence they were driven by the neighboring Algonquins. Their defeat and expulsion to the south bred in them a deep determination for revenge. In the New York wilderness they developed and cultivated a passion for ruthless warfare and forming their famous Confederation somewhere about the year 1570, they rapidly became the most powerful Indian military force east of the Mississippi and a sombre threat and terror to the other Indian tribes far and wide.

In contrast to both Algonquins and Iroquois, the Siouan tribes who ranged the Piedmont country from the Potomac south, were primarily nomads—and nomads, observes Mooney, have short histories. Modern scholarship inclines to place the origin of the great Siouan or Dakotan family possibly amidst the eastern foothills of the southern Alleghanies or at least as far east as Ohio, whence, after a long period, they probably were driven by the Iroquois and other enemies beyond the Mississippi. Being essentially nomadic, without permanent villages and relying on constant hunting for their food, following their game wherever it might lead, they necessarily ranged widely and covered broad areas. From the days of the earliest European invasion, locations of the Iroquois and Algonquin stock were known, but as the earliest English scouts and adventurers found no such long established villages in the Piedmont country, their tendency and following them, that of the early writers and historians, was to loosely assume that the Indians found there were, in common with their neighbours, either Algonquins or Iroquois. Later antiquarians and ethnologists seem to have followed their lead; with an exasperating paucity of record, tradition or material remains, there was but little on which to base knowledge of language, whence racial stock might be deduced. It was not until Horatio Hale announced, sixty years ago, his discovery of a Siouan language bordering the Atlantic coast and James Mooney, in 1894, published his Siouan Tribes of the East that these Indians of the northern Virginia Piedmont, known to be members of the Manahoac Confederacy, were identified as of the Siouan stock. They "consisted of perhaps a dozen tribes of which the names of eight have been preserved. With the exception of the Stegarake," writes Mooney, "all that is known of these was recorded by Smith, whose own acquaintance with them seems to have been limited to an encounter with a large hunting party in 1608."

As Smith's narrative, after its wont, paints a vivid picture of the Manahoacs, a picture which almost stands alone in the mist of conjecture and deductive reasoning making up what is left to us of them, it is well to quote it in full, bearing always in mind that while these people were found on the upper Rappahannock, we have excellent reason to believe that they also occupied all the land now within the bounds of Loudoun. As allied bands, without fixed habitation, they wandered over the lands between Tidewater and the Blue Ridge, from the James to the Potomac.

The story is contained in Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia which states on its title page to be "by Captaine John Smith sometymes Governor in those Countryes & Admirall of New England." Chapter VI of the book, from which we quote, is however apparently signed by Anthony Bagnall, Nathaniel Powell and Anas Todhill who were three of Smith's companions on this adventure. Bagnall and Powell were among the six listed as "Gentlemen" in distinction to an additional six listed as "Souldiers," among the latter being Todhill.

On the 24th July, 1608, Smith and these twelve men set out on this second voyage of discovery along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Going as far north as the head of the Bay and the "Susquesahannock's" river and noting their many findings, they eventually, upon their return south, came to "the discovery of this river some call Rapahanock" up which they proceeded, with occasional brushes with the Indians along its banks. On their third day upon the river

"Wee sailed so high as our Boat would float, there setting up crosses, and graving our names in the trees. Our Sentinell saw an arrowe fall by him, though he had ranged up and downe more than an houre in digging in the earth, looking of stones, herbs, and springs, not seeing where a Salvage could well hide himselfe.

"Upon the alarum by that we had recovered our armes, there was about an hundred nimble Indians skipping from tree to tree, letting fly their arrows so fast as they could: the trees here served us for Baricadoes as well as they. But Mosco (their Indian guide) did us more service than we expected, for having shot away his quiver of Arrowes, he ran to the Boat for more. The Arrowes of Mosco at the first made them pause upon the matter, thinking by his bruit and skipping, there were many Salvages. About halfe an houre this continued, then they all vanished as suddenly as they approached. Mosco followed them so farre as he could see us, till they were out of sight. As we returned there lay a Salvage as dead, shot in the knee, but taking him up we found he had life, which Mosco seeing, never was Dog more furious against a Beare, than Mosco was to have beat out his braines, so we had him to our Boat, where our Chirugian who went with us to cure our Captaines hurt of the Stingray, so dressed this Salvage that within an houre after he looked somewhat chearefully, and did eat and speake. In the meane time we contented Mosco in helping him to gather up their arrowes, which were an armefull, whereby he gloried not a little. Then we desired Mosco to know what he was, and what Countries were beyond the mountaines; the poore Salvage mildly answered he and all with him were of Hassinninga, where there are three Kings more like unto them, namely the King of Stegora, the King of Tauxuntania and the King of Shakahonea, that were coming to Mohaskahod, which is onely a hunting Towne, and the bounds betwixt the Kingdom of the Mannahocks, and the Nantaughtacunds, but hard by where we were. We demanded why they came in that manner to betray us, that came to them in peace, and to seeke their loves; he answered they heard we were a people come from under the world, to take their world from them. We asked him how many worlds he did know, he replyed, he knew no more than that which was under the skie that covered him, which were the Powhattans, with the Monacans, and the Massawomecks, that were higher up in the mountaines. Then we asked him what was beyond the mountaines, he answered the Sunne: but of anything els he knew nothing; because the woods were not burnt. These and many such questions we demanded, concerning the Massawomecks, the Monacans, their owne Country, and where were the Kings of Stegora, Tauxintania, and the rest. The Monacans he said were their neighbours and friends, and did dwell as they in the hilly Countries by small rivers, living upon rootes and fruits, but chiefly by hunting. The Massawomecks did dwell upon a great water and had many boats, & so many men that they made warre with all the world. For their Kings, they were gone every one a severall way with their men on hunting: But those with him came thither a fishing until they saw us, notwithstanding they would be altogether at night at Mahaskahod. For his relation we gave him many toyes, with perswasions to go with us, and he as earnestly desired us to stay the coming of those Kings that for his good usage should be friends with us, for he was brother to Hassinninga. But Mosco advised us presently to be gone, for they were all naught, yet we told him we would not till it was night. All things we made ready to entertain what came, & Mosco was as dilligent in trimming his arrowes. The night being come we all imbarked, for the river was so narrow, had it biene light the land on the one side was so high, they might have done us exceeding much mischiefe. All this while the K. of Hassinninga was seeking the rest, and had consultation a good time what to doe. But by their espies seeing we were gone, it was not long before we heard their arrowes dropping on every side the Boat; we caused our Salvage to call unto them, but such a yelling and hallowing they made that they heard nothing but now and then a peece, ayming for neere as we could where we heard the most voyces. More than 12 miles they followed us in this manner; then the day appearing, we found ourselves in a broad Bay, out of danger of their shot, where we came to an anchor, and fell to breakfast. Not so much as speaking to them till the Sunne was risen; being well refreshed, we untyed our Targets[1] that covered us as a Deck, and all shewed ourselves with these shields on our armes, and swords in our hands, and also our prisoner Amoroleck; a long discourse there was betwixt his countrimen and him, how good we were, how well wee used him, how we had a Patawomeck with us, loved us as his life, that would have slaine him had we not preserved him, and that he should have his liberty would they be but friends; and to doe us any hurt it was impossible. Upon this they all hung their Bowes and Quivers upon the trees, and one came swimming aboard us with a Bow tyed on his head, and another with a Quiver of Arrowes, which they delivered to our Captaine as a present, the Captaine having used them so kindly as he could, told them the other three Kings should doe the like, and then the great King of our world should be their friend, whose men we were. It was no sooner demanded than performed, so upon a low Moorish poynt of Land we went to the Shore, where those foure Kings came and received Amoroleck: nothing they had but Bowes, Arrowes, Tobacco-bags, and Pipes: what we desired, none refused to give us, wondering at every thing we had, and heard we had done: our Pistols they tooke for pipes, which they much desired, but we did content them with other Commodities, and so we left foure or five hundred of our merry Mannahocks, singing, dancing, and making merry and set sayle for Moraughtacund."

The spelling, punctuation and capitalization follow the text of the first edition (1624) in which, opposite page 41, is a map shewing apparently the Manahoacs (there spelled "Mannahoacks") in possession of the present Loudoun and the Monacans south of them, around the upper waters of the James.

With Smith's return to the mouth of the Rappahannock the mist descends again upon Loudoun for many years.

In 1669 and 1670, John Lederer made three journeys into the interior of Virginia. His first journey took him up the York River; his second, up the James; and the route of his third he describes as "from the Falls of the Rappahannock River to the top of the Apalataen Mountains." Although he obtained the consent of Sir William Berkeley before making his explorations, he seems to have incurred the ill-will of the Virginians themselves and by them was forced to flee to Maryland. There he met Sir William Talbot, who sympathized with and befriended him and translated his story of his travels from the latin in which it had been written. It was published in London in 1672 with a "foreword" by Talbot in Lederer's defense.

Of the "Indians then Inhabiting the western parts of Carolina and Virginia," Lederer says:

"The Indians now seated in these parts are none of those which the English removed from Virginia, but a people driven by the Enemy from the northwest, and invited to sit down here by an Oracle above four hundred years since, as they pretend for the ancient inhabitants of Virginia were far more rude and barbarous, feeding only upon raw flesh and fish, until they taught them to plant corn, and shewed them the use of it."

Concerning the whole Piedmont region, called by Lederer "The Highlands" he writes:

"These parts were formerly possessed by the Tacci, alias Dogi, but they are extinct and the Indians now seated here, are distinguished into the several nations of Mahoc, Nuntaneuck, alias Nuntaly, Nahyssan, Sapon, Managog, Mangoack, Akernatatzy and Monakin &c. One language is common to them all, though they differ in dialects. The parts inhabited here are pleasant and fruitful because cleared of wood and laid open to the Sun."

Apparently in Lederer's "Monakins" and "Mangoacks" we may recognize Smith's "Monacans" and "Mannahocks" or "Mannahoacks"; but on his third or Rappahannock journey he does not speak of such Indians as he may have actually met. James Mooney thinks that by that time the Manahoacs may have been driven out of their earlier hunting grounds. The "Tacci, alias Dogi" described by Lederer are suggested by Mooney to have been only a mythic people, a race of monsters or unnatural beings, such as we find in the mythologies of all tribes and had no relation to the Doeg, named in the records of the Bacon rebellion in 1676, who were probably a branch of the Nanticoke.

What became of the Manahoacs? Did their pursuit of the game they hunted gradually draw them westward or were they, more probably, driven from the Piedmont country by their terrible foes the northern Iroquois, aided perhaps by the Susquehannocks who next appear upon the scene? But before taking up the story of the Iroquois and Susquehannock influence in Loudoun, we must turn to the English Kings and their grants of Virginia and particularly its Northern Neck, that spacious territory lying between the Rappahannock and Potomac, extending from the Chesapeake to a disputed western boundary.

CHAPTER II

ENGLAND ACQUIRES VIRGINIA

Mighty in her military strength and with an all but inexhaustible wealth pouring into her coffers from her American conquests, Spain stood as a very colossus over the Europe of the sixteenth century; and England, watching and fearing her hostile growth, grimly determined that she too, should have her share of that fabulous new world and its treasure. So deeply planted and so greatly grew this determination that it eventually became a part of England's public policy and in June, 1578, the great Elizabeth, with her eyes on the American coast, issued letters patent to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and after Gilbert's death reissued them on the 25th March, 1584, to his half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh, to discover, have, hold and occupy forever, such "remote heathern and barbarous lands, countries and territories not actually possessed by any Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people." As by its terms the new grant was to continue but for "the space of six yeares and no more," it was clear that advantage of its provisions should be taken with promptness; and Raleigh was not a man given to delay or indecision. He had been making his preparations; hardly more than a month elapsed before an expedition of two ships captained by Philip Amidas and Arthur Barlow set sail from England, bound for America. On the 4th of the following July, having landed on an island off the coast of the present Carolinas, these men raised the English flag and formally declared the sovereignty of England and its Queen. They brought home with them such glowing accounts of their discovery that Elizabeth was moved to bestow upon all the coast the name of Virginia—the land of the Virgin Queen. Two more attempts were made to establish permanent settlements in the neighborhood and although both failed, enough had been done to found a claim of English ownership and dominion, a claim which covered the entire coast from the French settlements in the north to the Spanish settlements upon the Florida peninsula, and thus the original Virginia became coextensive with England's pretensions on the North American continent. It is true that Spain then claimed the entire coast under a Papal Bull but Papal Bulls meant very little to Elizabeth or to her pugnacious sea-rovers. One of the many curiosities of history is that neither Raleigh nor his captains ever saw the soil of that part of America which was to become the Virginia we know, nor did the Queen who named it ever have knowledge of its physical characteristics, its resources or its inhabitants. In short, Virginia proper was neither to be discovered nor have its first precarious settlement until after Elizabeth's death.

After these first abortive attempts to found English settlements under his patent, Raleigh, on the 7th March, 1589, assigned it and all his rights thereunder to a company of merchants and adventurers who were resolved to proceed with the enterprise. These assigns, after the death of Elizabeth, became the leaders in seeking from King James I "leave to deduce a colony in Virginia." That monarch, says Bancroft, "promoted the noble work by readily issuing an ample patent" and on the 10th day of April, 1606, signed and affixed his seal to the first Charter of an English colony in America under which permanent settlement was to be effected. This charter declared the boundaries of Virginia to extend from the 34th to the 45th parallels of longitude and authorized the planting of two colonies. The first of these, to be founded by the London Company, largely made up of men of that city, was designated a "First Colony" to be established in the southerly portion of England's claim; the right to establish a "Second Colony" to be planted in the north, went to the Plymouth Company, whose membership, headed by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Governor of the garrison of Plymouth in Devonshire, came principally from the west of England. Under this Charter the King named the first "Council for all matters which shall happen in Virginia;" under it the London Company dispatched the expedition of three ships in command of Sir Christopher Newport and having Captain John Smith among its members; and under it and the Second Charter (of 1609) the infant colony was governed until, in the year 1624, the Charter was revoked and the Crown took over the affairs of the Colony.

Until the troubled reign of the first Charles, the growth of Virginia's population had been very slow. It was not until the defeat of the Royalists in 1645 by the forces of the Parliament and the King's execution in January, 1649, that the first great increase in population occurred. In a pamphlet published in London in that latter year, by an unknown author, it is stated that her population was at that time 15,000 English and 300 negroes and these were scattered along the lower portions of the James and the York and the shores of the Chesapeake. Then the defeated Cavaliers began to arrive in such great numbers that by 1670 Sir William Berkeley estimated that 32,000 free whites, 6,000 indentured servants and 2,000 negroes were there. Many of the old population and the newer arrivals as well, were pressing northward to the land between the mouth of Rappahannock and that of the Potomac which in 1647 had been organized into a new county, under the name of Northumberland, to include all the lands lying between those latter rivers and running westerly to a still indefinite boundary. This was new territory recently, and still very sparsely, settled by the English and even as late as 1670 it was contemporaneously estimated that the Indians between the two rivers had nearly 200 warriors.

Although the Stuarts had been deposed in England and the younger Charles forced to fly to the Continent, he was still King in Virginia with loyal and devoted subjects. It was under such conditions that Charles, actuated not only by a desire to reward certain of his Cavalier adherents who were sharing his exile, but also to create a refuge for others of his followers from the ire and oppression of the triumphant Roundheads, granted by charter dated the 18th day of September, 1649, the whole domain between the Rappahannock and Potomac to seven of his faithful lieges who, during the Civil War, had fought valiantly in the Stuart cause. These men were described in the charter, still preserved in the British Museum, as Ralph Lord Hopton, Baron of Stratton; Henry Lord Jermyn, Baron of St. Edmund's Bury; John Lord Colepeper, Baron of Thoresway; Sir John Berkeley, Sir William Morton, Sir Dudley Wyatt and Thomas Colepeper Esq. And thus, says Fairfax Harrison, "the proprietary of the Northern Neck of Virginia came into existence."

He notes that of the patentees Lord Jermyn, after the Restoration, became Earl of St. Albans and Sir John Berkeley, Baron Berkeley of Stratton. "The only conditions" quotes Head "attached to the conveyance of the domain, the equivalent of a principality, were that one-fifth of all the gold and one-tenth of all the silver, discovered within its limits should be reserved for the royal use and that a nominal rent of a few pounds sterling should be paid into the treasury at Jamestown each year."

But to receive a grant of this splendid Proprietary from a fugitive and powerless King was one thing and to reduce it to actual possession was another and very different one. Charles might and did consider himself King in both England and Virginia and the ruling Virginians might and did consider themselves his very loyal and obedient subjects; but unfortunately for the seven Cavalier patentees of the Northern Neck, the Parliament and Cromwell took a radically different view of the matter and, even more unfortunately, were in a position to enforce that view. No sooner had the representatives of the new Proprietors come to Virginia and were duly welcomed by the royalist Governor Sir William Berkeley, than a Parliamentary fleet of warships arrived from England, deposed the Governor, set up the rule of Parliament in 1652 and abruptly ended, for the time being, the patentees' hopes of gaining possession of their new grant.

There was little to be done by these Cavaliers while Parliament and Cromwell ruled. And then the wheel of history, after its fashion, completed another cycle. On the 3rd September, 1658, Cromwell died and soon the ruthless and efficient but never very cheerful control of England by the Puritans came to an end. In 1659 word came to Virginia of the resignation of Richard Cromwell and the Puritan Governor Mathews dying about the same time, the Virginia Assembly in March, 1660, proceeded to elect Sir William Berkeley to be their Governor again. On the 8th of the following May, Charles II was proclaimed King in England and in September a royal commission for Berkeley, already elected by the Assembly, arrived, the Virginians themselves welcoming the restoration of Stuart rule with great enthusiasm.

The owners of the patent of the Northern Neck believed that their patience was at length to be rewarded. Again they sent a representative to Virginia, this time with instructions from King to Governor to give his aid to the Proprietors to obtain possession of their domain. But during all the years of their forced inactivity, the settlement of Virginia had gone on apace. What had been in 1649 a thinly settled frontier, shewed now a largely increased population and land grants to these new settlers had been freely issued by Virginia's government. Many of those newly seated in the Northern Neck were very influential men and in their opposition to the claims of the patentees received popular sympathy and encouragement. As a result, Berkeley found himself confronted by a Council which obstructed his every effort to carry out the King's instructions and the endeavours of the Proprietors to gain possession of their grant being completely blocked, they were obliged to appeal to the home government for relief. The outcome of negotiations between them and Francis Moryson, then representing Virginia in London, was that the patent of 1649 was surrendered by its holders for a new grant carrying on its face substantial limitations of the earlier patent. This new grant was dated the 8th day of May, 1669, almost twenty years after the first, and contained provisions recognizing the title to lands already seated or occupied under other authority; generally limiting the Proprietors' title to such other lands as should be "inhabited or planted" within the ensuing twenty-one years, together with a constructive recognition of the political jurisdiction of the Virginia government within the Proprietary.[2]

This appeared a reasonably satisfactory compromise of the controversy to both sides. But suddenly in February, 1673, Charles made a grant of all Virginia to the Earl of Arlington and Lord Colepeper to hold for thirty-one years at an annual rent of forty shillings to be paid at Michaelmas. Thus was Virginia rewarded for her faithful loyalty to the Stuarts. When the news came to Jamestown the Colony flamed with resentment and anger; and now Berkeley and his Council were in hearty accord with the wrathful indignation of the Colonists. Even though the King had not intended to interfere with the title of individual planters in possession of their land, his action threw the whole situation, and particularly in the Northern Neck, into turmoil and confusion. Exasperation was directed against the holders of the Charter of 1669 as well as those of 1673 and again the original patentees appealed to the Privy Council for relief. Again the King sought to help them but by this time they had grown weary of the long controversy and indicated their willingness to sell out their rights to the Colony; before an agreement could be reached, Bacon's Rebellion flared up and the whole subject was again in abeyance.

