Many causes have contributed to the great upsurge of interest now manifesting itself in Virginia's romantic history and in the men and women who made it. If, perhaps, the greatest and most potent of these forces is the splendid restoration of Williamsburg, her colonial capital, through the munificence of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., of New York, we must not lose sight of the part played by the reconstruction of her old historic highways and their tributary roads into the fine modern highway sys

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

Mighty in her military strength and with an all but inexhaustible wealth pouring into her coffers from her American conquests, Spain stood as a very colossus over the Europe of the sixteenth century; and England, watching and fearing her hostile growth, grimly determined that she too, should have her share of that fabulous new world and its treasure. So deeply planted and so greatly grew this determination that it eventually became a part of England's public policy and in June, 1578, the great E

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 move

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

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 settle

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

In the Quarter century, between 1730 and the French and Indian War of 1755, the lands of the future Loudoun became progressively more populous. Although Truro Parish had been created as recently as 1732, this pressure of incoming settlers seemed to call for the division, in its turn, of Truro and in 1748 the government of the Colony set off the upper part of Truro, beyond Difficult Run, as a new parish which was named Cameron in delicate compliment to the Lord Proprietor's Scotch Barony. Most un

We have come to the outbreak of that great world conflict between England and Prussia on the one side against France and Austria, Russia, Sweden, and Saxony on the other which Fiske, writing before the devastation of 1914, called the most memorable war of modern times and which, involving three continents, ultimately passed the vast French territories in Canada and India to the British crown. In European history the contest is known, somewhat inadequately, as the Seven Years War and gave Frederi

In the Virginia of England's rule, the vestry of a Parish "divided with the County Court the responsibility of local government, having as their especial charge the maintenance of religion and the oversight of all things pertaining thereto in the domain of charity and morals." [74] The parish was a territorial subdivision with large civil as well as ecclesiastical powers and duties and when, through increasing population, a parish came to be divided, in those days of expanding settlement, it usu

Our upper country, at last, has graduated from being classified as merely part of the backwoods of Lord Fairfax's Northern Neck and is now enrolled in the rapidly growing roster of colonial Virginia's counties. Unfortunately the conferring of that dignity did not alter the social problems of the frontier nor change, to any great degree, the turbulence and heterogeneous character of its population. The Irish element, particularly, appears to have been pugnacious and lawless, if one may judge from

When the American Colonies joined issue with Great Britain in the controversy which was to result in American independence, Loudoun's population, beginning with a thin trickle of adventurers, had been growing for over fifty years, during which time, save for the short period before and after Braddock's defeat, her sure but steady development and increase of people had received no serious reversal. The exact number of her inhabitants in 1775 is unknown; but fifteen years later she was credited wi

While the Powells and the Masons, the Lees, the Claphams, the Nolands and the Rusts, the Chinns, the Peytons, the Mercers, the Ellzeys and others of her natural leaders and large landowning families of the time, had abetted and supported, in one capacity or another, the Revolutionary cause, it was, in the end, the simple, homespun, backwoodsman class that bred Loudoun's most romantic figure in the Revolution. Sergeant Major John Champe of Lee's Partisan Legion, mighty of bone and sinew, stout-he

From the close of the Revolution to the War of 1812, there were at least four outstanding movements in Loudoun: the restoration of the fertility of her soil, the disestablishment of the church, the loss of a substantial part of her area which returned to Fairfax and the erection of large country mansions. The great project of Washington's Potomac Company, involving the extensive improvement of that river for navigation, was not, of course a Loudoun enterprise, although the welfare of her people

When Patrick McIntyre published the one hundred and tenth number of The True American in Leesburg on Tuesday the 30th December, 1800, he, following the tradition of his craft, probably left his office with a lively sense of anticipation of the town's forthcoming celebration of the advent of a new century; that he could have foreseen that a single copy of that issue would be the sole available survivor of his journal in 1937 is not to be presumed. Yet in the Library of Congress that single copy b

It was a happy, prosperous, and contented Loudoun that the sun shone down upon in 1850. In politics the county was predominantly Whig and in the growing national issues of States' rights, slavery and secession, her sentiment clung to the preservation of the Union; but the seeds of dissension had been sown. The repercussions of John Brown's insane raid on the nearby Harper's Ferry arsenal on the 16th October, 1859, were particularly severe in Loudoun. The madness of it all profoundly shocked the

From east to west, from north to south, her farm lands ravaged, plundered and made desolate, many of her sons dead or incapacitated by wounds or sickness, her barns, outbuildings and fences burned, her horses, cattle and other livestock stolen, confiscated or wantonly driven away, Loudoun presented, in that summer of 1865, a sad and dispiriting contrast to the fruitful abundance of five years before. By the terms of the surrender at Appomattox the Southern cavalryman had been allowed to retain t