The Cultural History of Marlborough, Virginia. C. Malcolm Watkins
else on the basis of the Buckner survey seems not to have been noted at the time. Rude houses placed informally and connected by lanes and footpaths, the courthouse attempting to dominate them like a village schoolmaster in a class of country bumpkins, a few outbuildings, a boat landing or two, some cultivated land, and a road leading away from the courthouse to the north with another running in the opposite direction to the creek—this is the way Marlborough must have looked even in its best days in 1708.
THE DEATH OF MARLBOROUGH AS A TOWN
Could this poor village have survived had the courthouse not burned? It was an unhappy contrast to the vision of a town governed by “benchers of the guild hall,” bustling with mercantile activity, swarming on busy market days with ordinaries filled with people. This fantasy may have pulsated briefly through the minds of a few. But, after the abrogation of the Port Act in 1710, there was little left to justify the town’s existence other than the courthouse. So long as court kept, there was need for ordinaries and ferries and for independent jacks-of-all-trades like Andrews. But with neither courthouse nor port activity nor manufacture, the town became a paradox in an economy and society of planters.
Remote and inaccessible, uninhabited by individuals whose skills could have given it vigor, Marlborough no longer had any reason for being. It lingered on for a short time, but when John Mercer came to transform the abandoned village into a flourishing plantation, “Most of the other Buildings were suffered to go to Ruin, so that in the year 1726, when your Petitioner [i.e., Mercer] went to live there, but one House twenty-feet square was standing.”[48]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia (New York, 1823), vol. 2, pp. 172–176.
[2] Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 471–478.
[3] William Fitzhugh was founder of the renowned Virginia family that bear his name. As chief justice of the Stafford County court, burgess, merchant, and wealthy planter, he epitomized the landed aristocrat in 17th-century Virginia. See “Letters of William Fitzhugh,” Virginia Magazine of History & Biography (Richmond, 1894), vol. 1, p. 17 (hereinafter designated VHM), and William Fitzhugh and His Chesapeake World (1676–1701), edit. Richard Beale Davis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, for the Virginia Historical Society, 1963).
[4] VHM, op. cit., p. 30.
[5] Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, edit. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1947), p. 88; Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia, 2nd ed. (New York: P. Smith, 1935), vol. 2, pp. 553–554.
[6] Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia (hereinafter designated JHB) 1659/60–1693, edit. H. R. McIlwaine (Richmond, Virginia: Virginia State Library, 1914), pp. 303, 305, 308, 315.
[7] “Letters of William Fitzhugh,” VHM (Richmond, 1895), vol. 2, pp. 374–375.
[8] JHB 1659/60–1693, op. cit. (footnote 6), p. 351.
[9] Hening, op. cit. (footnote 1), vol. 3, pp. 53–69.
[10] Stafford County Order Book, 1689–1694 (MS bound with order book for 1664–1688, but paginated separately), pp. 175, 177, 180, 189.
[11] “Mills,” VHM (Richmond, 1903), vol. 10, pp. 147–148.
[12] John Mercer’s Land Book (MS., Virginia State Library).
[13] JHB, 1742–1747; 1748–1749 (Richmond, 1909), pp. 285–286.
[14] Stafford County Order Book, 1689–1694, pp. 184, 357.
[15] Hening, op. cit. (footnote 1), vol. 3, pp. 108–109.
[16] Ibid., pp. 404–419.
[17] “Petition of John Mercer” (1748), (Ludwell papers, Virginia Historical Society), VHM (Richmond, 1898), vol. 5, pp. 137–138.
[18] Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, 1652–1781, edit. William P. Palmer, M.D. (Richmond, 1875), vol. 1, pp. 137–138.
[19] JHB, 1742–1747; 1748–1749 (Richmond, 1909), pp. 285–286.
[20] Hening, op. cit. (footnote 1), vol. 2, pp. 204–205.
[21] JHB, (1659/60–1693), op. cit. (footnote 6), p. 28.
[22] Ralph Happel, “Stafford and King George Courthouses and the Fate of Marlborough, Port of Entry,” VHM (Richmond, 1958), vol. 66, pp. 183–194.
[23] Stafford County Order Book, 1689–1694, p. 187.
[24] Ibid., p. 122.
[25] William Fitzhugh and His Chesapeake World (1676–1701), op. cit. (footnote 3), p. 241.
[26] Stafford County Order Book, 1689–1694, p. 194.
[27] Ibid., p. 182.
[28] In Virginia recurrent English fears of Catholic domination were reflected at this time in hysterical rumors that the Roman Catholics of Maryland were plotting to stir up the Indians against Virginia. In Stafford County these suspicions were inflamed