We must now return to the Indians. The Dutch settlements along the Hudson had early developed a very lucrative and active trade with their native neighbours, particularly the Iroquois, who brought to them furs for which they were given European manufactures, especially spirits and firearms and when, in 1664, the English conquered and took possession of these Hudson settlements, they continued the Dutch trade and friendship with the Iroquois. To obtain furs, the hunters and warriors of the Five Nations ranged further and further afield and before long were in bitter conflict with the Susquehannocks who had their headquarters and principal stronghold fifty or sixty miles above the present Port Deposit in Maryland on the east bank of that river from which they derived their name. They were mighty men and warriors, these Susquehannocks. All the early English who mention them pay tribute to their splendid strength and stature. Smith who, it will be remembered, came in contact with them before his skirmish with the Manahoacs, said of them that "such great and well proportioned men are seldom seen, for they seem like giants to the English, yea to their neighbours." And in 1666 Alsop wrote that the Christian inhabitants of Maryland regarded them as "the most noble and heroic nation of Indians that dwelt upon the confines of America.... Men, women and children both summer and winter went practically naked," and adds, among other details, that they painted their faces in red, green, white and black stripes; that the hair of their heads was black, long and coarse but that the hair growing on other parts of their bodies was removed by pulling it out hair by hair; and that some tattooed their bodies, breasts and arms with outlines. Our American soil, from the beginning, appears to have favoured the art of the barber and beauty-shop.

From the English in Maryland these Susquehannocks acquired guns and ammunition and thus were able to hold their own with their Iroquois foe for over twenty years of the harshest warfare. But the Iroquois were relentless and though repulsed again and again, returned year after year to the attack. The Susquehannocks finally weakened by an epidemic of smallpox, were overcome, the Iroquois captured their main stronghold and completely overthrew their power. Fugitive bands of Susquehannocks, nominally friendly to the English of Maryland and Virginia, then roamed the western frontiers of those colonies and along both banks of the Potomac, still harassed by pursuing bands of Senecas.

Under such conditions it was not long before they came in open conflict with the English settlers, some say through Indian thefts, others because the English attacked a party of them, mistaking them for pilfering Algonquin Doegs. The fighting, once begun, spread rapidly and the settlers on their exposed frontiers, denied practical assistance by the Virginia Governor Berkeley and his colleagues (whom rumor said were making such substantial profits from the Indian trade that they were loath to antagonize the Indians by sending organized forces against them) turned for leadership to Nathaniel Bacon, a young planter of gentle birth, not long come out from England. Bacon was a natural leader, their cause was popular and soon Virginia found herself in the midst of an Indian war and a rebellion against the Jamestown government as well. Bacon led his men to victory over both Indians and Governor but suddenly dying from a dysentery or from poison—to this day the cause of his death is surrounded by uncertainty—the "rebellion collapsed with surprising suddenness," his former followers were overcome by the Governor with the aid of English troops and Berkeley proceeded to wreak a vindictive and merciless revenge.

Meanwhile knowledge of the turmoil had reached England and the King sent Commissioners to Virginia to investigate the causes of the trouble and Berkeley's wholesale executions and confiscations of estates. These men made a fair report of their findings to the King, which, added to the many complaints from the families of Berkeley's victims, caused Charles to exclaim: "As I live, that old fool has taken more lives in that naked country than I have done for the murder of my father." In the spring of 1677 the royal order for Berkeley's removal arrived and he sailed for England in an attempt to justify himself in an audience with Charles, his departure being "joyfully celebrated with bonfires and salutes of the cannon" by the Virginians. But in England he found that the King, resentful at his abuse of power, avoided meeting him and in July the old man fell ill and died, his end hastened, it is said, by his vexation and chagrin over the King's attitude.

Upon the death of Berkeley, the King appointed Lord Colepeper Governor of Virginia. As he was not ready nor, possibly, inclined to go immediately to his post, the King issued a special commission to Sir Herbert Jeffries, who had been one of his emissaries to investigate Berkeley, as Lieutenant Governor in immediate charge of affairs. Jeffries ruled until his death in 1678 when he was succeeded by Sir Henry Chicheley as Deputy Governor under an old Commission issued to him as early as 1674. Colepeper did not personally take charge on Virginia's soil until 1680, and then but for a brief period, soon returning to England and remaining there over two years. It was not until December, 1682, that we again find him in Virginia.

Colepeper, it will be remembered, was not only by inheritance a part owner of the patents of 1649 and 1669 to the Northern Neck but he was coproprietor with Arlington under the grant of 1673 of all Virginia and now in his own person Governor of the Colony as well. For good measure, his cousin, Alexander Colepeper, was also an owner by inheritance of a share in the grants of 1649 and 1669. It was apparent that he was in a position at long last to turn his Virginia interests to account; but in doing so he sought to make the new dispensation as personally profitable to his rapacious self as possible. Therefore he opened negotiations with his old associates, by 1681 had succeeded in buying most of them out, and declared himself sole owner of all these grants, although his cousin still owned his one-sixth interest. But the King had become annoyed at his conduct and the stories of his rapacity and, seeking an opportunity to punish him, seized upon the pretext that he had been absent from his post without leave. On this charge he, in 1682, was deprived of his office as Governor. Two years later (1684) Colepeper sold out his rights under the so-called Arlington Charter of 1673 to the English Crown for a pension of £600 a year for twenty-one years. He tried also to sell to Virginia his rights to the Northern Neck under the Charter of 1669, but in that transaction he was unsuccessful. A curiously ironic fate seemed intent upon keeping the Northern Neck Proprietary, reward of Cavalier loyalty and devotion, as an inheritance for the still unborn sixth Lord Fairfax, scion and representative of the family of two of the most able of the Parliamentary leaders.

Although Bacon and his men, when they took the field in 1676, had thoroughly disciplined the Indians in Virginia, the Iroquois and the Susquehannocks still entered Piedmont and roamed its forests. The Iroquois are believed to have driven out the Manahoacs and their kinsmen prior to 1670 and certainly claimed their lands by conquest; not coveting them for settlement but for hunting and particularly for such furs as they could trap and collect in a land plentiful of beaver and otter. The Virginians built forts at the navigation heads of the great rivers for the protection of settlers; but the northern Indians passed beyond and between them and not only attacked the tributary Virginia Algonquin tribes, from time to time, but were frequently in conflict with the English as well. Lord Howard of Effingham, successor to Colepeper as Governor, met Governor Dongan of New York in July, 1684, and with him closed a treaty with the Iroquois whereby the latter were to call out of Virginia and Maryland "all their young braves who had been sent thither for war; they were to observe profound peace with the friendly Indians; they were to make no incursions upon the whites in either state; and when they marched southward they were not to approach near to the heads of the great rivers on which plantations had been made."[3] But the treaty also contained a provision that the Iroquois, when in Virginia, should "Keep at the Foot of the Mountains" which seemed to acknowledge their right to be there and so continued the Indian menace to such settlers as pushed into Piedmont. Nevertheless the frontier forts of the Virginians were allowed to fall into disuse, the Colony depending on companies of armed and mounted rangers to patrol the back country and keep the Indians in order, and there seemed some prospect of peace though the outlying plantations, long keyed up to Indian alarms, remained alert and watchful. However for awhile there was less Indian trouble in the upper country and then a new alarm occurred, resulting in the first recorded exploration of the present Loudoun.

CHAPTER III

THE PASSING OF THE INDIANS

Sir Alexander Spotswood

When Smith came to Virginia, there was an Indian tribe of the Algonquin stock called by him the Nacothtanks, a name later evolving into Anacostans, which occupied the land about the present city of Washington and some years later having moved its principal village southward to the banks of the Piscataway Creek, thereafter was known by the name of that stream. A daughter of their so called "Emperor" or Chief, having been converted to Christianity, married Giles Brent of Maryland and with him moved across the Potomac to land he acquired on the north shore of Aquia Creek, then still in a frontier wilderness. The Susquehannocks, at the time of their outbreak in 1675, had sought refuge within the fort of the Piscataways but had been refused asylum, the Piscataways remaining loyal to their Maryland neighbours and aiding them in the fighting. In consequence the Susquehannocks bore these lower river Indians bitter hatred. When the Iroquois completed their conquest of the Susquehannocks and reduced them to vassalage, they embraced their side of the quarrel. Toward all the tribes of the east the attitude of the Iroquois was simple, consistent and uncompromising. Rule or ruin, subjugation or extinction, was the harsh choice offered and there was no alternative for these others save in remotest flight. To protect the Piscataways, the Marylanders gave them a reservation amidst their settlements. Blocked and perhaps made jealous by this move, the Iroquois changed from force to guile, seeking every opportunity to turn them against their Maryland protectors and, it is thought, eventually in 1697, persuading them to move across the Potomac into the forests of the Virginia piedmont where they camped for a while near what is now The Plains in Fauquier County. It was not long before white hunters or friendly Indians brought the news to the settlements and the Virginians, still having sporadic troubles with the Iroquois and Susquehannocks in these backwoods, viewed the incursion of another tribe with great alarm. They immediately sought to induce the newcomers to return to Maryland but this they suavely, though none the less stubbornly, refused to do. At length in 1699, feeling the loss of their normal and accustomed diet of fish, they, of their own accord, broke up their camp and traversing the forests of the present Loudoun, settled on what has since been known as Conoy Island in the Potomac at the Point of Rocks. There had recently occurred several murders of English settlers by Indians, probably roving Iroquois; and Stafford County—which some years before, had come into existence to cover this upper country and was to include all this northern piedmont wilderness until through increasing settlement, it was separately formed into Prince William County in 1731—was again in fine ferment over the whole Indian menace. By direction of Governor Nicholson, the county sent two of its officers, Burr Harrison of Chipawansic and Giles Vandercastel whose plantation was on the upper Accotink, to summon the "Emperor" of the Conoy Piscataways to Williamsburg. Mounted on horseback and, we may believe well armed, the two intrepid emissaries promptly set out upon their mission, travelling it is thought, an Indian trail about a mile or more south of the Potomac, which is in its course approximately followed by the present Alexandria Pike, and fording as well as they could the various creeks which run into that stream from the south. The Governor had ordered that they keep a record of their journey and a description of their route and the land traversed and complying with those instructions they wrote the first detailed description of any part of Loudoun. Their report exactly complied with the Governor's orders as to its scope and became a document of primary importance in Loudoun's history. It reads:

"In obedience to His Excellency's command and an order of this Corte bearing date the 12th day of this Instance, April," (1699) "We, the subscribers have beene with the Emperor of Piscataway, att his forte, and did then Comand him, in his Maj'tys name, to meet his Excellency in a General Assembly of this his Maj'ties most Ancient Colloney and Dominion of Virginia, the ffirst of May next or two or three days before, with sume of his great men. As soone as we had delivered his Excellency's Commands, the Emperor summons all his Indians thatt was then at the forte—being in all about twenty men. After consultation of almost two oures, they told us they were very bussey and could not possibly come or goe downe, but if his Excellency would be pleased to come to him, sume of his great men should be glad to see him, and then his Ex-lly might speake whatt he hath to say to him if Excellency could nott come himself, then to send sume of his great men, ffor he desired nothing butt peace.

"They live on an Island in the middle of the Potomack River, its aboutt a mile long or something Better, and aboute a quarter of a mile wide in the Broaddis place. The forte stands att ye upper End of the Island butt nott quite ffinished, & theire the Island is nott above two hundred and ffifty yards over; the bankes are about 12 ffoot high, and very heard to asend. Just at ye lower end of the Island is a Lower Land, and Little or noe Bank; against the upper end of the Island two small Island, the one on Marriland side, the other on this side, which is of about fore acres of Land, & within two hundred yards of the fforte, the other smaller and sumthing nearer, both ffirme land, & from the maine to the fforte is aboute foure hundred yards att Leaste—not ffordable Excepte in a very dry time; the fforte is about ffifty or sixty yardes square and theire is Eighteene Cabbins in the fforte and nine Cabbins without the forte that we Could see. As for Provitions they have Corne, they have Enuf and to spare. We saw noe straing Indians, but the Emperor sayes that the Genekers Lives with them when they att home; also addes that he had maid peace with all ye Indians Except the ffrench Indians; and now the ffrench have a minde to Lye still themselves; they have hired theire Indians to doe mischief. The Distance from the inhabitance is about seventy miles, as we conceave by our Journeys. The 16th of this Instance April, we sett out from the Inhabitance, and ffound a good Track ffor five miles, all the rest of the days's Jorney very Grubby and hilly, Except sum small patches, but very well for horses, tho nott good for cartes, and butt one Runn of any danger in a ffrish, and then very bad; that night lay at the sugar land, which Judge to be forty miles. The 17th day we sett ye River by a small Compasse, and found it lay up N. W. B. N., and afterwards sett it ffoure times, and always ffound it neere the same Corse. We generally kept about one mile ffrom the River, and a bout seven or Eight miles above the sugar land, we came to a broad Branch of a bout fifty or sixty yards wide, a still or small streeme, it tooke our horses up to the Belleys, very good going in and out; about six miles ffarther came to another greate branch of about sixty or seventy yeards wide, with a strong streeme, making ffall with large stones that caused our horses sume times to be up to theire Bellyes, and sume times nott above their Knees; So we conceave it a ffreish, then not ffordable, thence in a small Track to a smaller Runn, a bout six miles, Indeferent very, and soe held on till we came within six or seven miles of the forte or Island, and then very Grubby, and greate stones standing Above the ground Like heavy cocks—they hold for three or ffoure miles; and then shorte Ridgges with small Runns, untill we came to ye forte or Island. As for the number of Indeens, there was att the fforte about twenty men & aboute twenty women and abbout Thirty children & we mett sore. We understand theire is in the Inhabitance a bout sixteene. They informed us there was sume outt a hunting, butt we Judge by theire Cabbins theire cannot be above Eighty or ninety bowmen in all. This is all we Can Report, who subscribes ourselves

"Yo'r Ex'lly Most Dutifull Servants

Giles Vanderasteal

Bur Harrison ."

This "Sugar land" where our emissaries spent the first night of their journey, and the Sugarland Run passing through and named from it, are frequently referred to in the early records and the mouth of the Run became in 1798 the starting point of Loudoun's corrected southern boundary line with Fairfax. They derived their name from the groves of sugar maples found growing there which, with the use of their sap, were well known to the Indians from earliest times. In 1692 David Strahane "Lieut. of the Rangers of Pottomack" tells in his journal that while patrolling the upper woods, he and his men on the 22nd September "Ranged due North till we came to a great Runn that made into the sugar land, & we marcht down it about 6 miles & ther we lay that night." The wording quite clearly shows that the sugar land was then well known to the whites.

Although, as their report shews, Vandercastel and Harrison reached their goal and duly delivered their message, the Piscataways did not then or later comply with the Governor's pressing invitation. That their attitude was not prompted by defiance but rather by worried caution based on their appreciation of the manifold difficulties of their then relations with the whites, is indicated by the report of two other English envoys who, later in the same year, were sent by the authorities to Conoy. These men, Giles Tillett and David Straughan, kept a journal from which we learn that in November, 1699, they in their turn reached the fort and found that "one Siniker" (i.e. Seneca or Iroquois) was among the Piscataways who had had trouble with "strange Indians" who they called Wittowees and that the "Suscahannes" had captured and brought two of these Wittowees to the fort. The "Emperor" received the Englishmen very kindly and told them that he was then willing to "come to live amongst the English againe but he was afeared the sstrange Indians would follow them and due mischief amongst the English, and he should be blamed for it, soe he must content himselfe to live there." He accused the French of stirring up these "strange Indians" and "presents his services to the Gove'n'r, and thanks him for his Kindness to send men to see him to know how he did."

Our friend the Emperor shews his knowledge of statecraft. Doubtless he continued to find plausible reasons for holding on to Conoy where he and his people complacently continued to remain until after the Spotswood-Iroquois Treaty of 1722 which had such a broad effect on Loudoun and which we shall presently consider. During this long occupation of the island, the Piscataways finished building and occupied their fort and village and to this day evidence of their tenure, in arrowheads and other objects, is still, from time to time, discovered.

The journey of Harrison and his companion Vandercastel is important to Loudoun not only because it resulted in the first known description of any of the topography of what is now that county, but also because it marks the first definitely known white exploration of the locality above the Sugarland Run and while unknown English hunters may have theretofore penetrated some part of Loudoun's wilderness, these men were, it is believed, the first whites named and recorded who ever trod Loudoun's soil above the Sugarland. Vandercastel's connection with our story then ends; but Burr Harrison became the progenitor of one of the most prominent and respected families of the county which has now been identified with its best life for five generations. He had been baptized in St. Margaret's, Westminster, in 1637 and came with his father Cuthbert Harrison of Ancaster, Yorkshire, to Virginia some time prior to 1669 when Burr, with others, patented land on Asmale Creek near Occoquan. Afterward, but before 1679, he acquired land on the Chipawansic, presumably from Gerrard Broadhurst. Therefore, to distinguish him and his descendants from the other numerous and not necessarily related Virginia Harrisons, he and they were thenceforward usually known as the Harrisons of Chipawansic. It was not, however, until 1811 that Burr Harrison's descendants in the male line took up their permanent residence in Loudoun; in that year the widow of his great-great-grandson Mathew Harrison moved with her children to Morrisworth, an estate seven miles southeast of Leesburg, now the home of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Fendall, which had come to her from her family the Ellzeys of Dumfries, and there she continued to live until her death.

In the year 1712 another courageous adventurer sought out Conoy. The Swiss Baron Christopher de Graffenreid had been interested in forming a colony of Germans, refugees from the lower Palatinate, at New Bern in North Carolina and also having obtained authority to make a settlement on the Shenandoah in Virginia's remote frontier, he proceeded to explore the neighbourhood. He followed the Potomac up to Conoy Island and drew a map of the surroundings. This map notes the great number of wild fowl on the river, particularly at the mouth of Goose Creek. "There is in winter," he wrote, "such a prodigious number of swans, geese and ducks on this river from Canavest to the Falls that the Indians make a trade of their feathers." Such a description is enough to reduce to envious inanition our Loudoun Nimrod of today whose occasional reward of a few wild ducks may at rare intervals reach the hardly hoped for bagging of a single wild goose, as a rule now far too alert and wary to alight in their spring and fall flights over the county. The wild swan has, alas, wholly disappeared.

