Mary stayed on at Ferry Farm for twenty-nine years after her husband's death. It is possible that she spent part of this time on some of her adjoining property. Meanwhile her children had married--Betty Washington Lewis was living in Fredericksburg, and George was established at Mount Vernon, which he had inherited after Lawrence's death.

By 1772 George had persuaded his mother to move to a house which he owned in Fredericksburg where she would be close to Betty, at Kenmore.

When Mary Ball Washington moved to Fredericksburg, her property in the Northern Neck included: "43 Hoggs, Shoats and Pigs, 16 sheep, 24 head of cattle, 2 horses; and at the Quarters (her dower land of 400 acres, some miles down the river), 4 horses, 6 oxen, 8 cows and calves, 39 hogs." On the two farms there were ten slaves. The "Quarters" was bringing her an income of 30 pounds per year.

After Mary was installed in Fredericksburg, she had her coachman, Stephen, drive her almost every day to Ferry Farm. Mary's favorite carriage in her old age was a light open phaeton. She was respectfully greeted by everyone she passed on the streets of Fredericksburg.

In her later years Mary is said to have worn a mobcap and kerchief. A mobcap was a frilly white cap introduced from France. In summer she probably waved a fan made from the bronze feathers of wild turkeys.

During these years George Washington frequently visited his mother, and other relatives in the Northern Neck. In August, 1768, he "hauled the Sein for sheepsheads" off Hollis Marsh in Westmoreland County. In 1771, he dined at the Glebe in Cople Parish, and "returned to my brother's in the evening." George enjoyed the social life in Fredericksburg. He liked to play cards, and he liked to dance--the minuet and cotillions and country-dances. It was said that he liked beautiful women, punch, horses and hunting, and that he could be gay or dignified, whenever the occasion demanded. During Revolutionary days Washington and the Northern Neck patriots often gathered at the Rising Sun Tavern in Fredericksburg.

In 1784, while visiting Mount Vernon, Marquis de Lafayette rode to Fredericksburg to pay a visit to Madam Washington before he returned to France. When he returned to Mount Vernon after calling upon Mary Ball Washington he made this comment about her: "I have seen the only Roman Matron living at this day."

George Washington traveled to Fredericksburg in March, 1789, to tell his mother good-bye before leaving Mount Vernon to go to New York for his first inauguration. She did not live to see him again.

Mary Washington was buried in Fredericksburg, near Meditation Rock, a spot near her home where she often went to read her Bible, pray and meditate. It was her request that she be buried there. Many years later a monument to her was erected there.

The modest house where she spent her last years became a national shrine in 1890. A college in Fredericksburg was later named for Mary Washington.

"All that I am I owe to my honored Mother," is the tribute that the great George Washington paid to Mary Ball Washington.

_AFTER THE REVOLUTION_

The Northern Neck, like the rest of Tidewater Virginia, changed after the Revolution. War had taken its toll of manpower and money.

The tobacco lands had become exhausted, therefore the culture of tobacco had been almost abandoned. Wheat and corn were now the main crops.

The once thriving tobacco river ports fell into decay. Foreign ships no longer tied up at the plantation landings. The tobacco rolling-roads were no longer needed for their original use.

After the war the English clergy was withdrawn and the churches were unused and deserted for years. Some fell into ruins or were used for other purposes. The glebes became "bones of contention" between the Episcopal Church and the "people." In 1802 the General Assembly passed an act by which the glebes were sold for the benefit of the public.

After the Revolution other religious denominations gained a foothold in the Northern Neck.

People now turned away from anything British, even in architecture and dress. Before the Revolution boys and girls dressed precisely like their parents in miniature. After the war they wore a special dress of their own.

In 1789, there were still few conveniences of life in the Neck, or elsewhere in the country. All cloth was woven by hand. Most of the farm implements were made of wood. Wheat was cut with a scythe, raked with a wooden rake and beaten out with sticks or "trodden out" by oxen.

There were as yet no matches with which to make a fire. Flint and tinder box were used instead and live coals were kept as a basis for the next day's fire. Wood was the chief fuel and candles were used for light.

Bananas and oranges were rarely seen in the Northern Neck then, for sailboats were too slow to bring these fruits any distance in good condition. Communication was slow. By 1790 there were fifteen post-offices in Virginia. The postal service was crude. Mails were carried by post-riders and stages.

People of the Northern Neck lived comfortably but the great prosperity was gone, and although eventually it was recovered in part, the pattern of living was never on such a grand scale again as it was before the Revolution. The large estates were broken up by division or sale. New families took the places of the old. Many of the old names passed into oblivion. The old order of social aristocracy declined, but the people still clung to their old customs, traditions and family life.

