A VIRGINIA HERITAGE Colonel J. Willcox Brown in Baltimore Days A • • • 1rg1n1a ~ eritage by Eleanor Brown Merrill PRIVATELY PRINTED 1968 Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 68-54707 Press of Whittet & Shepperson, Richmond, Virginia DEDICATION ~ To the memory of my brother DONALDSON BROWN A True Virginian V FOREWORD HIS CHRONICLE of our forebears is addressed to my nieces and nephews, who have shown interest in learning something about their antecedents. Many facts have been unearthed by George H. S. King, Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists, and I have read a vast amount of reference material relating not only to the persons but, also, to the times involved. As Maud Wilder Goodwin writes in her preface to White Aprons: "The obscurity which veils the entire history of the great struggle between tyranny and popular rights in Virginia a hundred years before the Revolution makes accuracy impos­ sible even for the most painstaking historian." And later depre­ dations and loss of records have further shrouded the image of past years. It must be admitted that some embroidery has been used in an effort to make interesting reading. But the data as given are essentially correct, and the genealogical tables given present accurate data. This work ceases with the generation preceding my own; it is hoped that you younger ones will be stimulated to carry the record further through a period that has shown many up­ heavals and an increasing horde of relatives. E. B. M. Vll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ~ IRST THE WRITER wants to record deep appre­ ciation of the Donaldson Brown family's constant encourage­ ment and support of this study, without which it could not have been carried through. References listed after each chapter are gratefully acknowl­ edged, as is the generous help of those mentioned throughout the text. We want to thank George H. S. King, Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists, for his research and findings which are all on file, though the present volume necessarily omits some material which must be left for future writers; and we acknowledge the kind assistance of John Frederick Dorman, F.A.S.G., in the final preparation and indexing of this work. In addition to the above mentioned, thanks are due to Emily Dunn, Winifred Barksdale, Elinor Hopkins, Miriam Jones, Louis E. Dean, the Virginia Historical Society staff and to others who have been generous with their help. Especially is the writer grateful to her two part-time secretaries-Elinor M. Whelan and Katharine Parks-who have shown infinite skill and patience in deciphering and transcribing an abominable scrawl. Vlll CONTENTS ~ FOREWORD Vll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Vlll CHAPTER ONE BrownJ 1729-1798 I CHAPTER TWO BrownJ 1760-1836 r8 CHAPTER THREE WillcoxJ 1690-1863 29 CHAPTER FOUR Poythress, 1633-1815 CHAPTER FIVE Brown, 1836-1865 CHAPTER SIX Brown, 1865-1867 75 CHAPTER SEVEN Macfarland, 1762-1872. CHAPTER EIGHT Macfarland, 1872-1899. I08 CHAPTER NINE Beirne, 1771-1835 l 14 CHAPTER TEN Brown, 1867-1914 124 CHAPTER ELEVEN Brown, 1914-1930 150 APPENDICES 157 INDEX 1 79 ix ILLUSTRATIONS ~ Colonel J. Willcox Brown . FRONTISPIECE Ivy Cliff: The Brown Home Captain Henry Brown: 1760-1841 22 John Thompson Brown: 1802-1836 23 Old Blandford Cemetery, Petersburg 30 Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond 30 Major J. Willcox Brown . 66 Ellen Turn er Macfarland . go William H. Macfarland in War Years 91 Uncle He,nry and Aunt Martha 98 Glencoe 99 Mrs. William H. Macfarland and Daughter 106 Mrs. William H. Macfarland, the Widow 107 Andrew Beirne: 1771-1845 I 14 Mrs. J. Willcox Brown. 128 xi A VIRGINIA HERITAGE Chapter One: BROWN, 1729-1798 T WILL SURPRISE you to find that instead of coming to Virginia with the first settlers from England, as written of by your great-grandfather in his letter of 1833,1 the earliest record established by this study is of Browns living in Mannington, Salem County, New Jersey, on June 5, 1729, where they were part of a Scotch-Irish immigration. (Some­ one has written of the Scotch-Irish as being "neither fish, flesh nor fowl"-but more pleasing is the characterization given by Samuel Brown in 1875: "A people firm and resolute in their 2 purposes, and tenacious of their rights." ) In Professor Ley­ bum's The Scotch-Irish 3 we read that those in Scotland who accepted grants of land in northern Ireland around 1600 from the then Scottish King James became the ancestors of all Scotch-Irish in America-humble folk with ambition and qualities of character that made them good pioneers. They came two hundred thousand strong in the Eighteenth Century -those Lowland Scots who had moved to Ulster. Professor Leyburn's introduction takes us down a peg when we read: "The search for