De Graffenreid's reference to the vast number of wild fowl on the upper Potomac, in those early days, has abundant confirmation from others. So numerous were the wild geese that the Indians called the river above the falls "Cohongarooton" or Goose River and the English at first gave it the same name; applying the name Potomac to only so much of the stream as lay between the falls and the bay. It was not until well after 1730 that the whole river was generally called by the latter name.

The "Canavest" referred to by de Graffenreid was the village of the Piscataways on Conoy and in his journal he describes it as "a very pleasant and enchanting spot about forty miles above the falls of the Potomac, we found a troop of savages there ... we made an alliance, however with these Indians of Canavest, a very necessary thing in connection with the mines which we hoped to find in that vicinity, as well as on account of the establishment which we had resolved to make in these parts of our small Bernese colony which we were waiting for. After that we visited those beautiful spots of the country, those enchanted islands in the Potomac above the falls." De Graffenreid's "mines" and "establishments" were to be over the Blue Ridge in the nearby Shenandoah Valley; but he shrewdly recognized the advisability of making friends with a tribe so firmly and strategically planted as he found at the settlement on Conoy. As to his "enchanted islands," those contiguous to the Loudoun bank of the Potomac long have had Loudoun owners and seem to its people to be sentimentally part of her domain; as a matter of cold fact and colder law, they lie within the bounds of Maryland; for in 1776 the long dispute over the sovereignty of the Potomac was settled by a clause in Virginia's Constitution of that year relinquishing jurisdiction.

Two years before de Graffenreid's expedition, there arrived in Virginia as Lieutenant Governor, Colonel (afterward Sir) Alexander Spotswood, the most alert, devoted and able ruler the Colony had had since Smith—a man "who still enjoys an almost unrivalled distinction among Virginia's Colonial Governors"[4] and, says Howison, whose "chief advantage consisted in his social and moral character, in which aspect it would not be easy to find one of whom might be truly asserted so much that is good and so little that is evil."[5] Spotswood came to love Virginia as though it were his native land and great was the moral debt the Colony, and especially the counties created from its old frontier, came to owe to his strong and conscientious administration. Under a vicious practice by that time obtaining in England, the titular governship of Virginia had been held, since 1697, by George Hamilton Douglas, Earl of Orkney, who though never setting foot in the Colony, drew £1,200 of the annual salary of £2,000 attached to the office until his death in 1737; and thus Spotswood, preëminent among Virginia's rulers, served but under a lieutenant-governor's commission. A great-grandson of John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St. Andrew's and Lord High Chancellor of Scotland, who lies buried in Henry VII's Chapel in Westminster Abbey, Spotswood descended from an old and aristocratic Scottish family, whose progenitor, a cadet of the great house of Gordon, married an heiress of the ancient race of Spottiswoode which took its name from the Barony of Spottiswoode in the Parish of Gordon, County of Berwick. Born in 1676 in Tangier where his father Robert Spotswood then served as physician to the English Governor and garrison, Spotswood "a tall robust man with gnarled and wrinkled face and an air of dignity and power"[6] had, in 1704, fought valiantly under Marlborough and had been desperately wounded in the battle of Blenheim. He brought with him recognition of the right of Virginians to the writ of Habeas Corpus, which though, since Magna Carta, the common heritage of every free-born Englishman, had not theretofore run in Virginia. Had this been his all, Virginia would have been his debtor; in the event it was but an augury of many benefactions to follow.

From the first, Spotswood shewed a keen and enlightened interest in the problems of the frontier. His efforts to expand the settlements westerly and to subdue the Indians did not always meet with co-operation from the Virginia legislature, controlled by representatives of the more protected and densely settled tidewater sections, whose people, the "Tuckahoes" as they were called, were frequently unresponsive to the plight of those in the upper country; and from time to time Spotswood's impatience with his legislators boiled up into strong and bluntly worded reproof. To one of his assemblies, recalcitrant in Indian affairs, he addressed his well remembered words of dismissal: "In fine I cannot but attribute these miscarriages to the people's mistaken choice of a set of representatives whom Heaven has not ... endowed with the ordinary qualifications requisite to legislators; and therefore I dissolve you." A few Spotswoods, scattered here and there in the seats of the mighty of our modern America, might not prove inefficacious.

In May, 1717, we find him reporting upon the Indian situation to Paul Methuen, the then English Secretary of State, that though the English had carefully kept the terms of Lord Howard's Treaty of 1685, the Iroquois "had committed divers hostilitys on our ffrontiers, in 1713 they rob-d our Indian Traders of a considerable cargo of Goods, the same year they murdered a Gent'n of Acco't near his out Plantations; they carried away some slaves belonging to our Inhabitants, and now threaten not only to destroy our Tributary Indians but the English also in their neighbourhood." He adds that such conduct requires "some Reparation" and asks the Secretary to instruct the Governor of New York to cause his Iroquois to "forebear hostilitys on the King's subjects of the neighbouring Colonies and likewise any nation of Indians under their protection."[7]

Neither by temperament nor training was Spotswood a man to acquiesce in such conditions. After consulting with and urging co-operation upon the Governors of Maryland and Pennsylvania, he set out in the winter of 1717-'18 for New York "to demand something more substantial than the bare promises of the Chief men of those Indians, w'ch they are always very liberal of, in expectation of presents from the English, while at the same time their young men are committing their usual depredations upon ye Frontiers of these Southern Governments." He was fortunate in arriving in New York "very opportunely to prevent the march of a Great Body of those Indians w'ch I had Advice on the Road was intended chiefly against the Tributaries of this Governm't, and the Governor of New York's Messengers overtook them upon their march and obtained their promise to Abstain from any hostilitys on the English Governments."

It being late in the season for a conference with the Sachems of the Long House and the New York Assembly being in the "height of its business and like to make a larger session than ordinary," Spotswood arranged, through the Governor of New York, preliminary negotiations with the Indians and returned to his Virginia.

The discussions thus begun dragged along during the ensuing five years. At length, in 1721, the Iroquois sent their representatives to Williamsburg with more definite proposals and in May, 1722, the General Assembly passed an act reciting in detail the terms on which the treaty would be made.[8] Later in the summer Spotswood, with certain of his Council, went to New York on a man-of-war and thence proceeding to Albany (where he was joined by the Governor of Pennsylvania) the new treaty was closed after the usual endless speech making and other ceremony. By its terms the Iroquois were prohibited from ever again crossing the Potomac or the Blue Ridge "without the license or passport of the Governor or commander-in-chief of the province of New York, for the time being"; and the Virginia tributary Indians were similarly prohibited from crossing the same boundaries. Moreover, there were provisions that should any Indians—Iroquois or tributary—ignore the prohibition, they were, upon capture and conviction, to be punishable by death or transportation to the West Indies, there to be sold as slaves. There was added a clause rewarding him who captured an Indian found in Virginia without permission, with 1,000 pounds of tobacco when the latter should be condemned to death; or, if he should be condemned to transportation, the captor should "have the benefit of selling and disposing of the said Indian, and have and receive to his own use, the money arising from such sale."

There was nothing ambiguous in this treaty's terms; the Iroquois in signing it realized that their Piedmont hunting grounds were lost to them and that the sportive raids of their war parties below the Potomac were ended.

And now Spotswood's consulship had reached its end. His enemies in London and Williamsburg had been industriously intriguing and upon his return he found he had been superseded. He had acquired a vast estate of over 45,000 acres in the Piedmont forests and to settle and improve those lands he proceeded to devote his great and able energies. But he had far from retired from his public labours. As Postmaster General for the American Colonies he, by 1738, developed a regular mail service from New England to the James; and was about to sail as a major-general on Admiral Vernon's expeditions against Carthagena when he suddenly died. He was buried on his estate, Temple Farm, near Yorktown, where latterly he had made his home. It was in his mansion there, then owned by his eldest daughter Ann Catherine and her husband M. Bernard Moore, Senior, that many years later the negotiations for the surrender of Lord Cornwallis to General Washington closed the American Revolution.

CHAPTER IV

SETTLEMENT

Although Spotswood's treaty, as we now know, had finally ended the Indian menace in Piedmont, the Colonists had to be convinced of that fact by reassuring experience before any great movement to the upper lands would begin. There had been other treaties and, as they well knew to their cost, Indian promise and performance were not always consistent. The first ten years following the treaty, or from 1722 to 1732, are a twilight zone for Loudoun in which one has to depend on fragmentary traditions and comparatively few grants as to actual settlement; but after the latter year the records become increasingly numerous and tradition more definite and the student stands on progressively firmer ground. Slowly there grew a steady increase in trappers and hunters to the cismontane region and then, gradually and cautiously, the landless men, the poorer whites from the lower settlements, the redemptioners or indentured servants who had fulfilled their contracts of service, began to make their way by Indian trail or through the untravelled woodlands. Very soon, however, there were purchases of substantial tracts by a more prosperous class who began to seat themselves upon their new possessions. They were a rough and sturdy folk, those first poorer arrivals, illiterate for the most part, bred to primitive conditions of living, many accustomed from birth to self-reliance in meeting the problems of existence on a sparsely settled land and wholly ignorant of the relative comforts of life enjoyed by the prosperous planters in tidewater. They built their rude cabins of logs in such places as seemed best to them, paying scant attention to land titles and being in fact, for the most part, mere squatters on their holdings; and there they planted small patches of corn and beans which, with the abundant game in the woods and fish in the streams, provided their liberal and hearty fare. It has been traditional that these earliest pioneers found many open spaces burned over before their arrival; for so prevalent had been the Indian habit of firing the woods, that historians have suggested that had the coming of the Europeans to Virginia been delayed for a few more centuries, its great forests would have vanished before their arrival. Taylor records that the early whites found the timber (probably second or younger growth) "far inferior in size and beauty to what it is at present. Indeed it has been asserted that in clearing ten acres of land there could hardly be obtained from it sufficient material to enclose it;" but as he was a Quaker, living in the midst of the Quaker settlement between the Catoctin range and the Short Hills in the northern part of the county, whose people were in habits and daily life somewhat isolated and up to Taylor's time at least, given to keeping largely to themselves, we may assume that his tradition applied more particularly to his locality. However, the present writer, some twenty years ago, while improving a farm then owned and occupied by him in the Catoctin hills, about four miles northeast of Leesburg, had occasion to clear woodland for roads and gardens, he found that none of the larger trees, many of them oaks, had rings indicating an age of over two hundred years. Taylor, and following him Head, places the responsibility of burning the forests upon the hunters (ranging over the ground before the first settlers) who are said to have fired the underbrush "the better to secure their quarries;" but it is unquestionable that the Indians had preceded them in the practice. It will be remembered that more than a hundred years before, Smith's Manahoacs could not inform him of conditions beyond the mountains "because the woods were not burnt;" obviously in contrast to conditions on the Piedmont side; and Beverly in his history, written in 1705, amply confirms the Indian usage.

Although tradition tells us, and the absence of recorded grants confirms, that these earliest settlers were mostly squatters, there had been acquisition of large tracts within present Loudoun from the Proprietor of the Northern Neck long before their arrival.

In an earlier chapter the title to the Northern Neck has been traced down to the year 1681 when it vested for the most part in the second Lord Colepeper and it is now time to continue its history. Upon Colepeper's death, in 1689, his only child Catherine, with her mother, inherited the Proprietary. This second Lady Culpeper, or Colepeper as the name was then also spelled, was something of a character. By birth, it seems, she was Dutch and had inherited from her own family both a large fortune and an independent spirit, not infrequently found together; and it was this fortune

"which enabled Lord Colepeper to hold together his large properties, particularly the vast Northern Neck proprietary in the Colony of Virginia. It was also her fortune which rescued from bankruptcy the English property of her son-in-law, the fifth Lord Fairfax.... Lady Colepeper, it appears, never succeeded in mastering the English language. She both spoke and wrote it very imperfectly."[9]

Lady Culpeper died in 1710. The daughter Catherine had, some years before, married Thomas, fifth Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron in the peerage of Scotland and, on her mother's death, the grant rested in them; for in the meanwhile Alexander Colepeper also had died (1694) and left his one-sixth interest to Lady Margaret Colepeper, the second Lord's widow. The fifth Lord Fairfax, dying in 1710, left three sons (all of whom later died without issue) and it was the eldest of these, Thomas, who inherited the title and became the sixth Lord. This sixth Lord Fairfax had been born in England in 1691 and came later to Virginia, living out his long life as something of a misogynistic recluse (due, it is said, to an unfortunate love affair in early life with a mercenary adventuress) at his seat Greenway Court, then in the wilderness of Frederick County, where he died in 1781. Today his body rests in Christ Church, Winchester. He it was who became the friend and patron of the youthful George Washington and who fills so large a part in the history of the Northern Neck.

The family of Fairfax had long been seated in Yorkshire where the men were something more than typical English squires, often rising to positions of much national as well as local importance. It traced its descent from Richard Fairfax, Lord Chief Justice of England in the reign of Henry VI. Sir Thomas Fairfax accompanied the Earl of Essex to France and was knighted for bravery in the camp before Rouen. On the 4th May, 1627, he was created a Baron of Scotland with the title of Lord Fairfax of Cameron, which not very glorious honour he purchased for the sum of £1,500.[10] His son, Sir Ferdinando, was a general in the Parliamentary Army during the English civil war, becoming the second Baron, and the latter's son Sir Thomas, later third Baron, was commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary Armies and a most capable soldier. Becoming dissatisfied with the extreme policies of the Parliamentary party, he resigned his position in 1650 and was succeeded by Oliver Cromwell. This third Baron died in 1671, without male issue, and the title then passed to his cousin Henry, grandson of the first Lord. Upon his death, in April, 1688, he was succeeded by his son Henry as the fifth Lord Fairfax who has already been mentioned as the husband of Catherine Culpeper.

The fifth Lord Fairfax, although his marriage brought the great Proprietary into the family, seems to have been dissolute and extravagant. When he died in London, on the 6th of January, 1710, his affairs were in great disorder and it is said that at that time "his servant who attended him robbed him of the little money he had left." His widow, however, was a woman of thrift and character and intent on guarding her Virginia patrimony for the benefit of her sons. In 1702 Robert Carter had been appointed local agent for the Proprietary; but after her husband's death Lady Fairfax became dissatisfied with his conduct of its affairs and the revenues she was receiving and appointed in his place Edmund Jenings and Thomas Lee (then only twenty-one years of age) as resident agents. As Jenings was unable to go to Virginia at the time, young Lee found himself for four years in sole charge; and a most conscientious and capable agent he became and continued until Jenings came to Virginia in 1717 and took matters into his own hands. This Jenings was a man of considerable prominence who later was to serve, for a short time, as acting governor awaiting the arrival of Spotswood. After the death of Lady Fairfax, her testamentary trustees "turned again to Micajah Perry[11] for help and he pursuaded Robert Carter to agree once more to assume the agency"[12] (1722) which he continued to hold until his death ten years later. The Virginia office of the estate then remained closed until 1734 when Lord Fairfax appointed his cousin William Fairfax (whose son Bryan by his second wife Deborah Clarke of Salem, Massachusetts, was eventually to succeed to the title as the eighth Lord and in whose descendants the title still remains) to act as collector of rents. In 1736 Lord Fairfax himself assumed the management in Virginia for a short time; once more the office was closed until in 1739 we find William Fairfax again in charge, this time with more extensive powers until Lord Fairfax returned to Virginia in 1745 and took upon himself control for the rest of his life.

We are thus introduced to two more men who, in themselves and their families, had paramount rôles to play in and about the territory now Loudoun; and between whom there was to develop no little rivalry and conflict of personal ambitions and interests. Lee, himself between 1717 and 1719 a purchaser of several thousand acres of wilderness lying on either side of Goose Creek, had been born in 1690 at the family home Mt. Pleasant in Westmoreland County and eventually became "President[13] and Commander-in-Chief" of Virginia, as he is described in his will. He was a grandson of that Richard Lee of a family long in possession of the estate of Coton in Shropshire who, coming to Virginia sometime prior to 1642, first settled in that part of York which subsequently became Gloucester, later moved to Northumberland and became the progenitor of a family ever since of outstanding importance in the Northern Neck and Virginia. Carter, a later purchaser of land on a truly vast scale, whose father Colonel John Carter, believed to have been the son of William Carter of Carstown, Hertfordshire and of the Middle Temple, had come to Virginia prior to 1649 and first settled in upper Norfolk, now Nansemond County, came to wield an even greater power than his long-time rival. Our Robert Carter, (1663-1732) the "King Carter" of towering memory, was the second surviving son, and his residence Corotoman was in Lancaster County. The descendants of both Lee and Carter continued for many years to hold great estates in Loudoun. One of Lee's grandsons, Thomas Ludwell Lee, built Coton (long since vanished) about 1800 and another grandson Ludwell Lee built about the same time and just across the highway, the beautiful Belmont, that home of irresistible charm; while in 1802 George Carter, great-grandson of the mighty Robert, built and occupied Oatlands. Both Lee and Carter and their families and the great mansions built in Loudoun by their descendants will receive later mention.[14]

Unfortunately for the development of parts of the southern and southeastern portion of the county, the purchase of these great tracts by Lee, Carter and others greatly delayed their settlement and this to the disadvantage of the owners as well as the neighborhood. Even Lord Fairfax is found setting off to himself large specific tracts.[15] It was their intention to create hereditary landed estates, modelled on those existing in England and to be farmed by a numerous class of yeoman tenantry. But as the very type of farmer-settler most desired as tenants by the great owners came in, they early and strongly evinced that determination, common to all in the Colonies, to hold their land in a freehold that could be passed on indefinitely to their children and thus insure to them the benefit of their parents' industry and thrift rather than to become tenants for a limited period of any great estate; and this no matter how advantageous or tempting the proffered terms of tenancy. Under then existing conditions, with the supply of new and cheaply purchasable land seemingly inexhaustible if one had but the determination and courage to push on to the newer frontier, they went beyond the great manors, as they came to be called, and seated themselves in the upper lands or crossed the Blue Ridge to the Shenandoah Valley. Eventually and much later, when parts of the manors were sold, it was often in comparatively large parcels and these and the remaining portions were, as a rule, farmed with slave labor, a custom practically nonexistent in the northwest part of the county. Thus the relative thinness of settlement, persisting to this day, of much of the lower lands of Loudoun may be attributed not wholly to the fact that the stronger and more fertile lands lay above Goose Creek but in part to the social history of those early days as well.

The first specific grant of land in the later Loudoun appears long before the treaty of 1722. Under date of the 2nd February, 1709, Captain Daniel McCarty "of the Parish of Cople in the County of Westmoreland, Esq." obtained title to 2,993 acres "above the falls of the Potowmack River, beginning on said River side at the lower end of the Sugar Land Island opposite to the upper part of the rocks in said River,"[16] apparently for speculation or investment rather than for immediate occupation; the number and character of the Indians still to be encountered thereabout made settlement on isolated plantations or farms far too risky to be inviting to rich or poor. This Daniel McCarty was the founder of another eminent family of the Northern Neck which intermarried in early days with many of the best known of the early Potomac gentry. He subsequently married, as her second husband, Ann, sister to Thomas Lee already mentioned, and widow of Colonel William Fitzhugh of Eagle's Nest in King George County. The joining together of the prominent families of the lower peninsula began very early and by the closing years of the eighteenth century had gone so far that almost all were in very truth "Virginia cousins" of various degrees and through numerous alliances. Indeed this became so general that the social status of any family, tracing back to that period and locality, can generally be determined merely by the test of its affinities.

It is remarkable that the literature of romance has concerned itself so little with Daniel McCarty. His ancestry, his own life and that of his descendants unite in offering the richest material but, save in the traditions of Virginia, he is today all but unknown. He was the son of Donal, the son of Donough, Earl of Clancarty. Donal was an officer in the Irish Army that fought against King William and was ruined with its defeat. The Earl and his descendants were exiled and Daniel came to Virginia as a youth and settled in Westmoreland County. The Earls of Clancarty were the heads of a family descended from Cormac who was King of Munster in 483; and Burke, the great authority on the British peerage, declares that "few pedigrees in the British Empire, if any, can be traced to a more remote or more exalted source" than theirs; while another authority asseverates that "long before the founders of the oldest royal families of Europe, before Rudolph acquired the empire of Germany, or a Bourbon ascended the throne of France, Cormac McCarty ruled over Munster and the title of King was at least continued in name in his posterity down to the reign of Elizabeth."[17] Daniel's eldest son and heir, Colonel Dennis, married Sarah Ball, first cousin to Mary Ball, mother of General Washington; and Augustine Washington, the general's father, named him as one of the executors of his will. It was another descendant of Captain Daniel who was surviving principal in the famous McCarty-Mason duel over a century later—an event that so profoundly stirred the country and cost the life of one of the most prominent and beloved citizens of the Loudoun of that day.[18]

Francis Aubrey became a large purchaser of Loudoun land soon after the Iroquois evacuation, first obtaining a grant at the mouth of Broad Run about 1725. Among the tracts he later acquired was a grant of about 962 acres purchased on the 19th December, 1728 from Lord Fairfax on or near which later he built a home and lived. Nothing of this early house has survived; but we know that it was near the "Big Spring" then as now a conspicuous landmark on the old Carolina Road and about two miles north of the present Leesburg. Probably "the Chappel above Goose Creek" of the Truro Vestry books, the Chapel of Ease or convenient neighbourhood church, the building of which was supervised by him for the Parish, was immediately adjacent to his home and the location of that structure, the first church edifice of any kind to be erected within the bounds of present Loudoun, is known within a fair degree of accuracy and in 1926 with appropriate ceremonies, was marked with a stone monument.[19]

Hamilton Parish was coextensive with Prince William County when the latter was created in 1731. By a legislative act of May, 1732, that part of Prince William lying above "the river Ockoquan, and the Bull Run (a branch thereof) and a course thence to the Indian thoroughfare of the Blue Ridge of Mountains" (Ashby's Gap) was set off as Truro Parish and a Parish organization promptly followed. The new Parish was named for Truro in Cornwall, a great mining district, for mining was expected to be an important industry there. The first Vestry meeting was held on the 7th November, 1732; at a meeting held on the 16th April, 1733, an agreement was made with the Rev. Lawrence De Butts to preach at the Parish Church and "at the Chappell above Goose Creek" for 8,000 pounds of tobacco, clear of the warehouse charges and abatements. The chapel was then either contemplated or preliminary work on its construction may have been begun; it was not finished until 1736. But during that interval it is obvious, from the Vestry records, that occasional services were held there—perhaps at first in the open air or at the nearby house of Aubrey and thereafter in the unfinished chapel. At a Vestry meeting held on the 12th October, 1733, Joseph Johnson was chosen "Reader to the new Church and the Chappell above Goose Creek.... In the Parish Levy for this year provision is made for 2,500 pounds of tobacco to Captain Francis Aubrey toward building the Chapel above Goose Creek, and the next year the same amount and in 1735, 4,000 pounds for finishing said chapel."[20] Thus the construction of the chapel cost the Parish 9,000 pounds of tobacco which about this time seems to have been valued at eleven shillings per 100 pounds,[21] making the money cost of the chapel about £49″ 10s in Virginia currency or much less in the more stable money of England. Undoubtedly it was built of logs from the trees in its immediate vicinity and we may assume that it was very small.

At a Vestry meeting held on the 18th November, 1735, a payment of 1,000 pounds of tobacco was ordered made to Samuel Hull, Clerk of the Chapel above Goose Creek. In a meeting nearly a year later, on the 11th October, 1736, the Vestry ordered "that the Reverend Mr. John Holmes Minister of this Parish preach six times in each year at the Chappell above Goose Creek; and it is also ordered, that the Sundays he preached at the said Chappell the sermon shall be taken from the new Church;" but Mr. Holmes' ministry seems to have been somewhat irregular for at the bottom of the page is found this note signed by the Rev. Charles Green "the first regular Rector of Truro Parish":

"The Levity of the members of the Vestry is worth notice. They applyed to Collo. Colvill & entered an order, 23d Sept. 1734 for him to procure them a Clergyman from England. By the order on the other page they gave Cha. Green a title to the Psh. when ordained, and he had scarcely left the country when they received Mr. John Holmes into the parish as appears by the above order. N.B. Mr. Holmes was an Itinerant Preacher without any orders, & recd. Contrary to Law."

This Dr. Green, for he was a physician before becoming a clergyman, was "received into, and entertained as Minister" of Truro Parish at a Vestry meeting held on the 13th day of August, 1737. At the same meeting it was "ordered that the Churchwardens place the people that are not already placed, in Pohick and the new Churches in pews, according to their several ranks and degrees." Also "Ordered that the Reverend Mr. Charles Green preach four times in a year only, at the Chappell above Goose Creek. And that the Sundays he preaches at the Chappell, the sermon shall be taken from the new Church."

At a meeting on the 3rd October, 1737, the Vestry appropriated "To Francis Aubrey gent. for finding books for the Chappell 200 pounds tobacco." Also

"Whereas the Rev. Charles Green hath this day agreed with the Vestry to take the tobacco levied to purchase books for the Chappell above Goose Creek and ornaments for the Churches, at the rate of eleven shillings current money per hundred. He by the said agreement obliging himself to find and provide the said books and ornaments, being allowed fifty per cent. upon the first cost in accounting with the Church-Wardens. It is ordered that the collector pay to the said Green the sum of 8000 pounds of tobacco, it being the quantity this day levied for the purpose aforesaid."

At a Vestry meeting held on the 15th April, 1745, it was ordered that Messrs. John West, Ellsey and French view what necessary repairs were wanting at Goose Creek Chapel and agree with workmen therefor.

That seems to be the extent of the Truro Parish records concerning the "Chappell." It is believed to have been in use until about 1812 and thereafter utterly disappeared.[22] In 1742 Fairfax County was created, consisting of the Parish of Truro. In October, 1748, the Assembly passed an act dividing Truro Parish at Difficult Run and the upper part became Cameron Parish, in delicate compliment to the Lord Proprietor's Barony; but most unfortunately the Vestry book of Cameron, which would be invaluable source material for the Loudoun student seeking information for the period from 1748 until after the Revolution, seems to have wholly disappeared or been destroyed.[23] The Chapel had from its beginning until it became a part of Cameron Parish, that is from 1733 to 1748, these Clerks and Lay Readers:

Joseph Johnson, new or Falls Church and Goose Creek 1733-1735
Samuel Hull, Goose Creek, 1736-1740
John Richardson, 1741-1745
John Alden, 1745-1746
John Moxley, 1747
Thomas Evans, 1748

Aubrey is believed to have been the son of John Aubrey or Awbrey of Westmoreland, was an ally and close friend of Thomas Lee and, from his appearance in what is now Loudoun until his death in 1741, was of such dominant importance that he has been called its then "first citizen." When the county of Prince William was set off from Stafford in 1731, he became a member of its first Court and, in 1732, "the inspector of the Pohick warehouse and a member of the Truro Vestry." Two years before his death he became the Sheriff of Prince William County and, at about the same time, established the ferry at the Point of Rocks.[24]

But before Francis Aubrey settled at Big Spring, Philip Noland in 1724 had purchased land at the mouth of Broad Run. He married Aubrey's daughter Elizabeth and later removed to lands on the Potomac above the mouth of the Monocacy which his wife had inherited from her father. As early as 1758 and probably before, Noland operated a ferry across the Potomac from his new plantation to the Maryland side; thus joining the Maryland and Virginia sections of the Carolina Road, from the earliest days of local history a main artery of travel between north and south.[25] It was in this immediate vicinity that he built the mansion he was destined never to finish and which still stands incomplete, a most interesting example of one of the earliest of the more pretentious homes of Loudoun.

CHAPTER V

THE MELTING POT

Thus far we have been noting the arrival of Virginians from Tidewater. Rich or poor, great landowners or squatters, gentlemen of position and influence or the mere riff-raff of the settlements, with all the varying gradation between those extremes, they had at least in common their English blood and traditions and being the product of Virginia life, either through birth or years of residence. It is now time to consider other and wholly dissimilar strains which, during this period of early settlement, were coming into the newly opened country and which were to have such a lasting influence on its population.

As early as 1725 there was, it is said, a group of Irish immigrants which had established itself on the Virginia bank of the Potomac, opposite the mouth of the Monocacy. This particular cluster had come from Maryland having, perhaps, been attracted to the large grant between the Monocacy and the Point of Rocks which, before 1700, had been acquired by the first Charles Carroll, founder of his family in Maryland who, when he acquired the land on the Monocacy, was acting as Agent for Maryland's Proprietor, Lord Baltimore. Later his grandson, another Charles Carroll, inherited the grant, added greatly thereto, bestowed upon it the name of Carrollton Manor and in signing the Declaration of Independence as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, gave it and himself immortality. The Carrolls were Irish and Roman Catholics; perhaps they had encouraged these newcomers to go out to their great holdings on the Monocacy where life could be begun anew and there was less danger of interference with their religion than in the strongly Protestant east. However, whether encouraged or not, our particular covey of Irish seem eventually to have crossed to the Virginia shore and there planted themselves with small formality and no title. All was wilderness on both sides of the Potomac. The matter of a legal title was probably the least of our adventurers' troubles.

In the first half-century following the founding of Jamestown, few Irish were to be encountered in Virginia. The Colony was overwhelmingly English with, it is true, occasional Welsh, Irish and Scotch here and there; but these were accidental and the basic and dominating race of the settlers was so wholly Anglo-Saxon that the few others were submerged and lost in the English flood. But between 1653 and 1660, hundreds of unfortunate Irish, resisting Cromwell, were shipped as political prisoners and little better than white slaves to Virginia and the other Colonies. Again, after the defeat in 1690 of James II and his Irish supporters by William III at the Battle of the Boyne and the resultant Treaty of Limerick the next year, great numbers of the Irish were banished or condemned to transportation and of these many were sent to Maryland and Virginia where as servants or labourers on the land, their services were in demand. While the majority thus transported were ignorant peasants, feudal vassals of their lords, the "Kerns and gallowglasses" of Macaulay, numbers of the nobility and gentry were exiled as well, of which we have already recorded a prominent example in Daniel McCarty. Inasmuch as those transported were so treated as punishment for their uprising in favour of James and against the de facto English government of William, they were stigmatized as criminals, although, as shown, their offense was purely political. But Irish offenders against the penal laws other than political were also from time to time condemned to transportation and as the demand for labourers by wealthier planters in Virginia grew and until negro slaves later were generally available to them, there was also much kidnapping of wholly innocent Irish who, too, were taken to the Colonies and sold into servitude. Among this heterogeneous mass of unfortunates there were undoubtedly many who were disorderly, depraved and vicious and who, we know, subsequently gave great trouble to the Virginians; but to classify all the Irish forcibly transported as criminals or lawless would be as unjust as it would be untrue. It well may be borne in mind that to most of the English, they were a strange, impulsive and foreign people and equally or even more damning, Romanists in an intensely anti-Roman community. As such, we may well believe, they seldom enjoyed the benefit of a doubt of their inherent depravity.

The town of Waterford was, according to tradition, founded by an Irishman, one Asa Moore, who is reputed to have built his, the first house there in 1732, naming the new settlement for the place of his nativity. Later it received many English, Scotch-Irish, Germans and, particularly, Quakers to whom it largely owed the prosperity and progress it was then to enjoy.

During the interminable wars of the seventeenth century—in ghastly refutation as they were of those blissful dreams of the solidarity of Europe and that international brotherhood of peace and culture so fondly entertained by the Erasmian school only a few generations before—few parts of that same Europe had suffered more hideously than the land known as the Palatinate along the Rhine. The so-called Thirty Years War, from 1618 to 1648, brought devastation particularly to its lower portion. In 1688 its whole territory was invaded again by the French of Louis XIV—an invasion which, for sheer savage brutality to the people there and the inconceivable atrocities perpetrated on them, is difficult to parallel in the annals of civilized nations but which, with its certain legacies of distrust and hatred, is somewhat conveniently forgotten by the professional French patriot of today. The land was reduced to little more than a desert and such of its inhabitants as survived, to the utmost want and privation. For nine years, until the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), the French scourging of the land ground it to dust. A few years of quiet followed, in which the poor Palatines sought to restore their ruined towns and farms but fate seemed resolved on their annihilation. In 1703 another war, that of the Spanish Succession, broke out and raged until 1713 and the Palatinate again and again was overrun by hostile armies. It was during these years and after, that those left with the breath of life in their bodies appeared to give up hope of ever again occupying their homeland in peace. A great emigration began, ten thousand fugitives first going to England where they were received kindly by Queen Anne and her people and given much aid; but, in an England where work was none too plentiful, the Germans soon became an economic and social problem. About 3,800 were sent to Ireland where, in Munster, their descendants are still to be found; but many more were sent to America, some to New York but the greater number to Pennsylvania. In the latter Colony they were so well received that they sent back word encouraging others to follow them; and soon the harassed Germans began to arrive in such swarms that between 40,000 and 50,000 are believed to have come to Pennsylvania between 1702 and 1727, wholly changing its complexion. The Colony's Governor, George Thomas, writing to the Bishop of Exeter in 1747 stated his belief that the Germans then comprised three-fifths of the population of that Province. But of the early arrivals many of the most impoverished worked out toward the cheaper and still wild lands on the then frontier and thence south through the strong and fertile regions of western Maryland.

Meanwhile Virginia had been encouraging settlements of refugee Europeans on her frontiers in an effort to form buffer groups between the inimical French and Indians to the north and the seated parts of her domain. In 1730 a grant of 10,000 acres on the Shenandoah River was made to one Stover for settlement by Germans who began to pour south from Pennsylvania and Maryland and soon the Valley was taking on that perceptible Teutonic colour with which it is still dyed.

In 1731 there came to the present Loudoun the first colony of Germans from the Valley. Of all the early settling it is doubtful if any was more intelligently planned or more reasonably could anticipate success. Instead of a few individuals pioneering in haphazard fashion, there was a compact and homogeneous group of about sixty families, the men almost without exception artisans of various trades or peasants skilled in thrifty farming; and their lot had heretofore been so harsh and their fortune so adverse that the hardships inseparable from making a new home in the wilderness were, by comparison, a kindly dispensation of a hitherto hostile fate. On crossing the Blue Ridge they and those following them settled the land between the Catoctin Mountains and the Short Hills, north of the present Morrisonville, which from that time on has been known as the German Settlement and than which no part of Loudoun has been more industriously and providently farmed. Little those early Teutons spent on luxury or even comfort; a sound and certain living was their objective and the land and its increase, rather than ornate dwellings, received their uttermost effort. Even as late as 1853, Yardley Taylor was moved to record that their "farms are generally small and well cultivated and the land rates high. This class of population seldom goes to much expense in building houses ... many old log houses that are barely tolerable are in use by persons abundantly able to build better ones." But if their houses were primitive, the occupants were generally prosperous and free from debt and in later years comfortable and commodious farmhouses have taken the place of the earlier cabins. These earliest Germans, having neither speech nor habits in common with their neighbours, developed a self-sustained and independent community wholly different and set off from those of others around them and to this day their locality measurably carries on its distinctive life.

Following so closely upon the advent of the Germans that there has arisen some dispute as to which actually entered first, we find the arrival of the Quakers. "In 1733 Amos Janney left his residence at the Falls of the Delaware in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and migrating to Virginia with his family, established himself at Waterford"[26] and many other Quakers soon joined him. Local tradition places, even earlier than Janney, David Potts (another Pennsylvania Quaker) as a pioneer in the northern part of the present county but no record confirms his presence before the 16th November, 1746, when he leased 866 acres on "Kittockton Run" from Catesby Cocke for five shillings in hand paid with right of purchase. Legend may or may not be correct; the earliest settlers, as we have seen, often seated themselves without title. Both Janney and Potts were founders of well known families in the county where their descendants still worthily bear their names. It is definitely known, however, that soon the Quakers became very numerous; and as ever since they have been such a conspicuous element in the diversified population of the county, a brief narration of their story and migration is of interest.

The "Friends" or "Quakers" as they were subsequently called, are a religious sect founded by George Fox in England in 1647 when he was but twenty-three years old. They owe their name of Quakers to their tendency, in their early religious meetings, to have become so wrought up in individual enthusiasm as to be seized with an emotional trembling or quaking and the earlier Friends "definitely asserted that those who did not know quaking and trembling, were strangers to the experience of Moses, David and other Saints."[27] Their characteristic tenets included the doctrine of non-resistance and opposition to all formalism in religious services and as Fox began his activities at a time of intense religious fanaticism met by relentless persecution, it was not long before he and his followers were in open conflict with the constituted authorities. From proselyting in public and interrupting conventional religious services, the more extravagant of the zealots indulged in activities which can only be ascribed to religious mania and the authorities promptly met their challenge.[28] Merciless whippings, dragging at cart-tails, the pillory, branding with hot irons and even occasional execution were their fate; but in common with other religious persecution their growth in number seems to have been coincident with the most vigourous efforts made to suppress them. Fox, a man of humble birth, with no advantages of formal education, possessed tireless energy and great bodily vigour coupled with the assurance of a natural and magnetic evangelist; and although equally detested by Churchmen and Puritans and in conflict with every other religious body, his following rapidly grew throughout England. Journeys by his proselytes to continental America, the West Indies, Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy left converts where they preached and this was particularly so in the American Colonies where Fox himself came in 1672.

