The Stronghold - The Stronghold Part 19
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The Stronghold Part 19

When King Carter died in 1732, he owned 330,000 acres of land, a thousand slaves and 10,000 pounds sterling. The latter fact was remarkable because there was such a small amount of metallic money in the colony. He also left more than a hundred head of horses, over two thousand cattle and swine and several hundred sheep. These slaves and stock were scattered over his various plantations. His estate also included indentured servants, ships and nautical equipment, crops, farming equipment, cabins and mansions, furnishings, personal effects and a library of 521 volumes.

King Carter had done well for himself, and well for the proprietor. He had also opened up the back lands of the Northern Neck to settlers, which automatically forced the Indians back.

King Carter was a builder. He had a large brick kiln at Corotoman, which doubtless furnished the bricks for some of his homes and the church. He built a breakwater at Corotoman to save the waterfront from being washed away by tide and storm. It was made of huge rocks, probably brought as ballast in some of the ships. He dug a well at Corotoman and had it lined with stone. It was a far-cry from the early settlers' "spring near the door."

King Carter built a road from Corotoman to Lease-Land (Fredericksburg), a distance of almost a hundred miles. It was known as the King's Highway.

In everything that King Carter did he looked ahead. He was building for the future generations of his family. When he died he was the richest and most powerful man in Virginia. His given name had long since been forgotten. He was known to everyone in the Northern Neck as King Carter.

He was laid to rest in the yard of Christ Church.

_KITH AND KIN_

There used to be an old saying--"everybody in the Northern Neck is kith and kin." This was almost a fact.

It all came about because in the early days the families of wealth and ability assumed leadership locally and in the Colonial Government. It was the custom of these families to intermarry in order to keep the power of wealth and influence within their own circle.

By the end of the eighteenth century it was hardly possible to find a prominent Northern Necker who was not "kin" to some other outstanding Virginian. This rigid rule of "keeping up the bars," as they called it, resulted in an aristocracy similar in many ways to the nobility of the Old World. This system accounts for the high political intelligence for which Tidewater Virginia was noted.

The marriages of King Carter's children illustrate this characteristic of colonial life in the Northern Neck, and in Virginia. King Carter married only twice but he had twelve children.

By his first wife, Judith Armistead, King Carter had four children, John, Elizabeth, Judith and Anne.

Judith died in 1699, and he married Elizabeth Landon Willis, a widow and daughter of Thomas Landon of England. She died in 1719. The best known of her eight children are Robert, Charles, Landon, Mary and Lucy.

Elizabeth, the eldest daughter, was married to Nathaniel Burwell. King Carter gave her Carter's Grove. After Burwell died she married George Nicholas. Judith married Mann Page of Rosewell, in Gloucester County.

Anne married Benjamin Harrison of Berkeley, on the James.

Mary married George Braxton of Newington, in King and Queen County. Lucy married Colonel Henry Fitzhugh of Eagle's Nest, in Stafford County, on the Potomac.

John became a barrister in the Middle Temple, London, and married Elizabeth Hill of Shirley, on the James. Robert settled on the plantation of Nomini, on the Potomac. He married Priscilla, the daughter of William Churchill, a member of the Council.

Charles married three times--Mary Walker, Anne, daughter of William Byrd of Westover, and Lucy Taliaferro. His home was Cleve on the Rappahannock.

Landon's home was Sabine Hall, on the Rappahannock. He married three times--an Armistead of Hesse, a Byrd of Westover and a Wormeley of Rosegill.

King Carter's direct descendants include: a signer of the Declaration of Independence (Carter Braxton), two Presidents of the United States (the Harrisons), and General Robert E. Lee.

Thus King Carter's children were well established. These Carters and the heads of other top-ranking families were sometimes known in the Northern Neck as the "river barons."

_THE FIELDINGS_

Ambrose Fielding was a justice of the peace for Northumberland County in 1670.

Ambrose's son, Edward, came to Virginia from England, about 1687-88, to take up his inheritance of three hundred twenty-five acres left him by his father in 1675. His Northern Neck holdings were increased in 1695 by the will of his "Uncle Edward" Fielding, a great merchant of Bristol, England, who left him "500 acres at Wiccomocco in the County of Northumberland, in the Country of Virginia beyond the seas." In the same year Edward, by grant from Lady Culpeper and Lord Fairfax, acquired four hundred twenty-five more acres on "Wicocomoco river ... near ye Mill Dam of ye sd. Fielding, of Lee parish."

Edward owned a snuff box, marked with his initials, "E.F.," and the date "1716." The portrait of a young woman was painted on the lid. It is believed to have been his wife, or his daughter Sarah. The girl in the picture wears a dress of satin, with white skirt, green stomacher and plain colored bodice; the head-dress, which is like a scarf or loose hood, is of white and green, and the flower held in her hand is blue, as are the velvet cushions of the chair.

Edward's oldest son was born in 1689. Edward named him for his father, Ambrose.

When Ambrose was about twenty-one years old he married the daughter of a "chirugeon," Mark Attkins. After their marriage Ambrose and Catherine moved to Lancaster County and settled on a plantation known as Broad Neck Quarter.

