Part 1 (1/2)
Seaport in Virginia.
by Gay Montague Moore.
PREFACE
Twenty years ago on a hot and sultry July afternoon, my husband and I started to Mount Vernon to spend the day. On our return to Was.h.i.+ngton, we lazily drove through the old and historic town of Alexandria--and bought a house!
The town at once became of vital interest to us. We spent months and years going through every vacant building into which we could force an entrance. Our setter dogs could point an empty doorway as well as a covey of quail, and seemed as curious about the interiors as we were ourselves. I became obsessed with a desire to know the age of these buildings and something of those early Alexandrians who had lived in them.
Old maps and records littered my desk. Out of the past appeared clerks on high stools wielding quill pens and inscribing beautiful script for me to transpose into the story of one of America's most romantic and historic towns. It has been impossible to write about every house in Alexandria--even about every historic house. I tried to recall the old town as a whole. A succession of hatters, joiners, s.h.i.+ps' carpenters, silversmiths, peruke makers, brewers, bakers, sea captains, merchants, doctors and gentlemen, schoolteachers, dentists, artisans, artists and actors, began to fill my empty houses. s.h.i.+ps, sail lofts, ropewalks, horses, pigs, and fire engines took their proper places, and the town lived again as of yore--in my imagination.
Everywhere I turned I found General Was.h.i.+ngton: as a little boy on his brother Lawrence's barge bringing Mount Vernon tobacco to the Hunting Creek warehouse; on horseback riding to the village of Belle Haven; as an embryo surveyor carrying the chain to plot the streets and lots. He was dancing at the b.a.l.l.s, visiting the young ladies, drilling the militia, racing horses, launching vessels, engaging workmen, dining at this house or that, importing a.s.ses, horses, and dogs, running for office, sitting as justice; sponsoring the Friends.h.i.+p Fire Company, a free school, the Alexandria Ca.n.a.l, or other civic enterprises. He was pewholder of Christ Church and master of the Masonic lodge. To town he came to collect his mail, to cast his ballot, to have his silver or his carriage repaired, to sell his tobacco or his wheat, to join the citizenry in celebrating Independence. His closest friends and daily companions were Alexandrians. The dwellings, wharves, and warehouses of the town were as familiar to him as his Mount Vernon farm.
In Alexandria Was.h.i.+ngton took command of his first troops. From the steps of Gadsby's Tavern he received his last military review, a display of his neighbors' martial spirit in a salute from the town's militia. An Alexandrian closed his eyes, and Alexandrians carried his pall.
Was.h.i.+ngton belongs to Alexandria as Alexandria belongs to him. This is _George Was.h.i.+ngton's Alexandria_.
GAY MONTAGUE MOORE.
Alexandria, Virginia September 1949
PART ONE: PROLOGUE
An Account of the First Century of The Seaport of Alexandria
[Ill.u.s.tration: A typical Alexandria s.h.i.+pping merchant's home: Bernard Chequire, called the ”count,” built his dwelling and storeroom under the same roof]
[Ill.u.s.tration]
SITE AND ANTECEDENTS
In the middle of the seventeenth century when the English King, Charles II, was generously settling Virginia land upon loyal subjects, what is now the port of Alexandria was part of six thousand acres granted by the Royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley, in the name of His Majesty, to Robert Howsing. The grant was made in 1669 as a reward for bringing into the colony one hundred and twenty persons ”to inhabit.”
Howsing did not want this land but John Alexander did. He had surveyed the tract and knew its worth. Howsing doubtless thought himself well out of it when Alexander paid six hundredweight of tobacco and took it off his hands within a month.[1]
The growth and development of the colony of Virginia into a great agricultural population occupied in the cultivation of tobacco was not at all what the London Company had in mind. It visualized a colony of towns. But the possibilities offered by the great rivers emptying into Chesapeake Bay and the development of the tobacco trade were responsible for a civilization unique to Englishmen. True that the establishment of towns as trading centers was a recognized need--generally agitated by the Burgesses and planters from interested motives--but little came of it. Planters whose lands and domiciles lined the Virginia waterways found the direct trade with English s.h.i.+ps a facile, if expensive, convenience. It was so easy to dispose of a cargo of tobacco and receive at one's door in return delivery of a neat London sofa, greatcoat, or a coach and harness. So instead of towns, great tobacco warehouses were built at convenient centers where tobacco was collected, inspected, and s.h.i.+pped. Such a warehouse was established by act of a.s.sembly in 1730 and 1732[2] at the mouth of Great Hunting Creek, where it empties into the Potomac River, on the land of Hugh West, Sr. (a member of the Alexander clan) and where there was already a ferry to the Maryland side of the river. Almost immediately a little village grew up--a group of small houses and a school--known then as Belle Haven.
Tobacco was currency in the colony, tendered as such, and it const.i.tuted the first wealth. Salaries and fees were paid in tobacco, fines were levied in tobacco; it was the medium of exchange in England as well as in Virginia. When the colonists wrote the word, they used a capital T!
His Majesty's government of the New World was much occupied with the cultivation, housing, and transportation of this natural weed. The importance attached to tobacco is best ill.u.s.trated by a most extraordinary law. When Englishmen, whose homes are their castles, permitted the right of search of citizens' private dwellings, some idea of the value of this commodity may be realized. The Burgesses resolved early ”that any Justice of Peace who shall know or be informed of any Package of Tobacco of less than----weight made up for s.h.i.+pping off, shall have power to enter any suspected House, and by night or by day and so search for, and finding any such Package, to seize and destroy the same; and moreover the Person in whose Possession the same shall be found, shall be liable to a Penalty.”[3] Inspectors of tobacco held their appointments under the King; theirs was the responsibility of watching the crop, estimating its yield and weight, maintaining the standard of quality and inspecting the packing. Moreover, no tobacco could be ”bought or sold, but by Inspector's Notes, under a Penalty both upon the Buyer and Seller.”[4]
In 1742 the Burgesses, lower house of Virginia's Parliament, in session at Williamsburg, became exercised about the tobacco trade and ”Resolved, That an humble address of this house be presented to His Majesty, and a Pet.i.tion to the Parliament of Great Britain; representing the distressed state and decay of our Tobacco Trade, occasioned by the Restraint on our Export; which must, if not speedily remedied, destroy our Staple; and there being no other expedient left for Preservation of this Valuable Branch of the British Commerce, to beseech His Majesty and His Parliament, to take the same into Consideration; and that His Majesty may be graciously pleased to grant unto his subjects of this Colony, a Free Export of their Tobacco to Foreign Markets directly, under such Limitations, as to His Majesty's Wisdom, shall appear Necessary.”[5]
From 1742 a series of pet.i.tions from the inhabitants of Prince William and Fairfax[6] counties, asking authority from the a.s.sembly at Williamsburg to erect towns in the county, were presented to the Burgesses. Several years pa.s.sed before any notice was taken of these requests.
At a General a.s.sembly, begun and held at the College in Williamsburg on Tuesday, November 1, 1748 (sixteen years after the establishment of the warehouse at Hunting Creek) in the twenty-second year of the reign of George II, a pet.i.tion was presented from ”the inhabitants of Fairfax in Behalf of Themselves and others praying that a Town may be established at Hunting Creek Ware House on Potomack River.”[7] On Tuesday, April 11, 1749, a bill for establis.h.i.+ng a town at Hunting Creek Warehouse, in Fairfax County, was read for the first time.