The first of the Colonies to hear Quaker preaching was Massachusetts in 1656, but Virginia was a close second; for in the following year Thomas Thurston and Josiah Cole of Bristol arrived in the Old Dominion and are said to have made a number of converts before they were promptly banished. The Quakers were as little welcome in either Massachusetts or Virginia as in England itself and both Colonies passed stringent laws for their repression. Virginia ordained that any shipmaster found guilty of smuggling in Quakers was to be fined £100 and upon the third return of a Quaker after banishment, he was to be treated as a felon. But even before the passage of the English Toleration Act of 1689 the persecution had died down. By the end of the century they had so increased in number that they were a major element in Rhode Island, controlled New Jersey and Delaware and had, under William Penn in 1681, founded and were supreme in Pennsylvania. Penn declared for liberty of conscience in the Colony he termed his "experiment," with absolute religious freedom "for Papists, Protestants, Jews and Turks"—if not an absolutely unique, at least a sorely needed attitude in the seventeenth century religious life. Thence forward Pennsylvania was to be a great centre of Quakerism and from it mainly but also from Maryland, New York and other Colonies, as well as directly from Great Britain, were recruited the Quakers of Loudoun. Undoubtedly the familiar combination of economic pressure, the cheaper and more fertile lands of the new settlement and the pioneering spirit inherent in the British race explains the migration. It is interesting to note that by 1694 a Quaker had become Governor of South Carolina and that from 1725 to 1775 there was a constant flow of Friends from Pennsylvania, New York, New England and Great Britain to that State. As a main north-and-south highway, the famous Carolina Road, passed through the Loudoun to be, doubtless many came that way and we may believe that not a few of those emigrants joined their coreligionists who they found living in such comfort and prosperity in their fertile Virginia colony.

The Quakers of Loudoun had with characteristic shrewdness picked out for their settlement that part of the far-famed Loudoun Valley, between the Catoctin Hills and the Blue Ridge, that lies in the central part of the present county—perhaps the best and most fertile land the county boasts; and there the so-called "Quaker Settlement" continues to the present time. In common with their German neighbours to the north, they tended to form a more-or-less compact colony, segregated from the other pioneers. They were frugal, industrious, far better farmers than their Virginia neighbours; but between Germans and Quakers no love was lost and, though each was isolated from the Tidewater element, there was little or no intermingling. Nevertheless we find them occasionally making common cause against the slaveholding portion of the community and, in the next century in the War Between the States, both German and Quaker adhered to the Federal cause and were, at least for the time being, more than ever cut off from their then intensely Confederate neighbours. Time has softened and gradually worn down these old-time edges of difference and today, perhaps more than ever before, we find the descendants of these earlier opponents living in concord and mutual respect.

Our melting-pot is slowly filling. In the Scotch-Irish it now takes another human ingredient as distinct from the Anglo-Saxon as were the Germans or Irish but destined to make a major contribution not only to the new population of the Piedmont but to that of Virginia generally and the other Colonies as well. They were splendid pioneering material with the persistent industry and frugality of the German and Quaker but, unlike them, mixing freely with the other settlers, planting themselves anywhere and everywhere they found conditions and lands to their liking and so soon and freely intermarrying with their Virginia neighbours that their blood today is found very generally mixed with the older Virginia strain. Concerning their origin and history there has been much misinformation and occasionally rather prejudiced and heated argument; but the main facts are not obscure.

In the sixth century one of the Irish tribes known as the Scotti or Scots, inhabiting the island then known as Scotia, but which we now call Ireland, crossed the Irish Sea and made a mass descent on the west coast of ancient Caledonia; and driving before them the Picts they found occupying the land, they settled down in possession of their newly conquered territory, covering roughly the present Argyle. Five centuries later the descendants of these invaders, having waxed mightily in power and numbers and become one of the four tribal kingdoms of Caledonia, united with the others, the Picts, British and Angles, to make the Kingdom of Scotland to which they gave their name and of which their history thenceforth was a part. Thus apparently their future destiny was fixed for all time in Scotland; but Providence had not forgotten them and had other plans.

In all Ireland, never renowned for its meekness nor pacification, there was in Elizabethan days and before, probably no part more constantly and consistently embroiled than the Province of Ulster. More or less continuous fighting between its people and Elizabeth's soldiers gradually wore down the Irish and their final complete collapse came in 1607 when their native princes, the Earls of Tyrconnel and Tyrone, deserted them and fled to the Continent. Thereupon the first James of England, having succeeded Elizabeth, declared all the lands of the Province forfeited and escheated to the English Crown, thus providing a convenient and legal basis for dispossessing the native Irish of their holdings, which the King thereupon undertook to repopulate with English and Scotch. But the English did not view the King's inducements with enthusiasm. Inasmuch as, in comparison with the Scotch, they "were a great deal more tenderly bred at home in England, and entertained in better quarters than they could find in Ireland, they were unwilling to flock thither except to good land such as they had before at home, or to good cities where they might trade, both of which in those days were scarce enough" in Ulster.[29] But the Scotch, many of them from Argyle found Ulster, their old homeland, to their liking and James, Scotch himself, seems to have preferred them for his purpose. They came in great numbers, took root immediately and soon were creating a peace and prosperity in the Province unknown there for many a long day, their ranks being later heavily augmented by Covenanters fleeing from the persecution of Charles I. But between these Presbyterian newcomers and the native Irish Roman Catholics, their neighbours, there was friction and hostility from the beginning which has lasted unabated to the present day.

Had the English government the wit and policy to have let this new settlement alone all would have been well; but the England of those days had yet to learn, from the costly experience of the American Revolution, that art of governing colonies in which she is today without peer. After the final crushing of the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne, in which the new Ulster population was of no small assistance, the English merchants grew jealous of the trade, manufactures and aggressive competition of the Province and in 1698 succeeded in obtaining from Parliament restrictive laws which all but ruined her industries, particularly in linen and woolen then, as now, outstanding. And now to the ruin of their trades was to be added religious coercion. Although, as we have seen, a Toleration Act had been passed for England in 1689, it was not until nearly one hundred years later that in 1782 the Toleration Act for Ireland became law. From 1704 on there was a great effort to force the Presbyterians of Ulster, as well as those of Scotland, to conform to the English Church and those who refused were forbidden to keep schools, marriages performed by their ministers were declared invalid and other civil disabilities were imposed. By 1719 the people of Ulster had been made desperate by this senseless interference and persecution and they, too, began to flock to America. As with the others, the movement, once started, grew rapidly and in this instance reached such proportions that it became by far the greatest immigration that, until the later day of steam, was to come to America's shores. Again Philadelphia appears to have been the chief port to receive them, as many as six shiploads landing there in one week alone. Before the emigration was eased by the Toleration Act and a generally saner attitude in England, it is estimated that half a million of the Scotch-Irish had crossed the Atlantic, carrying with them a deep resentment toward England, for which she later was to pay a heavy price in the stubborn and valiant support these people and their descendants gave to the American side in the war of the Revolution.

As most of these Scotch-Irish immigrants were very poor, many paid for their passage by selling their services and labour for a term of years, becoming a part of that flood of "indentured servants" which we shall soon consider. Fairfax Harrison in his Landmarks of Old Prince William vividly describes their advent and early distribution in the Northern Neck. As soon as the earlier arrivals had worked out their contracted years of servitude, Colonel Robert Carter, about 1723, began seating them around Brent Town and Elk Marsh. But as their numbers grew, they soon shewed a disinclination to become tenants, preferring to push further into the wilderness "where they could and did take up small holdings on the same terms that Colonel Carter took up his great ones and in that process they scattered."[30] Being too poor to purchase negro slaves and the supply of "redemptioners" or indentured servants by that time beginning to diminish, they bought the cheaper convicts for labourers and the Piedmont backwoods of the Proprietary acquired a reputation for turbulence and lawlessness to which both master and servant contributed his share. But they settled the land, planted tobacco and corn as persistently and relentlessly as did their more prosperous neighbours and in common with them laboured to develop the future Loudoun.

To understand the status of the "indentured servants," who were so numerous in the Virginia Colony and were such a large and important factor in the population of the Northern Neck, it is well to first consider the meaning of the term. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the word servant was not at all confined to one who was engaged in a menial task but broadly referred to anyone who, for compensation, rendered service to another and it was customary in all occupations, calling for especial training or instruction, to take on apprentices "bound to serve for a certain time in consideration of instruction in an art or trade"—the apprentice to be fed, lodged and clothed by the master during the term and to give his labour and services in compensation for his support and instruction. This custom obtained not only in the various crafts and trades but even in the professions as well, lawyers and doctors taking students on similar terms. In modern England the broader and older meaning of the word persists in the expression "civil servant" in reference to a government clerk or employé in what in America, too, is known as the Civil Service.

Virginia's agriculture was based on the cultivation of tobacco and corn—both hand-hoed crops, with practically no use whatever of the plow. As land was plentiful and the plantations increased in size, the great and pressing need was always for labor—and more labor. This system of indentured service in Virginia began very early and opened a great supply of labor not otherwise available. There were many in England of the poorer class and even of those once more affluent who had for one reason or another become the victims of misfortune and sought a fresh start in the colonies but were without the money to pay their passage. No small number of those who had become bankrupt became indentured servants. The severe English laws against debtors forced many to fly from that country and Virginia was a safe escape; for in 1642 a law had been passed in Virginia protecting these fugitives from their English creditors.[31] Little social stigma seems to have attached to the indentured servants as such. Frequently they lived with the family of their master, especially so when he was one of the smaller proprietors, and as they became proficient and earned their master's confidence they were often made overseers of their fellow workers. Although by far the greater demand was always for workers on the land, not all of them were so employed; some were artisans, some of the better educated became teachers and it was not unusual for the wealthier planters to seek and purchase these latter for that purpose. George Washington is said to have thus received his earlier schooling. As a whole, they appear to have been well and humanely treated in Virginia, or at least after the earlier days of their introduction, with little or none of the shocking brutality they are known to have met with upon occasion in Maryland, such as called for that Colony's legislation of 1664, 1681, etc.[32]

That there had been some earlier harshness, but more probably to convicts, is suggested by the effort made by Robert Beverley, in his History of Virginia, first published in 1705, to refute rumours of ill-treatment or undue hardship in the lives of these people which had been spread abroad in the England of his day. No doubt the writings of Defoe and other authors without personal knowledge of what they undertook to describe, had had their affect. "A white woman is rarely or never put to work on the ground, if she be good for anything else," Beverley declares and further on has this to say:

"Because I have heard how strangely cruel and severe the service of this country is represented in some parts of England, I can't forebear affirming, that the work of the servants and slaves is no other that what every common freeman does; neither is any servant required to do more in a day than his overseer; and I can assure you, with great truth, that generally their slaves are not worked so hard, nor so many hours in a day, as the husbandman and day labourer in England. An overseer is a man, that having served his time, has acquired the skill and character of an experienced planter, and is therefore entrusted with direction of the servants and slaves ... all masters are under the correction and censure of the County Courts to provide for their servants food and wholesome diet, clothing and lodging."

And again:

"If a master should be so cruel, as to use his servant ill, that is fallen sick or lame in his service, and thereby rendered unfit for labor, he must be removed by the churchwardens out of the way of such cruelty, and boarded in some good planters home till the time of his freedom, the charge of which must be laid before the next county court, which has power to levy the same, from time to time, upon the goods and chattels of the master, after which, the charge of such boarding is to come upon the parish in general.... No master of a servant can make a new bargain for service or other matter with his servant, without the privity and consent of the County Court, to prevent the masters over-reaching, or scaring such servant into an unreasonable compliance."

Moreover, when the servant had redeemed himself by working out his time, he received from his former master, as assistance to start out for himself "ten bushels of corn (which is sufficient for almost a year) two new suits of clothes, both linen and woolen, and a gun, twenty dollars value"; all of which were given to him as his due. He had the right to take up fifty acres of unpatented land and thereupon took his place, according to his merit and industry, in the free life of the Colony.

The system was necessary from the first; for if the servants had not been bound they promptly would have secured tracts of land to work for themselves, leaving those who had paid for their passage in the lurch. That it was advantageous to both master and servant is indicated by its growth. Its end in Virginia was caused by a cheaper labor supply having become available rather than from any lack of those seeking transportation. It has been estimated that, between the years 1635 and 1680, from 1,000 to 1,600 came annually to Virginia under its conditions and that from first to last not less than eighty thousand persons so arrived. But with the importation of negroes, beginning on a larger scale about 1680, the custom declined until by the middle of the eighteenth century, it seems to have practically ended in Virginia.

The transporting of convicts by England to her American Colonies—a far greater injustice to them than the later taxation by which they were lost to her—began early and was, in Virginia, at once and most vigourously opposed; but the everpressing demand for laborers seems to have rapidly modified the opposition, at least on the part of the larger proprietors whose power and influence was out of all proportion to their number; and it was not long before convicts were not only accepted without protest but even sought. It is the old story, in America as elsewhere, of a selfish economic advantage blinding those in power to the welfare of the State as a whole, although many continued to hold misgivings of the outcome. Thus we find Beverley in a later edition of his history, recording: "as for malefactors condemned to transportation, the greedy planters will always buy them, yet it is to be feared that they will be very injurious to the Country, which has already suffered many murders and robberies, the effect of that new law of England."[33]

But a loose assumption that all the convicts or prisoners arriving were moral derelicts, or those whose offense essentially involved moral depravity, and that the proportion these bore to others leaving Europe for Virginia fixes the ratio of their descendants or influence in the Old Dominion's later population, would be wholly and demonstrably untrue. We must be much more discerning and analytical than that and, as in another instance, look to our definitions.

The penal law of England, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was far more severe than today. Literally scores of offenses were punishable by death or transportation which today are either not crimes or, if still so considered, are punishable only by fine or imprisonment. Among the transgressions most severely dealt with, were purely political offenses; and a political offense was essentially to have picked the wrong side in the many religious, dynastic or civic disturbances of the period. After the various Irish upheavals of the seventeenth century—and that island, it may be said, was conquered by the English no less than three times within less than a hundred years—there was banishment or transportation of many of the losing side. The transportation was especially ruthless after Cromwell's operations and again, a generation or more later, after the Battle of the Boyne. But the Irish were not the only political victims. When the forces of Parliament defeated the Stuart followers, they condemned to transportation a goodly number of their opponents; treatment which was promptly reciprocated by the triumphant Royalists after the Restoration who meted out the same punishment to former Cromwellian soldiers and non-conformists as well. Again, after the abortive effort made in 1685 by the Duke of Monmouth to seize his uncle's crown, the vicious and bloody Jeffries and his colleagues, in their less frenzied moments, sentenced, as criminals, multitudes of the unfortunate followers of Monmouth to transportation to Virginia—there to be sold into as virtual slavery as any thug convicted of murder or highway robbery who had, in one way or another, been lucky enough to escape hanging. On arrival they sold for from £10 to £15 each; and we find the King adding his gentle touch to the work. "Take all care" wrote James to the Council of Virginia "that they shall serve for ten years at least; and that they be not permitted to return themselves by money or otherwise until that term be fully expired. Prepare a bill for the Assembly of our Colony, with such clauses as shall be requisite for that purpose." Thus the king; but in four years he has lost his throne and William III is issuing a full pardon for all political offenders.

Hence no small part of the convicts were unfortunates, rather than criminals, to our modern way of thought. But there remained a large and unpalatable number who had been convicted of crimes of all degrees and in their ranks were found a motley crew ranging from the lowest type of profligate, whose escape from the noose had been a public misfortune, to the minor offenders punished for a first violation of law. However even this evil residue was fated to leave but a minor contamination of the Colony's bloodstream. A great death-toll was taken by sickness on the transporting ships, particularly by the dreaded "goal distemper" as it was called. Those who survived the voyage naturally received far less consideration from their purchasers than was accorded the indentured servant; the unaccustomed climate took its quota and all in all the mortality was very great. Of those who outlived their period of servitude, some rose to positions of trust; many of the incorrigibles soon made the Colony too hostile for their comfort and took themselves off either voluntarily or as fugitives—sometimes to the more remote and unseated parts of Piedmont or, more generally, to the North Carolina backwoods, a favorite refuge for the dregs of Virginia's Colonial population. And at length, in 1740, came an opportunity for a great and general house-cleaning. In raising the Virginia levies for the ill-fated expedition against Carthagena, many a convict was pressed into service and, in the disasters attending that adventure, ended his turbulent career. But unfortunately the polluted stream continued to pour in on Virginia's shores until after the Revolution.

An unduly large proportion of these undesirables appears to have found its way into the backwoods of the Northern Neck which, in 1730, Governor Gooch described as "a part of the Country remote from the Seat of Government where the common people are generally of a more turbulent and unruly disposition than anywhere else, and are not like to become better by being the Place of all this Dominion where most of transported Convicts are sold and settled."[34] One may, without an undue straining of the imagination, discover the descendants of some of these people in modern Loudoun's small lawless element.

The negro slaves were practically confined to the eastern and southern parts of Loudoun. They were all but unknown in the German Settlement and the Quakers as a sect were so opposed to the very institution of slavery that, as early as the eighteenth century, the Society in America reached the decision to disown any member thereof who held slaves.

In all this varied assortment of population, it is a tribute to the natural leadership of the Tidewater Virginian that he maintained his supremacy and control. From him the county inherits all that is best and most attractive in its social life—the courtesy of its people, the unfailing hospitality, the love of social intercourse, the ardour for outdoor sports, particularly the devotion to horses, dogs and fox-hunting, all of which so definitely distinguish it today and contribute to the outstanding and well-recognized charm of its life.

CHAPTER VI

ROADS AND BOUNDARIES

We have mentioned in the foregoing pages that an unusual feature in the settlement of these Stafford or Prince William backwoods, soon to be known as Loudoun, was not only the diversity of origin of the new population but that it came almost simultaneously from the north and the south and the west as well as from the Tidewater east. As the falls of the Potomac and Rappahannock blocked continuous water transport from the older settlements, the pioneers all were forced to come through the woodland trails and these trails or roads, if they could be then so called, now demand our attention.

What one might call the Appian Way of Piedmont, the longarum regina viarum as Statius calls the Roman road, was undoubtedly that aboriginal trail which, perhaps beginning as a buffalo path,[35] was followed habitually by the Indians in their north-south journeys to the earliest knowledge of the whites and appears in the records of the Colony at a very early date. The Carolina Road, as it is best known, became a great highway between the north and the south and if our surmise be correct that, in common with so many of our earliest colonial roads, it owes its origin to a beaten trail made by the heavier animals of the forest, it was probably used by the Manahoacks and their predecessor tribes long before the Susquehannocks frequented it in the latter half of the seventeenth century, not only on their trading journeys between the Dutch of Manhattan and the Carolina Indians, but in their war forays as well. The Iroquois of New York, as we have seen, followed their Susquehannock kindred to Piedmont and in Spotswood's day it was their ordinary and accustomed route. We think we get our first record of it among the Susquehannock "plain paths" noted in the Virginia Act of 1662 and it was sometimes referred to by that name. Later and from about 1686 until at least 1742, that part of the road between Brent Town and the Rappahannock was also known as the "Shenandoah Hunting Path," a name still occasionally heard; but the popular name was the Carolina Road with its no less popular descriptive appellation of "The Rogue's Road" due to the cattle and horse thieves who infested it throughout the eighteenth century. That these gentry misused the road only, rather than were residents of the country it traversed, was always maintained, and apparently with truth, by the Piedmont people; but so numerous had they become by 1742 that the Assembly passed an act[36] calling on those driving stock along the public highways to have in their possession a bill of sale of their cattle and horses to be exhibited to any justice of the peace when due demand therefor was made. Yet the rogues still continued to travel their road until the ebb and wane of its traffic in the early nineteenth century. Although the records fail to shew that highwaymen plied their trade on this or other Virginia roads, Loudoun folklore has held to a belief in their activities as witness the legend concerning Captain Harper, Loudoun's own Robin Hood:

"This portion through the present Loudoun of the old Carolina Road was then locally known as 'Rogue's Road' on account of the many bold robberies committed along its route by the famous gentleman highwayman of the day, Captain Harper, who regularly patrolled it and terrorized all those who lived adjacent to it until such was the fear of this dashing and bold highwayman, that women were afraid to venture out upon this road alone. A rather pretty story is related in this connection—a young Virginia maiden was walking this road alone one evening about twilight, hurrying from a visit to a neighbour, when a dashing cavalier rode up and reined his horse beside her. 'Are you not afraid to walk this road alone on account of Captain Harper and his band?' he asked. 'No' replied the maiden 'for I have always heard Captain Harper was a gentleman.' The dashing horseman looked at her a moment and then walked his horse beside her until she reached the gate leading to her home. And then raising his hat and bowing he said: 'Captain Harper bids you good night' and digging the rowels into his steed he vanished as he came."[37] The writer omits to mention the local tradition that Harper, though mercilessly robbing the rich, gave generously to the poor.

