Part 3 (1/2)

FOOTNOTES:

[42] Stafford County Order Book, 1689-1694, p. 195.

[43] Stafford County Will Book, Liber Z, pp. 168-169.

[44] _A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles_ (Oxford, 1928), vol. 10, pt. 2, p. 18.

[45] EDWARD H. PINTO, _Treen, or Small Woodware Throughout the Ages_ (London, 1949), p. 20.

[46] Stafford County Will Book, Liber Z, pp. 158-159.

THE GREGG SURVEY

In 1707, after the revival of the Port Act, the new county surveyor, Thomas Gregg, made another survey of the town. This was done apparently without regard to Buckner's original survey. Since Gregg adopted an entirely new system of numbering, and since his survey was lost at an early date, it is impossible to locate by their description the sites of the lots granted in 1708 and after.

Forty years later John Mercer wrote:

It is certain that Thomas Gregg (being the Surveyor of Stafford County) did Sep 2^d 1707 make a new Survey of the Town.... it is as certain that Gregg had no regard either to the bounds or numbers of the former Survey since he begins his Numbers the reverse way making his number 1 in the corner at Buckner's 19 & as his Survey is not to be found its impossible to tell how he continued his Numbers. No scheme I have tried will answer, & the Records differ as much, the streets according to Buckner's Survey running thro the House I lived in built by Ballard tho his whole lot was ditched in according to the Bounds made by Gregg.[47]

Whatever the intent may have been in laying out formal street and lot plans, Marlborough was essentially a rustic village. If Gregg's plat ran streets through the positions of houses on the Buckner survey, and vice versa, it is clear that not much attention was paid to theoretical property lines or streets. Ballard apparently dug a boundary ditch around his lot, according to Virginia practice in the 17th century, but the fact that this must have encroached on property a.s.signed to somebody else on the basis of the Buckner survey seems not to have been noted at the time. Rude houses placed informally and connected by lanes and footpaths, the courthouse attempting to dominate them like a village schoolmaster in a cla.s.s of country b.u.mpkins, a few outbuildings, a boat landing or two, some cultivated land, and a road leading away from the courthouse to the north with another running in the opposite direction to the creek--this is the way Marlborough must have looked even in its best days in 1708.

FOOTNOTES:

[47] John Mercer's Land Book, loc. cit. (footnote 12).

THE DEATH OF MARLBOROUGH AS A TOWN

Could this poor village have survived had the courthouse not burned? It was an unhappy contrast to the vision of a town governed by ”benchers of the guild hall,” bustling with mercantile activity, swarming on busy market days with ordinaries filled with people. This fantasy may have pulsated briefly through the minds of a few. But, after the abrogation of the Port Act in 1710, there was little left to justify the town's existence other than the courthouse. So long as court kept, there was need for ordinaries and ferries and for independent jacks-of-all-trades like Andrews. But with neither courthouse nor port activity nor manufacture, the town became a paradox in an economy and society of planters.

Remote and inaccessible, uninhabited by individuals whose skills could have given it vigor, Marlborough no longer had any reason for being. It lingered on for a short time, but when John Mercer came to transform the abandoned village into a flouris.h.i.+ng plantation, ”Most of the other Buildings were suffered to go to Ruin, so that in the year 1726, when your Pet.i.tioner [i.e., Mercer] went to live there, but one House twenty-feet square was standing.”[48]

FOOTNOTES:

[48] Pet.i.tion of John Mercer, loc. cit. (footnote 17).

II

_John Mercer's Occupation of Marlborough, 1726-1730_

MERCER'S ARRIVAL IN STAFFORD COUNTY

By 1723 Marlborough lay abandoned. George Mason (III), son of the late sheriff and ordinary keeper in the port town, held the now-empty t.i.tle of feoffee, together with Rice Hooe. In that year Mason and Hooe pet.i.tioned the General Court ”that Leave may be given to bring in a Bill to enable them to sell the said Land [of the town] the same not being built upon or Inhabited.” The pet.i.tion was put aside for consideration,”

but within a week--on May 21, 1723--it was ”ordered That Rice Hooe & George Mason be at liberty to withdraw their pet.i.tion ... and that the Committee to whom it was referred be discharged from proceeding thereon.”[49]

This curious sequence remains unexplained. Had the committee informally advised the feoffees that their cause would be rejected, suggesting, therefore, that they withdraw their pet.i.tion? Or had something unexpected occurred to provide an alternative solution to the problem of Marlborough?

Possibly it was the latter, and the unexpected occurrence may have been the arrival in Stafford County of young John Mercer. There is no direct evidence that Mercer was in the vicinity as early as 1723; but we know that he appeared before 1725, that he had by then become well acquainted with George Mason, and that he settled in Marlborough in 1726.

Mercer's remarkable career began with his arrival in Virginia at the age of 16. Born in Dublin in 1704, the son of a Church Street merchant of English descent--also named John Mercer--and of Grace Fenton Mercer, John was educated at Trinity College, and then sailed for the New World in 1720.[50] How Mercer arrived in Virginia or what means he brought with him are lost to the record. From his own words written toward the end of his life we know that he was not overburdened with wealth: