The Cultural History of Marlborough, Virginia Part 1

The Cultural History of Marlborough,Virginia.

by C. Malcolm Watkins.

Preface

A number of people partic.i.p.ated in the preparation of this study. The inspiration for the archeological and historical investigations came from Professor Oscar H. Darter, who until 1960 was chairman of the Department of Historical and Social Sciences at Mary Washington College, the women's branch of the University of Virginia. The actual excavations were made under the direction of Frank M. Setzler, formerly the head curator of anthropology at the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution. None of the investigation would have been possible had not the owners of the property permitted the excavations to be made, sometimes at considerable inconvenience to themselves. I am indebted to W. Biscoe, Ralph Whitticar, Jr., and Thomas Ashby, all of whom owned the excavated areas at Marlborough; and T. Ben Williams, whose cornfield includes the site of the 18th-century Stafford County courthouse, south of Potomac Creek.

For many years Dr. Darter has been a resident of Fredericksburg and, in the summers, of Marlborough Point on the Potomac River. During these years, he has devoted himself to the history of the Stafford County area which lies between these two locations in northeastern Virginia.

Marlborough Point has interested Dr. Darter especially since it is the site of one of the Virginia colonial port towns designated by Act of a.s.sembly in 1691. During the town's brief existence, it was the location of the Stafford County courthouse and the place where the colonial planter and lawyer John Mercer established his home in 1726. Tangible evidence of colonial activities at Marlborough Point--in the form of brickbats and potsherds still can be seen after each plowing, while John Mercer's "Land Book," examined anew by Dr. Darter, has revealed the original survey plats of the port town.

In this same period and as early as 1938, Dr. T. Dale Stewart (then curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution) had commenced excavations at the Indian village site of Patawomecke, a few hundred yards west of the Marlborough Town site. The aboriginal backgrounds of the area including Marlborough Point already had been investigated. As the result of his historical research connected with this project, Dr. Stewart has contributed fundamentally to the present undertaking by foreseeing the excavations of Marlborough Town as a logical step beyond his own investigation.

Motivated by this combination of interests, circ.u.mstances, and historical clues, Dr. Darter invited the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution to partic.i.p.ate in an archeological investigation of Marlborough.

Preliminary tests made in August 1954 were sufficiently rewarding to justify such a project. Consequently, an application for funds was prepared jointly and was submitted by Dr. Darter through the University of Virginia to the American Philosophical Society. In January 1956 grant number 159, Johnson Fund (1955), for $1500 was a.s.signed to the program.

In addition, the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution contributed the professional services necessary for field research and directed the purchase of microfilms and photostats, the drawing of maps and ill.u.s.trations, and the preparation and publication of this report. Dr. Darter hospitably provided the use of his Marlborough Point cottage during the period of excavation, and Mary Washington College administered the grant. Frank Setzler directed the excavations during a six-week period in April and May 1956, while interpretation of cultural material and the searches of historical data related to it were carried out by C. Malcolm Watkins.

At the commencement of archeological work it was expected that traces of the 17th- and early 18th-century town would be found, including, perhaps, the foundations of the courthouse. This expectation was not realized, although what was found from the Mercer period proved to be of greater importance. After completion, a report was made in the 1956 _Year Book_ of the American Philosophical Society (pp. 304-308).

After the 1956 excavations, the question remained whether the princ.i.p.al foundation (Structure B) might not have been that of the courthouse.

Therefore, in August 1957 a week-long effort was made to find comparative evidence by digging the site of the succeeding 18th-century Stafford County courthouse at the head of Potomac Creek. This disclosed a foundation sufficiently different from Structure B to rule out any a.n.a.logy between the two.

It should be made clear that--because of the limited size of the grant--the archeological phase of the investigation was necessarily a limited survey. Only the more obvious features could be examined within the means at the project's disposal. No final conclusions relative to Structure B, for example, are warranted until the section of foundation beneath the highway which crosses it can be excavated. Further excavations need to be made south and southeast of Structure B and elsewhere in search of outbuildings and evidence of 17th-century occupancy.

Despite such limitations, this study is a detailed examination of a segment of colonial Virginia's plantation culture. It has been prepared with the hope that it will provide Dr. Darter with essential material for his area studies and, also, with the wider objective of increasing the knowledge of the material culture of colonial America. Appropriate to the function of a museum such as the Smithsonian, this study is concerned princ.i.p.ally with what is concrete--objects and artifacts and the meanings that are to be derived from them. It has relied upon the mutually dependent techniques of archeologist and cultural historian and will serve, it is hoped, as a guide to further investigations of this sort by historical museums and organizations.

Among the many individuals contributing to this study, I am especially indebted to Dr. Darter; to the members of the American Philosophical Society who made the excavations possible; to Dr. Stewart, who reviewed the archeological sections at each step as they were written; to Mrs.

Sigrid Hull who drew the line-and-stipple ill.u.s.trations which embellish the report; Edward G. Schumacher of the Bureau of American Ethnology, who made the archeological maps and drawings; Jack Scott of the Smithsonian photographic laboratory, who photographed the artifacts; and George Harrison Sanford King of Fredericksburg, from whom the necessary doc.u.mentation for the 18th-century courthouse site was obtained.

I am grateful also to Dr. Anthony N. B. Garvan, professor of American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania and former head curator of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution's department of civil history, for invaluable encouragement and advice; and to Worth Bailey formerly with the Historic American Buildings Survey, for many ideas, suggestions, and important identifications of craftsmen listed in Mercer's ledgers.