The Carolina Road entered Virginia at a point on the bank of the Potomac, above the mouth of Maryland's Monocacy, where Noland's Ferry sometime prior to 1756 became its connecting link with Maryland; thence it ran in a southeasterly direction somewhere along the present clay road to Christ Church just south of modern Lucketts; thence south, following closely the present Leesburg-Point of Rocks State Highway, through Leesburg over what is known as King Street (the King's Highway of yesteryear) and approximately along the present James Monroe Highway (Route 15 of the United States Highway System) to Verts' Corner, thence along what is still locally called the Carolina Road (or sometimes the Gleedsville Road) to Goose Creek at Oatlands. The present hard road from Verts' Corner to Oatlands, now the main road, was probably built and the old road's traffic at that point diverted about 1830 when the rough pavement of the road was undertaken. From Goose Creek at Oatlands the old road followed United States Route 15 as at present to the Little River Turnpike, now known as the Lee-Jackson National Highway, just east of the village of Aldie; crossing this, it followed what is now but a local and little used county road which, in its progress south of the county and under changing conditions, eventually crosses the other great rivers above their falls line and so on to North Carolina. Along its route the first church in Loudoun, Aubrey's little log "Chapel of Ease," was erected at the Big Spring; and later many of the mansions of the Loudoun gentlefolk, such as the Noland House, Rockland, Springwood, Selma, Raspberry Plain, Morven, Rokeby, Oatlands, Oak Hill, and others in due time came to be built and historic "Ordinaries" or taverns such as that known as West's and later as Lacey's and towns such as Leesburg and the nearby Aldie grew up. All through the eighteenth century the flow of its colorful traffic continued and developed in volume until the founding of the City of Washington, as the nation's Capital, drew to the east those travelling between the northern and southern States. And now, over a hundred years after the passing of its golden days of activity, there are rumoured plans to revive the old road as a main north and south highway and once again, in the not too distant future, we may see its old life restored, with motors and trucks speeding along its surface where the old-time foot and horse-travel and Indians and soldiers, missionaries and traders, drovers honest or otherwise, were wont slowly to pass.

Nor are the old mansions and towns the only surviving landmarks along its way. The famous Big Spring still rises in as steady volume as of yore; the Tuscarora and Goose Creeks, no longer needfully forded but now spanned by modern concrete bridges, still flow complacently in their old-time channels and between them, on the west side of the present road and two and a half miles south of Leesburg, still stand the old Indian mounds.

These mounds, for there are others scattered to the west of the one so noticeable from the highway, have always excited local interest but the present generation has all but forgotten their traditional story. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of the house of Mr. T. W. Gaines, on whose land rises the mound nearest the road, or perhaps over the land where the mounds themselves now stand, there was fought a hardly contested Indian battle at about the time the first of the white pioneers were coming into that neighbourhood. Many years ago the late Mrs. William H. Martin, then a bride recently come to Leesburg, with the assistance of the late Miss Lizzie Worsley, who gave a lifetime of study to the past of Leesburg and Loudoun, carefully gathered up what she then could of the old story which had been handed down from generation to generation and incorporated it in a gracefully written "History and Traditions of Greenway" which was published in the Record of Leesburg, then edited by her husband.

"Numberless were said to be dead warriors," wrote Mrs. Martin, "who found their last resting place so far from their native lands beneath the mounds that were easily distinguishable in the gloom of the thick forest. This battle had been between the Catawbas of the Carolinas and the Delawares.[38] An hereditary enmity existed between these two tribes, distant as they were, the one from the other. A large band of Delawares, pushing into the territory of the Catawbas had severely punished that tribe, and victorious, were travelling northward to their home. The Catawbas followed and unexpectedly fell upon them, having overtaken them at the Potomac. Terrible and swift was their revenge, yet such were the fighting qualities of the Delawares thus brought to bay, that the Catawbas were forced to retreat, without prisoners. But when the remaining Delaware warriors looked upon their dead they saw the flower of their tribe, stark in death, and too far to be carried to their own hunting grounds. So there they were buried...."[39]

The surviving conquerors gathered together the bodies of their slain tribesmen and over them toiled to erect the mounds that still stand. The mounds and many hundred acres of surrounding land were early acquired by the Mead family, who later built nearby Greenway, and in that family the legend was handed down that in the springtime of each year, about the anniversary of the battle, there came through the forest a band of Indians who, when they reached the mounds, conducted weird mourning rites for their fallen brethren, made offerings of arrows and food and then disappeared in the surrounding woods as silently as they came. As the years passed, the mourners grew fewer and fewer until at length but a solitary old warrior arrived and held what proved to be the final ceremony. But the story does not end with those last solitary rites. According to the Mead family tradition, year after year, as the night fell on the anniversary of the battle, weird sounds of conflict came from the Indian mounds though no person or living thing could be seen.

Perhaps of equal antiquity and second only to the Carolina Road in early importance but in that respect now by far surpassing it, is the highway roughly paralleling the Potomac, the old Ridge Road now generally known as the Alexandria Pike. This road also originated in an Indian trail, possibly following an earlier buffalo path; it joined the famous Potomac Path of Tidewater above the ford at Hunting Creek and it was along its course that we have seen Giles Vandercastel and Burr Harrison, in 1699, exploring their way on their mission to Conoy Island. This was the main entrance from the lower part of the Northern Neck to at least so much of Loudoun as lies between the Potomac and the Catoctin Hills; and along its course and that of the Colchester Road to the south came the majority of the Tidewater settlers. Its route through what later was to be the Town of Leesburg is marked by Loudoun Street. The late Charles O. Vandevanter of Leesburg, who made a careful study of the location of these old roads, believed that originally its course west of Leesburg followed what is now known as the Dry Mill Road to Clark's Gap; but there is reason to believe that he was mistaken. As the road approaches the rise of the Catoctin Hills, it certainly at one time followed the hollow to the west of the present established road and upon the land later owned by the author; so running west of the present Roxbury Hall and on to Clark's Gap, marks of its old route being still plainly discernible. When the highway was incorporated in 1831, its route at this point was changed to approximately its present location to avoid the sharpness of the grade as it left the little branch now crossed by stone culverts. Remains of the old road were discovered in 1923 when building the private road to the house last named. At the foot of the hill and in front of the present tenant house, rough piking was uncovered and nearby, where the path leaves the lane to go to the barn, some old brick were dug up. The late Samuel Norris, who died in 1933 at the age of eighty-four, said that at this point there once was a cottage where, as he had heard when a boy from older people, there had lived a man whose duty it was to care for the extra horses which were attached to the stage coaches before they began the abrupt rise of the road at that point in following the hollow northwesterly. From Clark's Gap the early road followed the present sandclay road to what is now known as Ely's Corner, past the present Paeonian Springs and Warner's Cross Roads and Wheatland and Hillsboro to the depression in the Blue Ridge known as Vestal's or Key's Gap—Gershom Keys having owned land at that point as early as 1748 and the Vestal family having operated a ferry across the Shenandoah nearby at least as early as 1754 and perhaps in 1736; for we know it was in operation at that time and that one G. Vestal was living in the immediate neighbourhood then. Washington followed this road on his mission to Fort du Quesne in 1753 and once again in 1754 as major of that expedition against the French on the Alleghany (to the command of which he later succeeded on the illness and death of Colonel Fry), which resulted in the building and surrender by him of Fort Necessity.[40] In the following year it was trodden by that brigade of Braddock's army which, under the command of Sir Peter Halkett, left the main body of the troops when that main body crossed the Potomac over into Maryland at the present Georgetown as is related in a later chapter.

In an effort to attract the increasing traffic to and from the west, Leesburg citizens incorporated in 1831 the Leesburg and Snickers' Gap Turnpike Company which built an improved road north from Clark's Gap to Snickers' Gap, as the old Williams' Gap had then come to be called; and this new road (which is the present Alexandria-Winchester Highway) took the traffic theretofore going through Vestal's Gap and has since been the northerly main route across the Blue Ridge.

To carry the old Ridge Road over Broad Run, we know that there was built, before 1755, one of the earliest highway bridges in Loudoun's territory of which record has been preserved; for on the 1755 edition of the Fry & Jefferson map a wooden bridge is shewn at that point. The picturesque stone bridge that now spans the stream, venerable as it appears, may not have been constructed before 1820, at about which time that part of the road was being improved by the Leesburg Turnpike Company; nevertheless in eastern Loudoun it is a popular legend that it was built by George Washington as a young man and the inhabitants of the neighbourhood firmly believe that to be true.

The third of the principal roads of colonial Loudoun is called by Fairfax Harrison the Colchester Road and is described by him as also, in its first beginning an Indian path, developed about 1728 by King Carter and his sons Robin and Charles from the Occoquan below the falls "past the future sites of Payne's Church and the present Fairfax Court House all the way to the Frying Pan run."[41] The Carters believed that there was copper on certain of their recently acquired lands and this road was developed to bring the ore to tidewater. It became known as the Ox Road and a year or so later joined Walter Griffin's Rolling Road running west across Little Rocky Run and eventually across Elk Lick and Bull Run, across the Carolina Road (near which crossing West's Ordinary was built), and so above the ford over Little River to the Blue Ridge Road to Williams' Gap. It was over this road that the youthful Washington returned in the spring of 1748 from his survey with George William Fairfax of the lands of Lord Fairfax in the valley and thus first set foot in the present Loudoun; crossing the Blue Ridge at Williams' Gap[42] they proceeded to William West's house, later to be licensed as West's Ordinary and still later as Lacey's. Incidentally this old building and landmark continued to stand until the year 1927 when it was quite needlessly and most unfortunately torn down.

The Colchester Road continued to be a main thoroughfare up to about 1806 when the construction of Little River Turnpike diverted most of its travel and the new road with its branches became the principal highway system in southern Loudoun.

The Virginia roads in the early days were in terrible condition for wheeled traffic. Their most earnest defenders can only allege that they were no worse than other American roads of those days and better than many, a defense that damns without even the proverbial faint praise. Englishmen of the period were still asleep in their attitude toward road building and many of the highways of England seem to have been as bad as those in America. One peculiarity of the Virginia road was its general lack of side-fencing. Adjacent property owners were quite apt to run their boundary fences across the highway, leaving a gate for the traveller to open and pass through. Curious as this may seem to us, it was not wholly without its advantage; for where the highway had become a sink-hole of mud, it thus was possible for the passer-by to make as wide a detour through adjacent fields or woods as might be necessary to avoid the obstruction. This throws light upon the effort at Georgetown, predecessor settlement of the larger Leesburg, to have the course of the Carolina Road as it passed through that hamlet definitely established by the court as early as 1742 and again in 1757.[43]

Bridges were few, far between, and primitive. There was, as we have shewn, a wooden bridge prior to 1755 carrying the Ridge Road over Broad Run and it is believed that prior to 1739, the same road crossed Difficult near Colvin Run over a bridge of sorts; but for the most part fords were used to cross streams, or ferries in the case of the Potomac and other great rivers. When fords and ferries failed, the mounted traveller swam his horse across, leaving the wayfarer on foot to such more precarious adventure as conditions and his courage offered.

In a preceding chapter we have seen the Vestrymen of Truro Parish engaged in ecclesiastical affairs committed to their charge; among their secular duties was to appoint every four years reputable Freeholders to "perambulate" the Parish, that is to say to travel over the plantations and farms within it and renew their landmarks. In Virginia this was called "processioning" but it derived from a very ancient English practice know as "beating the bounds" believed to have been brought by Saint Augustine to England from Gaul where "it may have been derived from the Roman festival of Terminus, the god of landmarks, to whom cakes and ale were offered, sports and dancing taking place at the boundaries." In England we find the "beating of the bounds" observed under Alfred and Aethelstan, whose laws mention it. In later days, maps still being rare, it continued an English parish custom, generally observed on Ascension Day or during Rogation Week. A procession was formed, headed by the Priest of the Parish, the Churchwardens and other Parish dignitaries and followed by a crowd of boys who were armed with sticks with which they beat the Parish boundary stones and were sometimes beaten themselves at each marker in order to fix those markers in their minds and to insure the location of the boundary stones being remembered through the life of the younger generation. The procession frequently ended in a "parish-ale" or feast which doubtlessly assisted in reconciling the boys to it all.[44] In earlier days the Priests sought the Divine blessing for the following harvest on the lands within the parish. But translated to Virginia the procedure was robbed of much of its formality and many of its picturesque features and came to apply to renewing the landmarks of private holdings rather than confirming in memory those of the Parish bounds. There was a Truro Vestry meeting held on the 8th October, 1743, to appoint "Processioners," which meeting, the record states, was pursuant to an order of Fairfax County Court, Loudoun then being included in Fairfax. The Vestrymen at their meeting "laid off the said Parish into Precincts and appointed Processioners in manner following." As the men appointed were representative men in their neighbourhoods and as the "Precinct" may be taken to forecast the later division of Loudoun into its Magisterial Districts of modern days, it is interesting to study so much of the record as refers to the country above Difficult Run which in a few years was to be organized as Loudoun:

"That John Trammell and John Harle procession between Difficult Run and Broad Run; that Anthony Hampton and William Moore procession between Broad Run and the south side of Goose Creek as far as the fork of Little River; that Philip Noland and John Lasswell procession between Goose Creek and Limestone Run as far as the fork of Little River; that Amos Janney and William Hawling procession between Limestone Run and the south branch of Kitoctan.

"Between the south fork of Kitoctan and Williams Gap, no free holder in this precinct; between Williams Gap, Ashley's Gap, the County line and Goose Creek, to the Beaver Dam, and back to the Gap, no freeholder in this precinct. Between the Beaver Dam and the north east fork of Goose Creek no freeholder in this precinct."

Level Jackson and Jacob Lasswell were ordered to procession between the northeast and northwest forks of Goose Creek; John Middleton and Edward Hews between Little River and Goose Creek; William West and William Hall Junior between Little River and Walnut "Cabbin" branch; George Adams and Daniel Diskin between Walnut Cabbin branch, Broad run and Cub run and Popes head. The editors of the record add that these Processioners owned land within their several precincts at that date.[45]

The statement that there were no freeholders

(a) between the south fork of "Kitoctan" and Williams Gap; and

(b) between Williams Gap, Ashley's Gap, the County line and Goose Creek to the Beaver Dam and back to the Gap; and

(c) between the Beaver Dam and the north east fork of Goose Creek

is interesting. A and C take in parts of the Quaker Settlement. Also it is traditional in the Osburn family of Loudoun that their forebears John and Nicholas Osburn, sons of Richard Osburn of New Jersey and later of Chester County, Pennsylvania, came from Pennsylvania to the Shenandoah Valley near Harper's Ferry and thence in 1734 crossed the Blue Ridge and settled on its eastern foothills near the present Bluemont. It may be that with other pioneers in the upper lands they occupied their farms at first without title and later were obliged to buy the lands they had rescued from the wilderness from the more shrewd and far-sighted land speculators for we find no grants from the Proprietor to them. Many of the earliest settlers were in that position. Catesby Cocke and Benjamin Grayson particularly, took title to great tracts west of the Catoctin Hills and in 1740 sold their holdings to John Colvil of Cleesch as will later appear.[46] Neither Cocke nor Grayson were settlers in Loudoun. The former was the son of Dr. William Cocke, Secretary of State and he himself had been successively clerk of the counties of Stafford, Prince William and Fairfax. Grayson, a Scotch merchant from Quantico, became the father of Colonel William Grayson of Revolutionary fame who, with Richard Henry Lee, first represented Virginia in the United States Senate.

CHAPTER VII

SPECULATION AND DEVELOPMENT

In the Quarter century, between 1730 and the French and Indian War of 1755, the lands of the future Loudoun became progressively more populous. Although Truro Parish had been created as recently as 1732, this pressure of incoming settlers seemed to call for the division, in its turn, of Truro and in 1748 the government of the Colony set off the upper part of Truro, beyond Difficult Run, as a new parish which was named Cameron in delicate compliment to the Lord Proprietor's Scotch Barony. Most unfortunately, the first vestry book of the new parish, which would be invaluable source material for the Loudoun student seeking information for the period from 1748 until the Revolution, has vanished or been destroyed. The first parson of Cameron was the Rev. John Andrews, probably the hero of a convivial incident soon to be related.[47]

Increasing population meant rapidly rising land values, exercising an irresistible lure to many of the more active speculators of the Northern Neck. Such men of substance as Aubrey and Noland were developing the lands they purchased; but in another class were Benjamin Grayson, Catesby Cocke, George Eskridge, the wealthy Potomac trader John Colvil of Cleesh, that turbulent though gifted son of Dublin John Mercer and even William Fairfax himself, all of whom, so far as Loudoun was concerned, were active in land ventures rather than development. The Germans we have met coming over the Blue Ridge were more intent upon subduing the wilderness than skilled in the niceties of land titles; hence they, in common with many of the other pioneers, appear to have frequently omitted to secure grants from the proprietor for their holdings, giving Cocke, Grayson, Mercer and even Aubrey the opportunity, knowingly or otherwise, to secure the legal title to the lands of which they had taken possession.

