More history of the Northern Neck

Meanwhile, patents of land were given to those who had transported persons to the area (the "headrights"); others apprenticed themselves to plantation owners in exchange for eventual land holdings and other property. Sheriffs, justices of the county courts, dispensed local justice, collected taxes, served as treasurers, and supervised elections. "Colonels" commanded the county militias, in which all free men served; the counties themselves were divided into military districts. Vast tracts of land were cleared for the cultivation of the money crop, tobacco. Indentured servants (and, by the end of the century, slaves), were imported to work the plantations. Within just two or three decades, settlements of some permanence and note had completely replaced the humble and unassuming Indian villages, and the way of life on the Northern Neck had been forever changed. Gone were one hundred centuries of prerecorded history. In its place were the foundations of a more immediate "golden age."

Across the ocean, meanwhile, developments were taking place that would have a tremendous impact on the Northern Neck. In 1649 Charles I was executed, and Cromwell ascended to power. At the time, Charles II was in exile. In 1649 he made a grant of the Northern Neck territory to certain of his loyal subjects (much as the monarchy had earlier granted Pennsylvania to William Penn and Maryland to Lord Baltimore). Three years later, 100 men signed the Northumberland Oath—ninety-nine of them gathered at Chickacoan to do it—pledging support of an England "without Kings or House of Lordes," although privately, no doubt, many felt otherwise. When Charles 11 was restored to the throne in 1660, his land grant took effect, shakily at first, but clouding ownership of the newly settled territory nevertheless. During the next century, this Northern Neck Proprietary became a source of power, and huge land holdings were achieved by those who served as its agents, overseeing and collecting quitrents on the Proprietary-patented land.

By the early 1700s there were two "kings" in the Northern Neck—Robert Carter (agent of the Proprietary for Lord Fairfax), and tobacco. The latter was both the major export to England and the legal tender of the colony. Life centered around its cultivation. Indian paths became tobacco rolling roads, so named because casks (or hogsheads) of the harvested crop were rolled along them to the warehouses, located at shipping ports. Early plantation homes gave way to mansions. They were centers of trade and commerce, of culture and power, and they were almost exclusively mansions that tobacco built. In the 1720s and 1730s they were beginning to emerge all through the Northern Neck. Among them were Lee Hall (before its enlargements), Cobb's Hall (replacing the first Cobb's), and Stratford Hall, all of them in the Lee family, and all built in the 1720s (in 1729, an older Lee home, Machotick—or Matholic—had burned). Sabine Hall, home of Landon Carter, and Nomini Hall, home of Councillor Robert Carter, were established in the 1730s (an older Carter home—the mansion house at Corotoman—had likewise burned in 1729).

In a number of ways, the year 1732 marks the passing of the founding order and the emergence of a new one. In that year, King Carter died, and the church he paid to have built, Christ Church, was nearing completion. Also in 1732, two leaders of the movement for American independence were born in Westmoreland County: Richard Henry Lee at Stratford, and, just a few weeks later, George Washington at Pope's Creek Plantation.

The Grounds entrance at Pope's Creek Plantation

The Northern Neck was an exclusive land even then, cohesive and yet a land apart. Geography made it that way, and the Proprietary underscored it. In days where widows and widowers (of which there were many) quickly remarried, out of custom and necessity, the Northern Neck was further distinguished by the extensive intermarriages among the families of its great estates. George Washington's grandmother, for example, was married three times and died a widow. The land was bound together by such interrelationships: her daughter Mary Ball, the mother of George Washington, was born in Lancaster County, grew up in Northumberland, lived and was married in Westmoreland, and owned land in Richmond County.

A new and golden age was in the making. Tobacco and trade, and the plantation and its people, would flourish here during the next fifty years. So, too, would the movement for American independence.

History Continued....