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Dear Mr. and Mrs. Franklin,

Although you have been so busy living the newest chapter in the history of Oak Hill that you have not had time nor inclination to look into its past, there are indications you might be interested in knowing more about it. I refer especially to your own observations about the construction of your house and the route of the abandoned roadbed in front and your careful preservation of the inscriptions on the tombstones in back copied by Mrs. Lightbown and the family history brought by Miss Sallie Lane Lewis in 1938. Consequently I would like to share with you the story which has been pieced together using your information as a basis. We begin with

THE LAND ITSELF

When the first settlers began to clear the area where you live, in the 1730's, Fairfax County had not yet been carved out of Prince William County to the south. Lord Fairfax's agent, Robert "King" Carter, had given out large tracts of land for settlement to various individuals, who in turn usually leased or sold portions of their grants to people who wanted to start farms. All these grants have been plotted and overlaid on a map of modern Fairfax County by Beth Mitchell. she further discusses them in a Fairfax County History Publication called Beginning at a White Oak which accompanies the map. In case you don't have a copy, I will bring mine along when Elizabeth David and I come Friday.

In trying to trace the ownership of Oak Hill Farm we are concerned with three of these grants or patents as they were called. The first is called the Piney Ridge tract which belonged to Robert Carter, Jr. As you will see from Beth Mitchell's map, your house would appear to be in this tract. However, I can find no Carter leases for that tract in Prince William, Fairfax or Loudoun County records. We might expect to find them in these three places, because in 1742 Fairfax County was carved out of Prince William; and, in 1757, Loudoun County was separated from Fairfax. For forty years, from 1757 to 1797, the area west of Difficult Run, where your farm is, was part of Loudoun.

As Beth Mitchell points out, those early surveys of the patent boundaries were not always too accurate by our standards, so it would appear the Carter's grant should be a little farther north than it has been placed on her map, which puts you in the Awbrey-Tayloe-Turberville grant. Before we leave Piney Ridge, however, you might be interested to note that on Mrs. Mitchell's overlay map Wet Ox Road runs straight along the patent boundary between Carter and Tayloe. There was quite a drawn-out lawsuit over the division of the tract among Carter's heirs; and, according to an 1822 survey made in connection with this, Ox Road is shown looping to the south of the boundary at one point, very possibly where the abandoned road runs in front of your house. (Proceedings in Land Causes, Vol. 2, p.135)

This brings us to the grant in which your house is located immediately to the south of Carter's Piney Ridge. This property was first granted to Francis Awbrey in 1725. He sold it to Colonel John Tayloe in 1730, and Tayloe sold it to George Turberville at a date yet to be discovered. Turberville had a 4,142 acre patent adjoining Tayloe's to the south, which also comes into the story and into which some of your farmland today may fall.

LANDOWNERS AND THEIR TENANTS

As you may remember, Sallie Lane Lewis' Uncle Ben Higgs told her that "Oak Hill" had been given to another Sally Lane, born almost 200 years ago, by her father William Lane when she married Benjamin Higgs in 1816. Therefore, I was looking not only for leases on the site of your house from the land grant owner, but for a Lane purchase of the land.

In his will, recorded on page 110 of Fairfax County Will Book J-1 on February 11, 1808, William Carr Lane, Sr., did indeed "give and bequeath to my daughter Sally Rooles (alternate spelling of Rowles) 298 acres of land called Oakhill and including to make up that quantity 83 acres which had been leased by John Turberville to my father James Lane.....also the following slaves: Beck and her infant, Jack, Henry and Anna, also the furnishings which were part of her dowry." William Carr Lane, Sr., had several other children to whom he gave like portions, so you can see he was one the prosperous landowners of that time. The inventory of his estate, also recorded in Will Book J-1, beginning on p. 224, shows him to have been the owner of 33 slaves valued at over $6,000 and personal property such as farm equipment and household furnishings valued at almost $9,000.