In 1740 John Colvil bought out Cocke and his colleagues and, writes Fairfax Harrison "many lesser men and by pre-arrangement divided the territory with William Fairfax. Keeping for himself the lands lying between Catoctin Creek and the Catoctin Ridge and stretching from the Potomac to Waterford, he conveyed to William Fairfax 46,466 acres, constituting all the territory on the Potomac lying between Catoctin Creek and the Shenandoah River, including the Blue Ridge from Gregory's Gap to Harper's Ferry. The purchaser divided the property at the Short Hills into two estates, naming the northern one 'Shannondale' and the southern one 'Piedmont' and administered them as manors, on leases for three lives. By his will he left these lands, with his mansion house, Belvoir, to his eldest son, and the latter in turn, by his will of 1780, entailed them, with the intention that they should constitute the 'plantation' of Belvoir House, always to be held with it. But soon after this last will was written, the success of the American Revolution made it necessary for George William Fairfax, by codicil, to change his testamentary dispositions and his proposed entail was never made effective."[48]

After Colvil had settled with William Fairfax, he still held 16,290 acres along Catoctin Creek, to say nothing of 1,500 acres on Difficult Run, his plantation on Great Hunting Creek known as Cleesh and other lands in the Northern Neck. Born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, he was closely related to the Earl of Tankerville, through the latter's mother being his first cousin—a matter in which he took some pride and which was to be of even more moment to the Earl; for when Colvil came to make his will in 1755, he left his plantation Cleesh, then containing about 1,000 acres, to his own brother, Thomas Colvil, for life with remainder over "to the Right Honourable the present Earl of Tankerville and his heirs forever" and also "in consideration of my relation and alliance to the said Earl of Tankerville son of my father's brother's daughter," he left to him outright his 16,000 acres of land on the Catoctin, his 1,500 acres on Difficult and his interest in a certain nearby copper mine.[49] Thenceforth these lands remained in the Earl's family until after the Revolution. Thus originated the Earl of Tankerville's title to certain Loudoun lands, reference to which occasionally yet is heard.

About 1739 Josias Clapham, of an ancient family of Yorkshire (which long has been associated with the Fairfaxes there) bought land near the Point of Rocks and before his death owned much land in the Northern Neck. He died sometime prior to the 27th December, 1749, when his will, dated the 29th October, 1744, was proven in Fairfax County. In that will he left

"to my brother's son Josias Clapham two hundred fourty three Achres of four hundred joyning to Madm. Mason commonly called the Flat Spring to him and his heirs forever."

A codicil added to the will reads

"I leave my hole real Estate and Parsonable Estate to my brothers son Josias Clapham and if he dont come in, it is my desire that his brother Joseph should have it."[50]

Nicholas Cresswell, the journalist, as we shall see in Chapter XI, states that the younger Josias lived in Wakefield in Yorkshire and was much in debt. He decided to "come in" by emigrating to Virginia and soon appeared on his lands in the upper country. He became a great leader in Loudoun affairs. Toward the end of his long life he, in 1796, deeded to his son Samuel the estate later known as Chestnut Hill and the latter, soon thereafter, built the beautiful mansion which became another of Loudoun's outstanding and stately family seats and which still stands, in all its old-time charm, not far from the Point of Rocks, in one of the most fertile and captivating regions of Loudoun. Through the marriage of Betsy Price, a granddaughter of Josias Clapham, to Thomas F. Mason of the Gunston Hall branch of that family (and therefore cousin to that Thomson Mason of Raspberry Plain who we are about to meet) the house and estate, until very recent years, continuously was occupied by these Mason descendants of Clapham.[51]

A few years after the death, in 1741, of Francis Aubrey, much of his great estate lying between the old Ridge Road (where it now passes through Leesburg under the name of Loudoun Street) north to the Limestone Branch and from the Potomac westerly to the Catoctin Hills, came into the possession of Mrs. Ann Thomson Mason, widow of the third George of that ilk; thus introducing to our frontier of that day another of the most prominent of the Tidewater families and one which also was to play a very notable rôle in Loudoun for at least a century. This George Mason, at the age of forty-five, had been drowned while attempting to cross the Potomac in a sailboat in the year 1735. In 1721 he had married, as his second wife, Ann Thomson, daughter of Stevens Thomson of Hollins Hall, Staffordshire, England, who had served as Attorney-General of Virginia for some years during Queen Anne's reign. He, in turn, was the son of Sir William Thomson of the Middle Temple, a Sergeant at Law who, to his credit, in 1680 had had the courage to act as counsel for the defendants Tasborough and Price in the malodorous Popish Plot trials of disgraceful memory. By this second wife, Mason had six or seven children, of whom only three were to survive him: George his eldest son (for his first wife had been childless) who later was to build Gunston Hall and become the author of the famous Bill of Rights; Thomson, later to become at least a part-time resident of Loudoun and a famous lawyer in his day; and Mary, who, on the 11th April, 1751, was to marry Samuel Selden of Salvington in Stafford County, near Fredericksburg. She died at her mother's plantation Chipawamsic, on the 5th day of January, 1758, leaving two children, Samuel and Mary Mason Selden, the latter inheriting her Loudoun lands.

When George Mason met his accidental death he left no will. Under the Colonial law of primogeniture, his extensive holdings of land therefore went to his eldest son. According to the family historian, his younger children were left penniless. His widow thereupon bent all her energies to create an estate for each of them. Saving what she could, through every available economy and acting under the advice of her late husband's friends, she acquired "ten thousand acres of what was then called 'wild lands' in Loudoun County, for which she paid only a few shillings per acre." She, during her lifetime, divided these lands between her two younger children "for the reason assigned by her that she did not wish her children to grow up with any sense of inequality among them in regard to fortune. The investment turned out a most fortunate one, and she thereby unwittingly made her younger children wealthier than their elder brother."[52]

It is thus so many of the beautiful modern estates between Leesburg and the Limestone Branch trace their title back to the Mason family. Mrs. Ann Thomson Mason died on the 13th November, 1762, "leaving a reputation among her connections and neighbours for great prudence and business capacity, united to the charms of an amiable, womanly, character." Her Rector, friend and relative, the Rev. John Moncure, described her as "a good woman, a great woman, and a lovely woman."[53]

Though she planted the Mason line in Loudoun, she herself does not appear ever to have lived in that rough and for those days remote frontier country. The actual seating of her line on her large purchase was left to her son Thomson who, after going to England to acquire his training in law and being admitted to the Middle Temple on the 14th August, 1751, as its records show, returned to Virginia, practiced law at Dumfries, became, perhaps, the most eminent lawyer of his time at the Virginia Bar and vigourously aided the American Revolution. He either had improved and extended the first Raspberry Plain home or, as Lancaster says, built a new one for he deeded the existing structure with the supporting land to his son Stevens Thomson Mason, confirming the grant in his will, together with the plate and furniture then in the dwelling; which indicates a more impressive home than the first building.

Thomson Mason died at Raspberry Plain on the 26th February, 1785, and was there buried; but the first mansion and burial place were not where the imposing modern house of the same name now stands but rather much to the north, near the fine spring and branch for a long time included in the present Selma lands, for the latter estate was, of course, at that time and long afterward but another part of the extensive Mason holdings. It is of interest to note that this original Raspberry Plain holding was never acquired by Francis Aubrey nor was it part of Mrs. Ann Thomson Mason's purchase. On the contrary, it comprised a small grant, stated to be 322 acres, made by the Proprietor to one Joseph Dixon, a blacksmith, by patent dated the 2nd July, 1731.[54] Dixon, in turn, sold it to Aeneas Campbell by deed dated the 15th July, 1754, for a consideration nominally stated as "five shillings"—the old-time equivalent of our "One Dollar and other good and valuable considerations"—and Campbell was living there when commissioned the first sheriff of Loudoun in 1757. In the deed to him the plantation is described as being "On the branches of Limestone run called and known by the name of raspberry plain" and the grant goes on to give the exact location by metes and bounds. It apparently had been more carefully surveyed and found to have more area than first believed, for it is further described as containing "393 acres as appears by a survey thereof" and the grant specifically includes "all houses, buildings, orchards, ways, waters, water-courses," etc. Therefore Dixon may be credited with having built the first Raspberry Plain house, a matter long in doubt locally.[55] The estate was subsequently sold by Campbell and Lydia his wife to Thomson Mason, by deed dated the 15th day of May, 1760, for 500 pounds current money of Virginia.

Around 1750 there came from Scotland to this same country, north of the present Leesburg, that William Douglass who is to be so frequently mentioned by Nicholas Cresswell in his journal at the time of the Revolution. Colonel Douglass, as he afterward became, was the son of Hugh Douglass of Garalland in Ayshire who, in turn, was sixth in descent from the Earl of Douglas and also a descendant of the Campbell Barons of Loudoun, thus making the Douglass family of Loudoun County kinsfolk to the Earl of Loudoun for whom the county was to be named. Our William Douglass owned the estates of Garalland and Montressor in Loudoun, served as one of her justices (1770) and as sheriff in 1782. He died in the latter year, leaving a will which was probated on the 24th September 1782.[56]

In the meanwhile the settlement of the Quakers was increasing rapidly in population. As early as 1736, it is said, Hannah Janney, the wife of Jacob Janney, held the services of her sect twice a week on a tree-stump in the forest "and on that spot a log house was built in 1751 and a meeting established" which was and still is known as the Goose Creek meeting. This log hut in 1765 was superseded by a stone building and as the congregation grew and the latter building was found too small, it was replaced, in 1817, by a brick meeting-house; but the old stone building of 1765 still stands and is owned by the Friends. Remodelled as a dwelling house it is now occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Taylor.

A monument today marks the place, now in the village of Lincoln, where the good Hannah Janney worshipped. It stands in a grove of trees and reads:

"Here on a log in the unbroken forest Hannah Janney, wife of Jacob Janney, worshipped twice weekly in 1736. In 1738 Friends meetings were held in a private house once a month. Then a log meeting house. Then the old stone house in 1765 and the brick house in 1817."

By 1743 or 1744 the Friends had erected a church, known as the Fairfax Meeting, at Waterford, where as we have seen in a prior chapter (V), they soon had become very numerous and through their energy and thrift had really established that little settlement's early character and prosperity. This first meeting house of the Friends followed the fate which appeared to hover over so many of Virginia's early structures; it duly disappeared in flames and in its place in 1868 there was constructed the present substantial and commodious edifice, now only too seldom used because of the dwindling of the Quaker population there.

Concurrently another religious organization had been growing rapidly in the colonies. The Baptists had experienced the well-proved truth that religious persecution is a most fertile soil for religious growth. "Magistrates and mobs, priests and Sheriffs, courts and parsons all vainly combined to divert them from their object," writes one of their historians. The Baptists in Virginia are said to have originated from three sources—emigrants in 1714, directly from England, settling in the southeasterly part of the Colony, others from Maryland about 1743 going to the northwesterly part, and still another group leaving New England about 1754 and going to what is now Berkely County in West Virginia. Between 1750 and 1755 John Gerrard, a Baptist preacher of Maryland, is said to have gone to Berkely County and thence journeyed over the Blue Ridge into the present Loudoun "where he found the people ready to listen to the proclamation of the gospel." The first Baptist church in Loudoun (and perhaps in Virginia as well) was built at Ketocton in 1756 or 1757, according to tradition, to be followed by a stone building in 1815 and then, in 1856, by the present brick edifice.

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]

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR

Sir Peter Halkett, Bart. In command of that part of Braddock's Army that marched through the present Loudoun in 1755.

We have come to the outbreak of that great world conflict between England and Prussia on the one side against France and Austria, Russia, Sweden, and Saxony on the other which Fiske, writing before the devastation of 1914, called the most memorable war of modern times and which, involving three continents, ultimately passed the vast French territories in Canada and India to the British crown. In European history the contest is known, somewhat inadequately, as the Seven Years War and gave Frederick the Great of Prussia the fateful opportunity to demonstrate his extraordinary military genius; but in America it is known as the French and Indian War from the terrible alliance that the English colonists were forced there to face.

The menace of the French control of Canada had never oppressed the imagination of Virginia as it had that of New England and New York. Distance and lack of colonial unity tended to build in the minds of the Virginia Assembly the belief that it was a matter, to the Old Dominion at least, of secondary interest; though her royal governors, and especially Dinwiddie, recognized its true and pressing danger. Virginia claimed jurisdiction over a vast and largely unknown western territory, including much of what is now western Pennsylvania and that strategic point marking the confluence of the Alleghany and Monongahela rivers, now covered by the city of Pittsburgh. The French in Canada were well aware of the huge military importance of this "gateway of the west" and, although at the time peace was supposed to exist between England and France, in 1753 sent a small expedition south to take possession of it. News of these Frenchmen in Virginia territory came to Governor Dinwiddie who, in turn, sent the twenty-one year old Washington, already a major in the militia of Virginia, to remonstrate and protest to their commander. On his journey Washington travelled the road to Vestal's Gap and crossed the Blue Ridge at that point. Though he faithfully delivered his message, the English protest was ignored, the French commander asserting that all that domain belonged to his King and that the English had no territorial rights west of the mountains. Thereupon the energetic Dinwiddie decided that war or no war the French should be dislodged. A regiment of 300 Virginians was organized under Colonel Joshua Fry, with Major Washington as second in command, to take possession of the disputed "gateway" and fortify it.

This expedition, too, followed the road to Vestal's Gap and Washington, as was his habit, kept a journal of his experience. By the mischance of events this journal was to be captured later by the French at Fort Necessity; but in 1756, to bolster their claim that this English expedition was an unprovoked attack against a friendly power in time of peace, they published in French so much of it as served their purpose. Unfortunately the published portion did not include the march through Piedmont; but in Washington's accounting with the Virginia government we find these items:

"1754
"Apl. 6 To expences of the Regim^t at Edward
Thompson's in marching up 2″ 16.0
8 To Bacon for D^o of John Vestal at
Shenandoah & Ferriges over 1.9"[63]

Edward Thompson was a Quaker who lived near the present Hillsboro and who was to leave numerous descendants in Loudoun.

From the Shenandoah the little force pressed on into Western Maryland where at Will's Creek (the present Cumberland) then a trading station of the Ohio Company, 140 miles west from their objective, Colonel Fry was stricken with an illness which, a short time later, was to prove fatal. Leaving their colonel behind, the Virginia militia, now under the command of Major Washington, advanced very slowly cutting a narrow road through the forest and sending a small force ahead to begin work on the proposed fort at the confluence of the rivers. That work was hardly begun, however, when a greatly superior force of French and Indians, arriving suddenly on the scene from the north, drove the Virginians away, took possession of the place and continued the fort's construction naming it, on completion, Fort DuQuesne after Canada's French Governor.

The retreating Virginians fell back through the woods until they joined Washington's main force, encamped at Great Meadows, and it was not long before Washington learned from his Indian scouts that a small party of enemy skirmishers was cautiously advancing to deliver a surprise attack. Washington promptly determined on a counter-surprise with such complete success that the Virginians killed Jumonville, the French leader, and nine of his followers and captured the remaining twenty-two. But Washington knew that a much larger force of French would soon attack him and that his position was precarious. With earthworks and logs he caused his men to hastily fortify their camp, grimly called by him Fort Necessity. They had not long to wait for the enemy. There soon emerged from the surrounding forest a force of six hundred French and Indians from Fort DuQuesne who, apparently not finding that the appearance of the fort or the reputation of its defenders invited an attack, settled down to a siege. Washington, though in the meanwhile reinforced, had not more than three hundred Virginians and about one hundred and fifty Indian auxiliaries; but more serious than his inequality of numbers were his rapidly dwindling supplies of food and ammunition. This was the situation which resulted in Washington's first and last surrender during his long military career. The French so little relished an attack on the fort or a longer siege that the English were allowed to march out and begin their retreat (4th of July, 1754) under arms and with full honors of war.

All of this began to look very much like a fresh outbreak of war between England and France; but more and worse was to follow before a formal declaration of war was made in 1756. The Duke of Cumberland, son of George II, then Captain General of the British Armies, laid plans for a great American campaign which, once for all, was to cripple the French power in the west. Three expeditions were devised against French strategic strongholds on the American continent: One was to proceed against Crown Point on Lake George, a second against Fort Niagara and the third to capture the newly erected Fort DuQuesne. Major-General Edward Braddock, a veteran soldier thoroughly trained on Europe's battlefields, of unquestioned personal courage but abysmally ignorant of Indian warfare, was vested with the supreme command and with two British regiments, the 44th and 48th, set sail for America. The expedition landed at Alexandria where a general conference was immediately called at which were present, in addition to Braddock, Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia, Governor Delancey and Colonel William Johnson of New York, Governor Shirley of Massachusetts, Governor Sharp of Maryland, Governor Morris of Pennsylvania and other leaders. To these men Braddock revealed his orders and plans and the governors received the King's instructions as to the part they were to play in the campaign.

Alexandria was a poor starting point for Fort DuQuesne. Far better would have been Philadelphia, offering as it did not only a shorter route but more abundant and easily available supplies. Maryland interests, seeking the advantage of the highway to the west which the army would make, brought pressure to bear to have the force go through that Colony. It was finally decided to send a part of the troops through Maryland and a part through Virginia, the divided army to come together again at Will's Creek where, in the meanwhile, a large and strongly palisaded fort had been built by Colonel James Innes under the instructions of Governor Dinwiddie. A force of 1,400 Virginians and Marylanders was raised and added to the English troops and "on the 8th and 9th of April the provincials and six companies of the 44th under command of Sir Peter Halkett set out for Winchester, Lieutenant Colonel Gage and four companies remaining to escort the artillery. On the 18th of April the 48th, under Colonel Dunbar, set out for Frederick."[64] Although General Braddock, with Major Washington on his staff, crossed over into Maryland at Rock Creek and went to Will's Creek through that Colony, never entering or even seeing the embryo Loudoun, the local stories are still repeated, and with the utmost confidence, of the route he followed through that County and even where he spent the night. It was, as it still is, "Braddock's Army" in popular parlance and, as time passed, the commander's presence with the march through Virginia became a part of its story.

Had the supreme command of the expedition been vested in Halkett, rather than Braddock, one may reasonably believe that there would have been a very different outcome. A trained and able soldier, no less courageous than his chief, he was more cautious, more susceptible to new ideas and methods and far less arbitrary than lay in Braddock's nature to be. He learned to respect the dearly bought and superior knowledge of Indian fighting traits possessed by the provincials and wished to follow their recommendations that to Braddock, with his unbounded confidence in iron discipline, simply savoured of colonial ignorance and lack of military courage. Loudoun should remember Halkett not only as the commander of the march through her domain but as a brave and devoted soldier as well.

"Sir Peter Halkett of Pitferran, Fifeshire, a baronet of Nova Scotia," writes Sargent, "was the son of Sir Peter Wedderburne of Gosford, who, marrying the heiress of the ancient family of Halkett, assumed her name."[65] Our Sir Peter had married Lady Amelia Stewart, second daughter of Francis, 8th Earl of Moray, by whom he had three sons. Of these, James, the youngest, was a subaltern in his father's regiment and accompanied him on the expedition.

Of the Virginia troops serving in this campaign an effort has been made to identify such as came from the incipient Loudoun. All the Virginians were directly under the command of Captain Waggoner. As Loudoun was then a part of Fairfax her men were, of course, listed as from the latter county.

In March, 1756, the Virginia Legislature passed as its first act[66] an emergency measure from which we learn the names of certain soldiers from the then undivided Fairfax but from which side of Difficult Run each man came does not appear, or as to whether they went on Braddock's expedition or served nearer home, then or subsequently. The small amount of compensation awarded to each indicates a period of active service too short to have permitted them to be at the battle. Probably they were used east of the Blue Ridge.