I am equally indebted to Ivor Noel Hume, director of archeology at Colonial Williamsburg and an honorary research a.s.sociate of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution, for his a.s.sistance in the identification of artifacts; to Mrs. Mabel Niemeyer, librarian of the Bucks County Historical Society, for her cooperation in making the Mercer ledgers available for this report; to Donald E. Roy, librarian of the Darlington Library, University of Pittsburgh, for providing the invaluable clue that directed me to the ledgers; to the staffs of the Virginia State Library and the Alexandria Library for repeated courtesies and cooperation; and to Miss Rodris Roth, a.s.sociate curator of cultural history at the Smithsonian, for detecting Thomas Oliver's inventory of Marlborough in a least suspected source.

I greatly appreciate receiving generous permissions from the University of Pittsburgh Press to quote extensively from the _George Mercer Papers Relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia_, and from Russell & Russell to copy Thomas Oliver's inventory of Marlborough.

To all of these people and to the countless others who contributed in one way or another to the completion of this study, I offer my grateful thanks.

C. MALCOLM WATKINS

Washington, D.C.

1967

The Cultural History

of

Marlborough, Virginia

[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 1.--JOHN MERCER'S BOOKPLATE.]

HISTORY

I

_Official Port Towns in Virginia and Origins of Marlborough_

ESTABLISHING THE PORT TOWNS

The dependence of 17th-century Virginia upon the single crop--tobacco--was a chronic problem. A bad crop year or a depressed English market could plunge the whole colony into debt, creating a chain reaction of overextended credits and failures to meet obligations.

Tobacco exhausted the soil, and soil exhaustion led to an ever-widening search for new land. This in turn brought about population dispersal and extreme decentralization.

After the Restoration in 1660 the Virginia colonial government was faced not only with these economic hazards but also with the resulting administrative difficulties. It was awkward to govern a scattered population and almost impossible to collect customs duties on imports landed at the planters' own wharves along hundreds of miles of inland waterways. The royal governors and responsible persons in the a.s.sembly reacted therefore with a succession of plans to establish towns that would be the sole ports of entry for the areas they served, thus making theoretically simple the task of securing customs revenues. The towns also would be centers of business and manufacture, diversifying the colony's economic supports and lessening its dependence on tobacco. To men of English origin this establishment of port communities must have seemed natural and logical.

The first such proposal became law in 1662, establishing a port town for each of the major river valleys and for the Eastern Sh.o.r.e. But the law's sponsors were doomed to disappointment, for the towns were not built.[1] After a considerable lapse, a new act was pa.s.sed in 1680, this one better implemented and further reaching. It provided for a port town in each county, where ships were to deliver their goods and pick up tobacco and other exports from town warehouses for their return voyages.[2] One of its most influential supporters was William Fitzhugh of Stafford County, a wealthy planter and distinguished leader in the colony.[3] "We have now resolved a cessation of making Tob^o next year,"

he wrote to his London agent, Captain Partis, in 1680. "We are also going to make Towns, if you can meet with any tradesmen that will come and live at the Town, they may have privileges and immunitys."[4]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Potomack River]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 2.--Survey plats of Marlborough as copied in John Mercer's Land Book showing at bottom, John Savage's, 1731; and top, William Buckner's and Theodorick Bland's, 1691. (The courthouse probably stood in the vicinity of lot 21.)]

Some of these towns actually were laid out, each on a 50-acre tract of half-acre lots, but only 9 tracts were built upon. The Act soon lagged and collapsed. It was unpopular with the colonists, who were obliged to transport their tobacco to distant warehouses and to pay storage fees; it was ignored by shipmasters, who were in the habit of dealing directly with planters at their wharves and who were not interested in making it any easier for His Majesty's customs collectors.[5]

Nevertheless, efforts to come up with a third act began in 1688.[6]

William Fitzhugh, especially, was articulate in his alarm over Virginia's one-crop economy, the effects of which the towns were supposed to mitigate. At this time he referred to tobacco as "our most despicable commodity." A year later, he remarked, "it is more uncertain for a Planter to get money by consigned Tob^o then to get a prize in a lottery, there being twenty chances for one chance."[7]

In April 1691 the Act for Ports was pa.s.sed, the House, significantly, recording only one dissenting vote.[8] Unlike its predecessor, which encouraged trades and crafts, this Act was justified purely on the basis of overcoming the "great opportunity ... given to such as attempt to import or export goods and merchandises, without entering or paying the duties and customs due thereupon, much practised by greedy and covetous persons." It provided that all exports and imports should be taken up or set down at the specified ports and nowhere else, under penalty of forfeiting ship, gear, and cargo, and that the law should become effective October 1, 1692. The towns again were to be surveyed and laid out in 50-acre tracts. Feoffees, to be appointed, would grant half-acre lots on a pro rata first-cost basis. Grantees "shall within the s.p.a.ce of four months next ensueing such grant begin and without delay proceed to build and finish on each half acre one good house, to containe twenty foot square at the least, wherein if he fails to performe them such grant to be void in law, and the lands therein granted lyable to the choyce and purchase of any other person." Justices of the county courts were to fill vacancies among the feoffees and to appoint customs collectors.[9]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] WILLIAM WALLER HENING, _The Statutes at Large Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia_ (New York, 1823), vol. 2, pp. 172-176.

[2] Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 471-478.

[3] William Fitzhugh was founder of the renowned Virginia family that bear his name. As chief justice of the Stafford County court, burgess, merchant, and wealthy planter, he epitomized the landed aristocrat in 17th-century Virginia.

See "Letters of William Fitzhugh," _Virginia Magazine of History & Biography_ (Richmond, 1894), vol. 1, p. 17 (hereinafter designated _VHM_), and _William Fitzhugh and His Chesapeake World_ (1676-1701), edit. Richard Beale Davis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, for the Virginia Historical Society, 1963).

[4] _VHM_, op. cit., p. 30.