Lineage, Land, and Legacy: Early Northern Neck Families and Their Beginnings

By Walker Hatch, Spring 2025 Intern

Learn about some of the early planter families of the Northern Neck, researched and written by our 2025 Spring intern, Walker Hatch.

As the economic viability of the Virginia colony became clear, prominent lineages of English gentlemen took notice. After the South bank of the Potomac River was officially patented by the Virginia colony in 1648, those fleeing from the conflict in Maryland fled South, across the river, and into Westmoreland County. This is the context in which three prominent Northern Neck/Northern Neck-adjacent families established their lineage — the Washingtons, Taliaferros, and Lees (the focus of my research).

 

Detail of Nathaniel Pope & George Washington early land patent. Source: Historical Atlas of Westmoreland County by David W. Eaton

 

Col. Richard Lee I, Esq. (1618-1664), artist unknown

John Washington, the establishing patriarch of the Washington lineage in America and direct ancestor to George Washington, built a house on land acquired through his father-in-law as early as 1660. The patriarch of the Lee family, Richard “The Immigrant” Lee, came to the Virginia colony in 1635, and quickly established himself in politics and tobacco cultivation. Richard Lee began purchasing lands in the NNK as soon as 1653, coming to own thousands of acres in the region. By his death in 1664, he was the largest landholder in the colony, with 13,000 acres owned by him. Another prominent patriarch— Robert Taliaferro — owned vaste acreage in the NNK. Robert Taliaferro immigrated to the Virginia Colony in as early as 1647, and co-purchased 6,300 acres of land in the NNK with Lawrence Smith. All three of these men would become prominent tobacco planters with deep economic and political ties to the NNK region.

After the Anglo-Powhatan War of 1644, the land North of the York River was seen as a frontier, largely “untamed.” However, Native American tribes in the Northern Neck called this region home, and their forcible removal was considered necessary to achieve the goals of families like the Taliaferros, Washingtons, and Lees. In 1670, John Catlett (another prominent planter patriarch) is believed to have been killed by Natives near one of Robert Taliaferro’s homes, Taliaferro's Mount, during a “raid.” All three founding patriarchs of the Washington, Lee, and Taliaferro families were involved in some way with the martial apparatuses of the Virginia Colony. These apparatuses were most often engaged in conflict with Natives of the area, securing land and thwarting threats. Family tradition holds that Robert Taliaferro himself died of wounds sustained during the same “Indian raid” that took Catlett’s life.

All three families can also trace their origins back to England, where they enjoyed highly prestigious titles dating back hundreds of years. According to the traditional rules of primogeniture, the second and third born sons of men of consequence would either enter the clergy or the military. The founding patriarchs of the Washingtons, Lees, and Taliaferros were all not first-born, and thus they were relegated to carry on their family’s lineage in the New World. While they may have not been inheritors of land or title in England, they still held the prestige and backing of their respective family a certain number of properties that would turn a profit (such as a plantation), with their manors often serving as cruxes for the politics of the day. The backbreaking work of clearing the densely wooded lands of the NNK was performed first by indentured servants paying off their passage to the colony, but as the economies of the area developed it became clear more labor was needed. There is no doubt planters of the NNK owned enslaved Native Americans, but these Natives were very likely not from the immediate area. The Native slave trade network functioned in this way traditionally, and it can be assumed any enslaved Natives purchased for their capacity for labor in the NNK were likely not from Virginia. This being said, the chattel slavery we typically imagine when using the word “slave” was not institutionalized in the way it would later be in the mid-1700s, thus there is room for the variability of the nature of their enslavement. The planters of Virginia pivoted away from indentured servitude and Native enslavement, instead turning towards the enslavement of Africans.

Front door keystone of the Menokin house, owned by Francis Lightfoot Lee. The designs are of tobacco leaves and flowers. Stored at the Menokin Foundation.

The woodlands that once covered the NNK were felled en masse by those in bondage. To do this, those laborers had to fight through the brush, fell stands of trees, haul the lumber out, pull out stumps and roots, clear debris, level the area, etc. This alone is years of labor, not to mention the subsequent labor in those fields the enslaved cleared. Some of this process may be skirted by a common colonial process, that of appropriating the fields cleared by Natives for hunting, agriculture, or settlement. Of course, this led to land disputes, as these clearings could be rather extensive and prime for homesteading/European agriculture. As you can imagine, the colonial thirst for land often led to violent interactions with the Natives. On top of experiencing the violence of enslavement, those in bondage also had to reckon with the realities of Native hostility toward colonists. This tension is evident in the enslaved black population and indentured servant black population participating in Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), even after 1640 when slavery began being institutionalized in Virginia. As the despicable practice grew more and more established, the extent and intensity of chattel slavery grew in the NNK.

The founding patriarchs of the Lee, Washington, and Talliaferros were successful in their attempts to establish their historic families in the New World. Their wealth was built on settler-colonial violence and enslavement of both Natives and Africans. These prominent men all made calculated, apathetic, and unjust decisions in enslaving both the Natives and Africans. By the turn of the eighteenth century, chattel slavery was officially institutionalized in Colonial Virginia. The wealth rendered from slave labor and land speculation made the Taliaferros, Lees, and Washingtons of the NNK/NNK area very wealthy. The wealth was passed on as land became more desired; and the land held by these planter families became more profitable. Tobacco continued to be the primary cash crop in the NNK up until the birth of the eventual owner of Menokin, Francis Lightfoot Lee, in 1734.

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