That not all of the Virginia soldiers of the expedition of 1755 were enthusiastic volunteers is suggested by the passage of Chapter II of the session of 1754 which states in its preamble that as the King had instructed his lieutenant governor to raise soldiers for the expedition against the French on the Ohio and that there were "in every county and corporation within this Colony, able bodied persons, fit to serve his majesty, and who follow no lawful calling or employment" the justices of the peace, through the sheriffs, were ordered to forcibly enlist them, provided they were not voters or indentured servants![67] To raise money for the campaign an act was passed in May, 1755, instituting a public lottery with a first prize of £2,000 "current money" and many other prizes amounting altogether to £20,000 "current money."[68]

The route to be followed by Halkett's command is given in Braddock's Orderly Book as follows:

Thus from the date of entry, only two days after the last of Halkett's men had left the camp, we learn that the route given was the one ordered followed, rather than a report of one that had been pursued; but as it carefully describes the main northern road from Alexandria to Winchester it is safe to assume that the troops held to the course laid down for them.

The "Old Court House" was the first courthouse of Fairfax County built about 1742 and in use about ten years until another was built in Alexandria. Thus at the time of the march it was no longer used for the purpose for which it had been built. It stood near the present Tyson's Corner and in recent years its site has been marked by an appropriate inscription.

The "Mr. Colemans on Sugar Land Run" was the house of Richard Coleman who was thereafter in 1756 licensed by the Fairfax Court to keep an Ordinary there. It stood where the road then crossed Sugarland Run at the mouth of Colvin Run.

The "Mr. Miners" was the plantation of Nicholas Minor who served as a captain in this war and who soon was to lay out the town of Leesburg on part of his estate. It was known as Fruitland and the residence was situated on a knoll on the south side of the road about a mile east of the present Leesburg where a later building but bearing the same name now stands. There Miner in connection with his other activities, operated a distillery, probably for making brandy from peaches, apples and persimmons; according to General John Mason, a son of the famous George of Gunston Hall "the art of distilling from grain was not then among us" and he spoke of the time of his boyhood—a period well after 1755. A later writer comments: "The choice of such camping places as this perhaps explains in some measure the frequent court-martials in the army and the liberal rewards of from 600 to 1,000 lashes to recreant soldiers for drunkenness and for giving liquor to the Indians who accompanied the march or whom they met on the way."[69] There is much evidence that the British regulars, who had been recently recruited, frequently were disciplined for infraction of military rules and the disciplinary measures employed in British armies of that day were not gentle.

The "Mr. Thompson ye Quaker" we have already met in the preceding year when Washington, in Fry's expedition against the French at the "Gateway," noted his "expences." He lived, it will be recalled, in the locality which is now Hillsboro.

The "Mr. They's ye Ferry at Shanh" was, it is believed, in error for "Mr. Key's" and was at the Key's Gap Ferry.

All of this gives very little local detail. Fortunately that is more freely supplied from another and fortuitous source. There was attached to Braddock's expedition, when it left England, a certain commissary who had a widowed sister, one Mrs. Browne. She accompanied her brother from London to Fort Cumberland and, following the valuable eighteenth century habit, kept a journal which in 1924 was owned by Mr. S. A. Courtauld of the Howe, Halstead, Essex, and a photostatic copy of which has been acquired by the Library of Congress.[70] This journal or diary runs from the 17th November, 1754, to the 19th January, 1757. When Braddock and his men departed from Alexandria in April he had a number of soldiers too ill to travel. These he left there temporarily in charge of a force of "1 officer and 40 men" and the commissary (Mrs. Browne's brother), and Mrs. Browne stayed with them to help nurse the invalids. By June the sick men had so far recovered that they moved to join the main force, following the old Ridge (Alexandria-Winchester) Road over which Halkett and his men had marched before them. Here follows a full copy of Mrs. Browne's journal entries from her entrance into present Loudoun until she reached the Shenandoah:

1755. "June the 2. At Break of Day the Drum beat. I was extreemly sleepy but got up, and as soon as our Officer had eat 6 Eggs and drank a dram or two and some Punch we march'd; but, my Waggon being in the Rear the Day before, my Coachman insisted that it was not right that Madam Browne should be behind, and if they did not give way they should feel the soft end of his Whip. He gain'd his Point and got in Front. The Roads are so Bad that I am almost disjointed. At 12 we halted at Mr. Coleman's, pitched our markeys and dined on Salt Gammon,[71] nothing better to be had.

"June the 3. At 3 in the Morning was awak'd by the Drum, but was so stiff that I was at a loss to tell whether I had any Limbs. I breakfasted in my waggon and then sent of in front; at which all the rest were very much enrag'd, but to no Purpose for my Coachman told them that he had but one Officer to Obey and she was in his Waggon, and it was not right she should be blinded with Dust. My Brother the Day before left his Cloak behind, so sent his Man back for it on his Horse, and march'd on Foot. On the Road met with Mr. Adams a Parson[72] who left his Horse & padded with them on Foot. We halted at Mr. Minors. We order'd some Fowls for Dinner but not one to be had, so was obliged to set down to our old Dish Gammon & Greens. The Officer and the Parson replenish'd their Bowl so often that they began to be very joyous, untill their Servant told them that their Horses were lost, at which the Parson was much inrag'd and pop'd out an Oath but Mr. Falkner said 'Never mind your Horse, Doctor, but have you a Sermon ready for next Sunday?' I being the Doctor's country woman he mad me many Compts. and told me he should be very happy if he could be better acquainted with me, but hop'd when I came that way again I would do him the Honour to spend some Time at his House. I chatted til 11 and then took my leave and left them a full Bowl before them.

"June the 4. At break of Day my Coachman came and tap'd my Chamber Door and said Madam all is ready and it is right early. I went to my Waggon and we moved on. Left Mr. Falkner behind in Pursuit of his Horse. March'd 14 Miles and halted at an old sage Quaker's with silver Locks. His Wife on my coming in accosted me in the following manner: 'Welcome Friend set down, thou seem's full Bulky to travel, but thou art young and that will enable thee. We were once so ourselves but we have been married 44 Years & may say we have lived to see the Days that we have no Pleasure therein.' We had recourse to our old Dish Gammon, nothing else to be had; but they said they had some Liquor they called Whiskey which was made of Peaches. My Friend Thompson being a Preacher, when the soldiers came in as the Spirit mov'd him, held forth to them and told them the great Virtue of Temperance. They all stared at him like Pigs, but had not a word to say in their justification.

"June the 5. My Lodgings not being very clean, I had so many close Companions call'd Ticks that deprived me of my Night's Rest, but I indulg'd till 7. We halted this Day all the Nurses Baking Bread and Boiling Beef for the March to Morrow. A fine Regale 2 Chickens with Milk and water to Drink, which my friend Thompson said was fine temperate Liquor. Several things lost out of my Waggon, amongst the rest they took 2 of my Hams, which my Coachman said was an abomination to him, and if he could find out who took them he would make them remember taking the next.

"June the 6. Took my leave of my Friend Thompson, who bid me farewell. A great Gust of Thunder and Lightning and Rain, so that we were almost drown'd. Extreem bad Roads. We pass'd over the Blue Ridge which was one continual mountain for 3 miles. Forg'd through 2 Rivers. At 7 we halted at Mr. Key's, a fine Plantation. Had for Dinner 2 Chickens. The Soldiers desired my Brother to advance them some Whisky for they told him he had better kill them at once than to let them dye by Inches, for without they could not live. He complied with their Request and it soon began to operate; they all went to dancing and bid defiance to the French. My Friend Gore" (the coachman) "began to shake a Leg. I ask'd him if it was consistent as a member of his Society to dance; he told me that he was not at all united with them, and that there were some of his People who call'd themselves Quakers and stood up for their Church but had no more religion in them than his Mare. I told him I should set him down as a Ranter."

But to return to Halkett and the troops under his immediate command. From Winchester they proceeded to the new fort at Will's Creek which Braddock, upon his arrival, named Fort Cumberland in honour of his captain general. Here the main detachments of the expedition came together again in accordance with the plans made in Alexandria. The troops were given a short rest after their long march, the final plans were developed and on the 7th, 8th and 9th of June the army resumed its march to the west, widening the path through the woods made by Washington and his men the year before and hauling its artillery over the mountains with the utmost difficulty. So slow was their progress that Braddock decided to send on a large advance party, more lightly equipped, leaving the others to bring on the greater part of the supplies and baggage.

The Fall of Braddock. (From a painting by C. Schuessele, published in 1859.)

In contrast to Braddock's unbounded assurance, Halkett seems to have had a strong premonition of the impending disaster and his own tragic fate. Lowdermilk, in his excellent History of Cumberland, describes his dejection the night before the battle:

"Sir Peter Halkett was low spirited and depressed; he comprehended the importance of meeting the wily red skins with their own tactics, and while he urged the General to beat the bushes over every foot of ground from the camp to the Fort, he had little hope of seeing his advice put into effect; when he wrapped his mantle about him that night as he lay upon his soldier's bed his soul was filled with the darkest forebodings for the morrow, which he felt would close his own career as well as that of many another gallant soldier, a presentiment which was sadly realized."

Upon the following day, the 9th of July, the advance party of British, now making better progress, pressed on to a point five or six miles from Fort DuQuesne where they encountered the awaiting French and Indians. Against such British strength of numbers and equipment the French had one chance and well they knew it lay in meeting the attacking force in the forest before it could bring its artillery to play on their fortification. The mass of the scarlet-coated British troops were in close formation in the open; the French and Indians hid themselves behind the surrounding trees. As the first bullets poured into their ranks the British could see no foe and Braddock, deaf to the entreaties of the Virginians, insisted that his troops hold their ranks in the unprotected and open clearing. The provincials scattered and fought the foe in its own manner from behind every tree and mound they could find to shelter them; but Braddock, wholly immune to fear or reason himself, continued to hold his regulars together, in his anger beating back with his sword into the ranks those seeking cover. Even so the situation, impossible though it were rapidly becoming, might have been saved by the desperate and determined efforts of the provincials who had found a small ravine or ditch from which they were able to deliver an effective flanking fire against the French; but as the latter began to waver and the Americans left their protection to charge, the panic-stricken regulars fired upon them, killing and wounding a great number. It was the end. Braddock, who throughout the fighting had shewn the most reckless and obstinate courage and had had his horses killed from under him again and again, now received a mortal wound and the surviving English broke into a wild and disorderly retreat. Had the French and their allies pressed their advantage, hardly one of their foe would have escaped death or capture; but the Indian allies of the French, when the British fled, addressed themselves to killing the wounded and robbing and scalping the dead, thus giving the English their chance of flight, disorderly and panic-stricken, back over the road they had come. Braddock, crushed with the completeness of his defeat, died on the fourth day of the retreat and was buried in the roadway to protect his body from the Indian savages. How overwhelming was the French victory is shewn by the English record that of the 1,386 men who were under Braddock in the fight, only 459 escaped. That the British regulars stood their ground bravely in the face of most difficult conditions and stupid leadership there seems no question. But the greater praise went to the Americans who inflicted far more damage on the foe; and particularly to their leader Washington who with cool courage was everywhere encouraging his men in the fight and though his clothing was pierced repeatedly with rifle balls, he escaped wholly unwounded.

During the battle Halkett was shot and killed and his son James, seeing him fall and rushing to his aid, at once met the same fate. Both bodies were scalped and robbed and then left where they fell. Three years later Halkett's eldest son, the then Sir Peter Halkett, a major in the 42nd Regiment, joined General Forbes' new and successful expedition against Fort DuQuesne, especially to seek some trace of the fate of his father and brother. With friendly Indian help the bodies were found and identified and given a military burial nearby.

As the defeated English retreated to the east, the story of the calamity spread terror and dismay among the more westerly settlers. In Virginia the people in the valley were panic-stricken and in great numbers fled over the Blue Ridge to the Piedmont counties, spreading their terror among the people there. Washington wrote that he learned from Captain Waggoner who, as we have seen, had had command of the Virginia troops and had been wounded in the battle "that it was with difficulty he passed the Ridge for crowds of people, who were flying as if every moment was death." The fear and restlessness continued among the colonists on both sides of the Blue Ridge until General Forbes, as noted, in 1758 led his force to Fort DuQuesne and took possession of what was left by the French who burned and abandoned it at his approach. From then until after the Revolution this former outpost of France, under its new name of Fort Pitt, remained in the hands of the English government.

On the 1st day of September, 1758,[73] an act was passed in Virginia to pay arrears to "forces in the pay of this colony" and to raise money therefor. Section 5 recites:

"And whereas several companies of the militia were lately drawn out into actual service, for the defense and protection of the frontiers of this colony, whose names, and the time they respectively continued in the said service, together with the charge of provisions found for the use of the said militia are contained in the schedule to this act annexed....

"Loudoun County

On page 217 of the same act under the head of "Fairfax County" appear the following items, the names suggesting that the list was prepared prior to the time of the setting off of Loudoun from Fairfax and for services prior to those above listed:

The names of many other soldiers are given with the compensation awarded each. It is quite possible that among them were men who resided in that part of Fairfax which, at the time of the passage of the act, had been set off as Loudoun.

CHAPTER IX

ORGANIZATION OF LOUDOUN AND THE FOUNDING OF LEESBURG

In the Virginia of England's rule, the vestry of a Parish "divided with the County Court the responsibility of local government, having as their especial charge the maintenance of religion and the oversight of all things pertaining thereto in the domain of charity and morals."[74] The parish was a territorial subdivision with large civil as well as ecclesiastical powers and duties and when, through increasing population, a parish came to be divided, in those days of expanding settlement, it usually was followed by the creation of a new county. As has been noted in a prior chapter, Truro Parish, then coextensive with Fairfax County, was divided in 1748 by the Assembly setting off the upper part thereof, above Difficult Run, as Cameron Parish, thus indicating the early organization of a new county. But the politicians of Tidewater were beginning to look askance at the rapid increase of new counties in the upper country, fearing a diminution of their influence and control and perhaps there was some opposition in Fairfax itself. A petition presented to the Assembly in 1754 by the people of Cameron that they be formed into a new county resulted in a bill being passed to that end which, however, was disapproved by the Council. Again a petition was presented to the next Assembly with no better success; but on the 8th day of June, 1757 a bill was passed creating the new county. It reads as follows:

"An Act for Dividing the County of Fairfax

"I. Whereas many inconveniences attend the upper inhabitants of the County of Fairfax by reason of the large extent of said county, and their remote situation from the court house, and the said inhabitants have petitioned this present general assembly that the said county be divided: Be it, therefore enacted, by the Lieutenant-Governor, Council and Burgesses of this present General Assembly, and it is hereby enacted, by the authority of the same, that from and after the 1st day of July next ensuing the said county of Fairfax be divided into two counties, that is to say: All that part thereof, lying above Difficult run, which falls into the Patowmack river, and by a line to be run from the head of the same run, a straight course, to the mouth of Rocky run, shall be one distinct county, and called and known by the name of Loudoun: And all that part below the said run and course, shall be another distinct county, and retain the name of Fairfax.

"II. And for the due administration of justice in the said county of Loudoun, after the same shall take place: Be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, that after the first day of July a court for the said county of Loudoun be constantly held by the justices thereof, upon the second Tuesday in every month in such manner as by the laws of this colony is provided, and shall be by their commission directed.

"III. Provided always, that nothing herein contained shall be constructed to hinder the sheriff or collector of the said county of Fairfax, as the same now stands entire and undivided, from collecting and making distress for any public dues, or officers fees, which shall remain unpaid by the inhabitants of said county of Loudoun at the time of its taking place; but such sheriff or collector shall have the same power to collect or distrain for such dues and fees, and shall be answerable for them in the same manner as if this act had never been made, any law, usage or custom to the contrary thereof in any wise notwithstanding.

"IV. And be it further enacted, by the authority aforesaid, that the court of the said county of Fairfax shall have jurisdiction of all actions and suits, both in law and equity, which shall be depending before them at the time the said division shall take place; and shall and may try and determine all such actions and suits, and issue process and award execution in any such action or suit in the same manner as if this act had never been made, any law, usage, or custom to the contrary in any wise notwithstanding.

"V. And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, that out of every hundred pounds of tobacco, paid in discharge of quit rents, secretary's, clerk's, sheriff's, surveyor's, or other officers fees, and so proportionately for a greater or lesser quantity, there shall be made the following abatements or allowances to the payer, that is to say: For tobacco due in the county of Fairfax ten pounds of tobacco, and for tobacco due in the county of Loudoun twenty pounds of tobacco; and that so much of the act of the assembly, intitled, An Act for amending the staple of tobacco, and preventing frauds in his Majesty's customs, as relates to anything within the purview of this act, shall be and is hereby repealed and made void."[75]

The boundaries of the new county thus fixed have since that time been changed but once, when in 1798, a part of the originally constituted Loudoun was, by act of the Legislature, returned to Fairfax as later will be noted.[76]

Thus, from the formation of Northumberland County in 1647, it had taken 110 years for a sufficient population to penetrate, settle and develop in the backwoods to justify the organization of Loudoun. At first the creation of new counties out of the early Northumberland had been rapid. Lancaster along the Rappahannock was formed in 1651 and Westmoreland along the Potomac in 1653. Out of Westmoreland came Stafford in 1664. Then, so far as the line of descent of Loudoun is concerned, there is a long wait. Indian warfare and Indian domination of the upper country effectually held back settlement until Spotswood's epochal treaty of 1722. With the withdrawal of the Indians the pressure from Tidewater rapidly had its effect. Out of the Stafford "backwoods" and those of King George to the south was organized in 1731 Prince William with a disputed western boundary, the Proprietor claiming much of the Shenandoah Valley and the Virginia government holding to the Blue Ridge but the act discretely leaving that question untouched. In 1742 the territory above "Occoquan and Bull Run and from the head of the main branch of Bull Run by a straight course" to Ashley's Gap became the County of Fairfax of which, as shown, Loudoun in 1757 was born. Her contiguous county Fauquier was, by contrast, taken directly from Prince William in 1759.

It would have been wholly appropriate to have named the new county Lee or Carter, honoring families and individuals which had been so active in its development but the Lees then loved the Carters not at all nor the Carters the Lees and doubtlessly each would, and perhaps did, prevent the honor going to the other. So it came about that the lusty infant became the namesake of a man whose fame, so far as Virginia and the other American Colonies were concerned, was highly ephemeral. On the 17th February, 1756, in the winter following Braddock's defeat, John Campbell, fourth Earl of Loudoun, had been appointed Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of Virginia and, on the 20th of the month following, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in America. He seems to have owed his selection to his own and his family's influence with Court and ministry; certainly nothing in his earlier career had logically earned the bestowal of a paramount command in such a critical period for Britain. Loudoun, the only son of the third Earl of that ilk and his wife the Lady Margaret Dalrymple (only daughter of John 1st Earl of Stair) had been born in 1705 and succeeded his father in the title and estates in 1731. From 1734, until his death in 1782, he was one of the representative peers of Scotland. At the age of twenty-two he entered the army and had been appointed Governor of Sterling Castle in 1741, becoming aide-de-camp to the king in 1743. When the Jacobite rebellion broke out in 1745 he had been a staunch supporter of the House of Hanover, raising a regiment of Highlanders of which he became colonel and which later was cut to pieces at the Battle of Preston. Loudoun was one of the few who came out of the fight unscathed and, shewing that upon occasion he was capable of energy as well as loyalty, promptly he raised a force of more than two thousand new soldiers.