The house of Ambrose Fielding II, was built like a small fort in the wilderness, probably for defense against Indians. It was built of brick with loop-holes in the walls. A brick wall surrounded the house, and it too was pierced with loop-holes.

This house is said to have been located near the seat of the Carters at Corotoman. This statement seems to have been borne out by the will of King Carter, 1728, in which he mentions a "Fielding's Place." In 1749 the King's grandson, Robert Carter III, of Nomini Hall, owned about two thousand acres in a tract in Northumberland called Fielding's Quarter.

_PIRATES_

In the time of King Carter of Corotoman, the Chesapeake was alive with pirates. He wrote that they were "very bold and roguish ... miserable case, the Crown takes no more care of so vast a fleet of ships as uses this bay."

The pirates reaped a rich harvest from the unprotected ships that traveled to and from foreign ports. In one year four ships bound back to Virginia from England had been sunk.

There were three types of pirates--the "bloody pirate," who was simply a robber on the high seas; the privateers, who commanded armed private vessels commissioned to cruise against the commerce or war vessels of the enemy; and buccaneers, who were freeholders who preyed upon Spanish as well as American vessels and settlements.

With its many bays and rivers the coastline of Tidewater Virginia was hard to defend. Pirates could swoop down in their fast boats and rob vessels and plunder the plantations along the shore. It was easy to make a landing in the lower counties of the Neck where the land was low and there were wharves at the plantations.

In 1699, Captain Kidd, who tradition says wore a gold chain around his neck and picked his teeth with a toothpick of gold, entered the Chesapeake in his vessel _Alexander_. The militia of the maritime counties was called out but Captain Kidd, after plundering several ships, sailed away.

Louis Guittar entered the Bay in 1700 and plundered and destroyed five vessels while there. At some time during this period, a ship-load of pirates reached the waters of the upper Chesapeake, where they captured a large sloop. They anchored that evening not far from shore and, tradition says, "the pirates were heard beating their drums all night long."

The pirate, George Lowther, entered the Bay in 1722. Roger Makeele was another Bay pirate. He and his gang of thirteen men and four women preyed on small craft in the Bay channels. After a successful venture they celebrated by "drinking and feasting with Rumm or Brandy, mutton, Turkey &C." This gang was captured and brought to trial by the Governor of Virginia.

The Virginia government used several methods of defense: look-outs, militia, forts and guard-ships. There was a fort with twenty-four guns and one hundred fifty "available shot" at Corotoman, on the Rappahannock. At Yeocomico, on the Potomac, there was a fort with six guns. Since almost no maintenance was given to the forts in Virginia they were in a dilapidated condition by 1691. The guns were "spoiled in the sand with the water flowing over them at high tide." This form of defense proved to be ineffective. The colony had already turned to guard-ships as a means of protection.

These guard-ships were used to convoy merchant vessels to their destination, or to a safe "riding place." The designated "riding place"

on the Rappahannock was above the fort at Corotoman. On the Wicomico and on the Potomac the "riding places" were "as high as they can go."

One of these guard-ships, _H.M.S. Deptford_, a ketch, under command of Captain Thomas Berry, was upset in a squall in the Potomac. Captain Berry, who was ill at the time, was drowned along with eight members of his crew.

In 1726, Joseph Parsons, mate of the ship _Tayloe_ of Bristol, was tried in the court of Richmond County and convicted of piracy and the murder of Captain John Heard of the _Tayloe_. Parsons was sent to the "gaol" at Williamsburg. The Council in Williamsburg re-examined the case and discharged Parsons because of lack of sufficient evidence. The silver plate and other articles found in the possession of the crew were held by the authorities until the rightful owners could claim them. The crew said that they had taken the property from the _Tayloe_ "for sustinance while journeying through the colony."

After Blackbeard was captured by Maynard, in 1718, piracy in the Tidewater declined. The last pirate reported in the Chesapeake was in 1807. Tales of pirates, piracy and buried treasure were told in the region for many years.

_CHRISTMAS AT COLONEL FITZHUGH'S_

An account of a Christmas spent at Bedford plantation in the Northern Neck was written by Monsieur Durand, a Frenchman, who was journeying through Virginia in the holiday season of the year 1686. He wrote:

"We were now approaching the Christmas Festival.... It was agreed that all should go to spend the night with Colonel Fitzhugh, whose house is on the shore of the great river Potomac....

"By the time we reached Col. Fitzhugh's we made up a troop of 20 horse.

"The Colonel's accomodations were, however, so ample that this company gave him no trouble at all; we were all supplied with beds, though we had to double up. Col Fitzhugh showed us the largest hospitality. He had store of good wine and other things to drink, and a frolic ensued.

"He called in three fiddlers, a clown, a tight-rope dancer and an acrobatic tumbler, and gave us all the divertisement one would wish. It was very cold but no one thought of going near the fire because they never put less than the trunk of a tree upon it and so the entire room was kept warm."

William Fitzhugh, the owner of Bedford, came to Virginia in 1670. He secured a grant of land in the upper Neck, in what later became King George County. He married "little Sarah Tucker" of Tucker Hill when she was only eleven years old, and then sent her to England to be educated.