Читать книгу Legends of Loudoun - Harrison Williams - Страница 13

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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.