aristocrats among the early Scotch-Irish will prove futile." In A. M. Prichard's Mead Relations,4 from which we get some of our authoritative data, we read: "The writer of the foregoing manuscript ( the J. T. B. letter) ... has presented to posterity a splendid account of the traditional history of the A Virginia Heritage family as he, doubtless, received it from his forebears; but when he wrote he did not have that incomparable compilation of Lyman Chalkley's abstracts from the records of Augusta County, Virginia ... so that now it is possible to sit comfortably at home and gather within a few hours what previously re­ quired weeks to compile." (See Lyman Chalkley, Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish Settlement in Virginia) 3 v.; Rosslyn, Va., I gr 2.) There is no evidence of relationship between New Jersey Browns and the first Virginia settlers, who in those days of difficult travel would not, conceivably, have moved to New Jersey and back, so let us be satisfied with this beginning in the early seventeen hundreds. An interesting sidelight on the period is that in 1676 a group of Quakers succeeded in buying patents for settlement in West Jersey, this area having been disposed of by the Duke of York to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, then neglected until the Quakers by above mentioned arrangements were allowed to found Burlington in r 677, many coming from New England to New Jersey and forming homesteads in defi­ ance of Catholic James II. It was from East New Jersey, though, that your great-great­ great-great-grandfather Brown came to Virginia with an ever increasing migration from there and from Pennsylvania. Ac­ cording to Joseph A. Waddell's Annals of Augusta County) Virginia) Beverley and Borden were indefatigable in introduc­ ing settlers from Europe, both directly and through their very efficient agent, James Patton. We read in Colonial Virginia 5 that the first large grant of land in the Valley, south of Shen­ andoah-James River divide, was made in 1735 to Benjamin Borden, who thus secured about a hundred thousand acres. His factor, James Patton,(a) a native of Northern Ireland, had come to America many times with Irish immigrants and (a) Colonel James Patton (1692-1755) "was killed by the Indians at Draper's Meadow, now Blacksburg, in 1755." (Robert Douthat Stoner, A Seed-Bed of the Republic [Roanoke, Va., 1962] pp. 307, 312.) [ 2] was interested in settling the more desirable in what was then Augusta County, extending from the Blue Ridge to Virginia's western border-later broken up to include Orange County, North Carolina, as well as Botetourt, Lunenburg (now Bed­ ford), Ba th, Highland, and other counties in Virginia. The first Henry Brown of whom we have knowledge is men­ tioned in the New Jersey Archives as having received a bequest on July 21, 1682, from Moses Taylor. And from that same source we learn that in 1692 / 3 there were bequests from Sarah Lawrence to her cousin Esther Brown and a sister ...... Brown. We do not know the name of Henry's first wife, but could it be that she was the sister mentioned in Sarah Law­ rence's will? We do know that his second wife was Esther­ apparently the cousin referred to. By his first wife Henry Brown had four children: Henry (1712-1798), Samuel (1717-1750), Daniel (1720-1797), and David (1723-........ ), undoubtedly all born in New Jersey. By the second wife there were: Thomas, (b) who later owned eighty-seven acres between Peter's Creek and Mason's Creek of the Roanoke; Robert, who also later lived on Mason's Creek; and Esther, ( c) who at the time of her marriage owned prop­ erty on Lick Run of Mason's Creek. It is probable that the first Henry moved south before 1740, for he was designated as a "runaway" in July 1734, when Ann Grant of New Jersey brought suit against him, claiming debt against her husband's estate. Court records of Augusta County, Virginia, refer to the suit in November 1753 as against Henry Brown, Yeoman, ( d) of Mannington, New Jersey. The plaintiff (b) Married Mary Terry. (c) Married William Carlton in the spring of 1762 when he had a tract adjoin­ ing Esther's. (d) Philip L. Barbour in The Three Worlds of ]ohn Smith calls Smith "Yeoman," "which word now signifieth among us a man well at ease and having honestlie to live, and yet not a gentleman." Columbia University Press says that in early days the yeoman was below but next to the leisure class and was a "freeholder who farmed his own small holding." [3] A Virginia Heritage being called but "non-suited," the defendant was awarded five shillings and recovery of all costs, so we have nothing to worry about in this connection! Nor need we be dismayed by the term "runaway." In those days anyone who moved from one colony to another was looked upon askance, or at least as wandering afar.