CHAPTER III
THE PASSING OF THE INDIANS
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
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.