[saj]

Stumbled onto this. Page after page describing many towns, etc mentioned here interspersed with history..very interesting. When I got to the very beginning the front page could not be found, so I have no clue what this is from.

Here is an excerpt:

Diagonally across from the court green is the two-story, clapboard building that was WINFIELD SCOTT’S LAW OFFICE. Born in Dinwiddie County July 13, 1786, Scott graduated from the College of William and Mary (1805) and then entered the law office of David Robinson in Petersburg with whom he rode the circuit, which included Dinwiddie Court. His military career began in 1808. Commissioned captain of light artillery, he participated in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, and rose to the highest rank in the U. S. Army. He retired in 1861 and died in 1866.

At 42.7 m. is a junction with County 646.

Left here to a junction with County 655, 5.2 m.; L. here 0.5 m. to SAPONEY CHURCH, of Bath Parish. The small frame rectangular structure, low-pitched with a gabled roof extending forward, was built in 1880 of material from the church of 1726.

In this region lived the Saponey, ‘the honestest, as well as the bravest Indians we have ever been acquainted with,’ according to William Byrd II, who camped in this section on his return from surveying the Virginia-North Carolina boundary (11728). ‘All the grandees of the Sapponi nation did us the honor to repair hither . . ., he wrote. With them came ‘four young ladies of the first quality.’ The deliberate lure of these’copper colored beauties’and their surprising’air of cleanliness’ were wasted on the swampy air. ‘We resisted their charms,’ soliloquized Mr.Byrd, ‘notwithstanding the long fast we had kept from the sex, and the bear diet we had been so long engaged in. Nor can I say the price they set upon their charms was at all exhorbitant. A princess for a pair of red stockings cannot, surely, be thought buying repentance much too dear.’

and the Link to this,

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/VAGuide/tour01.html

Sue J

[saj]

Another excerpt:

US 15 crosses the Maryland Line, 0 m., on the south bank of the Potomac River at a point 18 miles south of Frederick, Md. (see Maryland Guide).

In the Potomac is HEATER’S ISLAND, first called Conoy Island for the Piscataway Indian tribe (of the Algonkin family) that bore the Iroquois name of Conoy at the time of its migration from Maryland. An ally of Colonial Maryland against the hostile Senecas (Susquehannas) and Iroquois, this obscure but important tribe, reduced to the confines of a reservation in 1669, was by 1685 ‘miserably poor and low.’ Persecuted by Iroquois and believing that Maryland intended complete annihilation the tribe looked across the Potomac for asylum. In 1697 the Piscataways, under their new name, moved to Virginia. Two years later they established themselves on this island, building a large fort, with 18 cabins inside the enclosure and 9 without. Maryland, realizing her loss, entreated the Indians to return, but the tribe remained in its new home. About 1705 an epidemic of smallpox descended on the island, causing the Indians to leave–forever.

Saj

[Author]

Posts