Harrison Williams

“ How slowly and with what unremitting toil and self-denial the ruined farms were restored, the fields again made to yield their corn and wheat and clover, rails split to rebuild the vanished fences, makeshifts at first and then better structures erected to replace those burned, only the people who lived through those years of poverty could tell; and on that slow path upward from ruin and desolation the part borne by the women equalled, perhaps surpassed, that enacted by the men. ”

“ 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 [50] 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 ”

“ Increasing population meant rapidly rising land values, exercising an irresistible lure to many of the more active speculators of the Northern Neck. Such men of substance as Aubrey and Noland were developing the lands they purchased; but in another class were Benjamin Grayson, Catesby Cocke, George Eskridge, the wealthy Potomac trader John Colvil of Cleesh, that turbulent though gifted son of Dublin John Mercer and even William Fairfax himself, all of whom, so far as Loudoun was concerned, were active in land ventures rather than development. ”

“ On the 16th August, 1864, General Grant, determining to end the menace, sent the following order to Major General Sheridan:
"If you can possibly spare a division of Cavalry, send them through Loudoun County to destroy and carry off the crops, animals, negroes and all men under fifty years of age capable of bearing arms. In this way you will get many of Mosby's men. All male citizens under fifty can fairly be held as prisoners of war, and not as citizen prisoners. If not already soldiers, they will be made so the moment the rebel army gets hold of them." ”

“ Yet I should wish to stand well in your estimation too; and therefore I will, if you please, give a faithful narrative of the causes which led both to my arrival in New York, and to my abandonment of the British Army on the shores of the Chesapeake. You are tired with your day's travel; you stand in need of food and rest. ”

“ Champe listened with deep attention, and with a highly excited countenance; the perturbations of his breast not being hid even by his dark visage. He briefly and modestly replied, that no soldier exceeded him in respect and affection for the commander-in-chief, to serve whom he would willingly lay down his life; and that he was sensible of the honour conferred by the choice of him for the execution of a project all over arduous ”

“ From such a sombre picture we may turn with relief to the spectacle of Loudoun in gala attire indulging in the greatest and gayest county-wide celebration her history affords.
Of all those who, from abroad, came to help the American [191] Colonies in their revolt, none so wholly captured the affections of her people as the French Marquis de Lafayette and as the years after the war passed by, that affection remained steadfast. ”

“ Colonel White himself was severely wounded on no less than seven occasions. Such was the esteem in which he continued to be held in Loudoun after the war, that he was elected sheriff of the county and also its treasurer. He was a principal founder and the first president of the Peoples National Bank of Leesburg which position he continued to occupy until his death in 1907. General Eppa Hunton in his autobiography has this to say of him: "No man in the Confederate Army stood higher for bravery, dash and patriotic devotion than Colonel 'Lige' White." ”

“ As the defeated English retreated to the east, the story of the calamity spread terror and dismay among the more westerly settlers. In Virginia the people in the valley were panic-stricken and in great numbers fled over the Blue Ridge to the Piedmont counties, spreading their terror among the people there. Washington wrote that he learned from Captain Waggoner who, as we have seen, had had command of the Virginia troops and had been wounded in the battle "that it was with difficulty he passed the Ridge for crowds of people, who were flying as if every moment was death." ”

“ When George Mason met his accidental death he left no will. Under the Colonial law of primogeniture, his extensive holdings of land therefore went to his eldest son. According to the family historian, his younger children were left penniless. His widow thereupon bent all her energies to create an estate for each of them. Saving what she could, through every available economy and acting under the advice of her late husband's friends, she acquired "ten thousand acres of what was then called 'wild lands' in Loudoun County, for which she paid only a few shillings per acre." ”

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

“ In short Loudoun is and always has been a horse-loving county and thus very naturally it is widely known as the Leicestershire of America. Today the raising and training of fine horses, together with the maintenance of numerous herds of dairy cattle (especially of the Guernsey breed) the fattening of great numbers of beef cattle, the raising of hogs, sheep and poultry, the growth and development on her many hillsides of extensive and well cared-for apple orchards, all augment the agricultural revenue Loudoun [229] derives from her ever smiling fields of corn and wheat, grass and clover. ”

“ As the first bullets poured into their ranks the British could see no foe and Braddock, deaf to the entreaties of the Virginians, insisted that his troops [94] hold their ranks in the unprotected and open clearing. The provincials scattered and fought the foe in its own manner from behind every tree and mound they could find to shelter them; but Braddock, wholly immune to fear or reason himself, continued to hold his regulars together, in his anger beating back with his sword into the ranks those seeking cover. ”

“ But to the nation the best known of all the old homes of Loudoun has always been Oak Hill. When James Monroe, after long years of service to his country, came to look forward to his retirement, he owned a large tract of land on the Carolina Road nine miles south of Leesburg, long in the possession of his family, which had occupied a dormer-windowed cottage there. On a gentle elevation on the plantation, President Monroe, in the year 1820, erected the great brick house, three stories in height with its porticos and Doric columns which he named Oak Hill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Both George Carter and his wife are buried in the gardens of Oatlands. The estate was acquired in 1903 by the late William Corcoran Eustis of Washington and is now the country home of his widow under whose care both residence and extensive gardens retain their justly celebrated charm and beauty. Mrs. Eustis, a daughter of the late Levi P. Morton, at one time Governor of New York and later Vice-President of the United States, has long been the Lady Bountiful of Loudoun. None of the county's residents has ever equalled her benefactions to its poor and to its public institutions of every kind. ”

