The Cultural History of Marlborough, Virginia. C. Malcolm Watkins
the present circumstances of the Country) be very injurious & burthensome to the Inhabitants thereof and traders thereunto.”[15] Doubtless dictated by the Board of Trade in London, the recommendation was a defeat for those who, like Fitzhugh, sought by the establishment of towns to break tobacco’s strangle-hold on Virginia.
THE ACT FOR PORTS OF 1705 AND THE NAMING OF MARLBOROUGH
Nevertheless, the town idea was hard to kill. In 1705 Stafford’s port town, along with those in the other counties, was given a new lease on life when still another Act for Ports, introduced by Robert Beverley, was passed. This Act repeated in substance the provisions of its immediate forerunner, but provided in addition extravagant inducements to settlement. Those who inhabited the towns were exempted from three-quarters of the customs duties paid by others; they were freed of poll taxes for 15 years; they were relieved from military mustering outside the towns and from marching outside, excepting the “exigency” of war (and then only for a distance of no more than 50 miles). Goods and “dead provision” were not to be sold outside within a 5-mile radius, and ordinaries (other than those within the towns) were not permitted closer than 10 miles to the towns’ boundaries, except at courthouses and ferry landings. Each town was to be a free “burgh,” and, when it had grown to 30 families “besides ordinary keepers,” “eight principal inhabitants” were to be chosen by vote of the “freeholders and inhabitants of the town of twenty-one years of age and upwards, not being servants or apprentices,” to be called “benchers of the guild-hall.” These eight “benchers” would govern the town for life or until removal, selecting a “director” from among themselves. When 60 families had settled, “brethren assistants of the guild hall” were to be elected similarly to serve as a common council. Each town was to have two market days a week and an annual five-day fair. The towns listed under the Act were virtually the same as before, but this time each was given an official name, the hitherto anonymous town for Stafford being called Marlborough in honor of the hero of the recent victory at Blenheim.[16]
The elaborate vision of the Act’s sponsors never was realized in the newly christened town, but there was in due course a slight resumption of activity in it. George Mason and William Fitzhugh, Jr. (the son of William Fitzhugh of Stafford County) were appointed feoffees in 1707, and a new survey was made by Thomas Gregg. The following year seven more lots were granted, and for an interval of two years Marlborough functioned technically as an official port.[17]
Inevitably, perhaps, history repeated itself. In 1710 the Act for Ports, like its predecessors, was rescinded. The reasons given in London were brief and straightforward; the Act, it was explained, was “designed to Encourage by great Priviledges the settling in Townships.” These settlements would encourage manufactures, which, in turn, would promote “further Improvement of the said manufactures, And take them off from the Planting of Tobacco, which would be of Very Ill consequence,” thus lessening the colony’s dependence on the Kingdom, affecting the import of tobacco, and prejudicing shipping.[18] Clearly, the Crown did not want the towns to succeed, nor would it tolerate anything which might stimulate colonial self-dependence. The Virginia colonists’ dream of corporate communities was not to be realized.
Most of the towns either died entirely or struggled on as crossroads villages. A meager few have survived to the present, notably Norfolk, Hampton, Yorktown, and Tappahannock. Marlborough lasted as a town until about 1720, but in about 1718 the courthouse and several dwellings were destroyed by fire and “A new Court House being built at another Place, all or most of the Houses that had been built in the said Town, were either burnt or suffered to go to ruin.”[19]
The towns were artificial entities, created by acts of assembly, not by economic or social necessity. In the few places where they filled a need, notably in the populous areas of the lower James and York Rivers, they flourished without regard to official status. In other places, by contrast, no law or edict sufficed to make them live when conditions did not warrant them. In sparsely settled Stafford especially there was little to nurture a town. It was easier, and perhaps more exciting, to grow tobacco and gamble on a successful crop, to go in debt when things were bad or lend to the less fortunate when things were better. In the latter case land became an acceptable medium for the payment of debts. Land was wealth and power, its enlargement the means of greater production of tobacco—tobacco again the great gamble by which one would always hope to rise and not to fall. When one could own an empire, why should one worry about a town?
ESTABLISHING COURTHOUSES
The administrative problems that contributed to the establishment of the port towns also called for the erection of courthouses. As early as 1624 lower courts had been authorized for Charles City and Elizabeth City in recognition of the colony’s expansion, and ten years later the colony had been divided into eight counties, with a monthly court established in each. By the Restoration the county courts possessed broadly expanded powers and were the administrative as well as the judicial sources of local government. In practice they were largely self-appointive and were responsible for filling most local offices. Since the courts were the vehicles of royal authority, it followed that the physical symbols of this authority should be emphasized by building proper houses of government. At Jamestown orders were given in 1663 to build a statehouse in lieu of the alehouses and ordinaries where laws had been made previously.[20]
In the same year, four courthouses annually were ordered for the counties, the burgesses having been empowered to “make and Signe agreements wth any that will undertake them to build, who are to give good Caution for the effecting thereof with good sufficient bricks, Lime, and Timber, and that the same be well wrought and after they are finished to be approved by an able surveyor, before order be given them for their pay.”[21] Such buildings were to take the place of private dwellings and ordinaries in the same way as did the statehouse at Jamestown. It was no accident that legislation for houses of government coincided with that for establishing port towns. Each reflected the need for administering the far-flung reaches of the colony and for maintaining order and respect for the crown in remote places.
THE COURTHOUSE IN THE PORT TOWN FOR STAFFORD COUNTY
Stafford County, which had been set off from Westmoreland in 1664, was provided with a courthouse within a year of its establishment. Ralph Happel in Stafford and King George Courthouses and the Fate of Marlborough, Port of Entry, has given us a detailed chronicle of the Stafford courthouses, showing that the first structure was situated south of Potomac Creek until 1690, when it presumably burned.[22] The court, in any event, began to meet in a private house on November 12, 1690, while on November 14 one Sampson Darrell was appointed chief undertaker and Ambrose Bayley builder of a new courthouse. A contract was signed between them and the justices of the court to finish the building by June 10, 1692, at a cost of 40,000 pounds of tobacco and cash, half to be paid in 1691 and the remainder upon completion.[23]
With William Fitzhugh the presiding magistrate of the Stafford County court as well as cosponsor of the Act for Ports, it was foreordained that the new courthouse should be tied in with plans for the port town. The Act for Ports, however, was still in the making, and it was not possible to begin the courthouse until after its passage in the spring. On June 10, 1691, it was “Ordered by this Court that Capt. George Mason and Mr. Blande the Surveyor shall immediately goe and run over the ground where the Town is to Stand and that they shall then advise and direct Mr Samson Darrell the Cheife undertaker of the Court house for this County where he shall Erect and build the same.”[24]