_MANTUA_

"Chicacony" was selected as a townsite by the Burgesses some time after John Mottrom and his friends had settled there. Mottrom had built a wharf and a warehouse at Coan and he had plans for a "Brew-House." If he had lived, the town might have matured. But Colonel Mottrom died and the plans for a town seem to have been abandoned. Plantation life did not encourage the growth of towns.

The Coan Hall property passed on to the descendants of John Mottrom.

Coan Hall and the other early homes in the vicinity either burned or fell into ruins. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, when the Coan Hall property went out of the Mottrom family, there appears to have been few traces left of the once thriving settlement at Coan.

James Smith, a wealthy Baltimore merchant and shipowner, purchased a portion of the Coan Hall estate from a Mottrom heir and erected a brick mansion on a slope there, about 1785. He called his new home Mantua.

Mantua was built along the traditional lines of a Virginia house--a central hall, two rooms on each side and large end chimneys. From the outside it appeared to have three stories but there were really six floor levels. Later, identical wings were added on each side by Smith's sons. Still later, Smith's grandson added an imposing front portico.

Before this addition coaches were driven, tradition says, right up to the front steps and ladies could step from coach to marble steps without soiling their dainty slippers. The conveyance could then continue around to the stables on the west side, or follow the driveway on to Coan Stage Road, which ran back of the plantation.

The marble steps, marble window-sills and paneled inside blinds were handsome details of Mantua which may have been the outcome of Smith's residence in Baltimore. Originally he was a native of County Derry, Ireland.

In the rear of the house there were five terraces, planted with flowers and, perhaps, vegetables and herbs. Brick slave quarters were ranged in a semi-circle beyond the terraces.

The second story front windows of Mantua overlooked both the Coan and the Potomac. Before government lighthouses and buoys marked the waterman's course in this section, he had only the stars, landmarks and a lighted window here and there to guide him. Mantua was a help to the watermen for they could always be sure of a lighted window there, a lamp purposely placed by members of the Smith family, and by day the towering poplar trees were familiar landmarks.

PART III

Nineteenth Century

_ROBERT E. LEE_

In 1791, Light-Horse Harry Lee became Governor of Virginia. While he was in Richmond he had the opportunity to visit the plantations along the James River.

When Harry rolled up before Shirley in all the trappings of a Virginia governor, it is not surprising that the young daughter of the house saw in him her "heart's desire."

But Charles Carter did not see Harry through his daughter's rosy vision.

He saw him as a widower who was seventeen years older than Ann, and as a soldier who had been disillusioned by war and had not adjusted to peace.

However, Harry won his suit and carried the happy Ann back with him to Stratford. Ann was a brunette of medium height and twenty years old.

Little else is known about her except that she was good.

Ann's first impression of the Lee mansion must have been a gloomy one.

Gayety had left Stratford with Matilda. The musicians had long since been gone, and the blooded horses. The windows once so brightly lighted were dark, and with no voices and laughter to fill the house, one could hear the wolves howling at night in the forest. This remote fortress in the fastness of the Northern Neck was different from anything that this great-granddaughter of King Carter had ever known. Shirley had been warm and happy.

Harry had no taste or ability as a farmer, and even if he had, Westmoreland County was now losing ground as a tobacco country. At first Ann may have traveled to Richmond with her husband and visited Shirley, for Harry was thrice elected to the governorship of Virginia. But as the years went by, Ann and her small children were more and more alone at Stratford. As his political career waned, Harry stayed away from home more and more, chasing various "will o' the wisps" which he believed would recoup his fortune.

Sometimes Ann stayed at Stratford as long as six months at a time without going anywhere to visit, or without seeing her social equals.

Still, Ann wrote a friend that she was too busy to be bored. We can imagine her moving about the house, sometimes carrying a charcoal brazier with her into the living room, to warm her frail body or to give the illusion of warmth.

[Illustration: _Young Robert E. Lee learning to ride._]

Into this sombre setting was born, on January 19, 1807, a new baby. He was christened: Robert Edward Lee. He was born in the southeast bedroom of Stratford, the same room in which the other great Lee men had been born.

The nursery was probably the coziest room at Stratford in those days.

Ann's one known accomplishment was singing, so we can picture her there as she sang to the new baby while she rocked him in his wooden cradle, and watched the flames in the fireplace as they illuminated the guardian cherubs on the iron fireback. Perhaps those days with her children were not unhappy. She taught her boys to be "honorable and correct" and to "practice the most inflexible virtue."