“ Aeneas Campbell was one of the leading spirits in the new county. Not only was he its first sheriff but he built its first courthouse, as later noted, and was an original trustee of Leesburg when that town was "erected." In those days the outstanding men in a community were chosen for public office and the frequency of his name on the records unquestionably confirms his influential prominence. His later career was interesting. After he sold Raspberry Plain to Thomson Mason in 1760, we find him, in 1776, back in Maryland and busily engaged in the work of the Revolution. ”

“ Five years later the hunting activities of Leesburg, at least, took on a more domestic hue. The inhabitants of the little town were busy in building up the reputation of a famous Virginia delicacy but apparently were rather overdoing it. "It is represented" reads an act of 1772 "that a great number of hogs are raised and suffered to go at large in the town of Leesburg, in the county of Loudoun to the great prejudice of the inhabitants thereof;" so the act forbade owners from allowing such liberties to their porkers and permitted any person to "kill and destroy such swine so running at large." ”

“ Although Bacon and his men, when they took the field in 1676, had thoroughly disciplined the Indians in Virginia, the Iroquois and the Susquehannocks still entered Piedmont and roamed its forests. The Iroquois are believed to have driven out the Manahoacs and their kinsmen prior to 1670 and certainly claimed their lands by conquest; not coveting them for settlement but for hunting and particularly for such furs as they could trap and collect in a land plentiful of beaver and otter. The Virginians built forts at the navigation heads of the great rivers for the protection of settlers ”

“ The improvement of transportation was a dominant motive. Canals, railroads, turnpikes all were instruments to that end. An early railroad was projected by the men of Waterford and incorporated in 1831 as the Loudoun Railroad Company to run from the mouth of Ketoctin Creek on the Potomac "passing Ketoctin mountain to the waters of Goose creek so as to intercept the Ashby's Gap turnpike road"; a curious and impractical route it may seem to us in the light of present conditions and that it was just as well that the project died in birth. ”

“ With the land sales are many offerings of negroes, not infrequently with a humanitarian undertone pleasant to read, for in Loudoun then there was much anti-slavery sentiment not only among Quakers and Germans but, more significantly, among the wealthy planters and educated town folk. Thus in the issue of the 26th October 1818:
"Negroes for Sale. For Sale, a family of Negroes, consisting of a woman and children. To a good master they will be sold a great bargain. They will not be sold to a southern trader." ”

“ Of those who outlived their period of servitude, some rose to positions of trust; many of the incorrigibles soon made the Colony too hostile for their comfort and took themselves off either voluntarily or as fugitives—sometimes to the more remote and unseated parts of Piedmont or, more generally, to the North Carolina backwoods, a favorite refuge for the dregs of Virginia's Colonial [59] population. And at length, in 1740, came an opportunity for a great and general house-cleaning. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Far better would have been Philadelphia, offering as it did not only a shorter route but more abundant and easily available supplies. Maryland interests, seeking the advantage of the highway to the west which the army would make, brought pressure to bear to have the force go through that Colony. It was finally decided to send a part of the troops through Maryland and a part through Virginia, the divided army to come together again at Will's Creek where, in the meanwhile, a large and strongly palisaded fort had been built by Colonel James Innes under the instructions of Governor Dinwiddie. ”

“ All through the eighteenth century the flow of its colorful traffic continued and developed in volume until the founding of the City of Washington, as the nation's Capital, drew to the east those travelling between the northern and southern States. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Foxcroft School has become so much a part of Loudoun that it is as difficult to picture the Middleburg neighbourhood without it as it would be to think of Middleburg without its famous fox-hunting. The school has eighty-five students, representative of the most prominent families in the United States from coast to coast, with students from abroad as well and there is always a long waiting list of applicants for admission. A healthy outdoor life is combined with carefully planned study. ”

“ 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 [30] 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. ”

“ Along the coast, in what we now know as Tidewater, the territory running from the Chesapeake to those rocky outcrops making waterfalls in all the great rivers flowing from Virginia into the Bay, the Indians were generally of the Algonquin stock, a tribe covering an enormous territory along the Atlantic seaboard from the neighborhood of Hudson's Bay southerly to at least the Carolinas but by no means monopolizing the regions where they were found.
To the north, in what is now New York, centred the Iroquoian tribes, with ramifications as far south as Virginia and North Carolina. ”

“ He learned to respect the dearly bought and superior knowledge of Indian fighting traits possessed by the provincials and wished to follow their recommendations that to Braddock, with his unbounded confidence in iron discipline, simply savoured of colonial ignorance and lack of military courage. Loudoun should remember Halkett not only as the commander of the march through her domain but as a brave and devoted soldier as well. ”