Since Lane mentioned his father James Lane had leased land from the Turbervilles, I looked to see if he might have acquired the land on which your house is built. The only early entry was in Price William County Deed Book E on page 146, which showed that James Lane leased a 142-acre plantation on which he was then living from From George Turberville in 1740. This was on Turberville's 4,142-acre tract to the south of Awbrey-Tayloe. There were three other leases for small plantations (150 acres apiece) recorded by Turberville on that tract at almost the same time, one to a William Lane, who was probably James' brother or cousin. These leases were usually given for three lives: those of the husband, his "present" wife (because women so often died in childbirth in those days, I think), and the eldest son if there was one. This practice is very useful to us today. In the case of James Lane we can match up the names of the wife and son to be sure we are following the same person.

The James Lane who leased from Turberville in 1740 had a wife named Lydia and a son named Aaron. The Major James Lane whose will was probated in Loudoun County in 1794 (Will Book B, pp. 212-214) had a wife (still) named Lydia and a son named Aaron, as well as sons Moses, James, Jr., and William and several daughters.

James Lane was the only one of the four 1740 lessees who eventually bought his plantation. His son William Carr Lane had to go to court to get the title transferred and recorded (Fairfax County Deed Book E-2. p. 466), which leads us to an 18th century practice which is not helpful today.

They were sadly negligent about recording title transfers. There are several of William Carr Lane's land holdings acquired from Turberville listed in the Fairfax County Tax Rools of 1798-1816 for which I can find no purchase deeds, including the two which make up the 298 acres of Oak Hill Farm. The basic tract of "land called Oakhill" under Lane's name in the 1798 tax rolls was 213 acres acquired from Turberville and valued at $2.41 an acre. The 1797 and before Loudoun County tax rolls, which might tell us when he bought it, are unfortunately dim and illegible on microfilm, although the originals in the State Library at Richmond might be more readable. We can be sure this is the "land called Oakhill" (1) because it is the only tract of the acreage (in 1805 the listing changed to 215, perhaps they took a survey), and (2) because in 1811 after Lane's estate had been settled, this land was transferred from his name to that of Joseph E. Rolls (Rowles), his son-in-law, along with 83 acres subtracted from a 335 acre tract "from Turberville", for which there is likewise no sale or lease in the records.

Again going back to Miss Lewis' information, you may remember that Joseph e. Rowles died of typhus in Georgetown in 1811. In 1814, the Land Tax Records show "oak Hill Farm" as the property of the heirs of Joseph Rolls, who are "scattered", and in 1816, their "place of residence is not known." Which brings us to the final part of the history:

THE HOUSE AND ITS INHABITANTS

So far we can't be sure who built the house and when. If Miss Lewis' oral history tradition from the Lanes is correct, the house was 200 years old or more in 1938, but we can't document that yet. Could it have been Colonel Tayloe who built Oak Hill when he took over the patent form Awbrey? Beth Mitchell cites the Loose Surveys in the Virginia State Library which contain one made in 1740 showing Colonel Tayloe's quarters. She also states there was one overseer and eight black titheables living on his patent (p. 259). Tayloe was making a real effort to settle the land as the proprietor required, but whether the quarters were a house he built for himself, the record doesn't say.

If Tayloe did build the house for himself and then decided not to live there and sold it, could Major James Lane have lived there? Beth Mitchell reports Lane was an agent for Robert Carter and surveyed his grants; and a Loudoun County lease shows him acting as "attourney in fact" for Carter. (Deed Book F-1, p. 137) James Lane's will doesn't say exactly where he lived, but in the accounting given by his executor, there is mention of money paid to Richard Bland Lee for wine furnished Mrs. Lydia Lane in her last illness, so the Lee papers might furnish information. William Carr Lane, James Lane's son, lived at Burlington plantation near Centreville, which he left to his son, William Carr lane, Jr.

It appears fairly certain that the house was there when the land is listed on the Fairfax County Tax Rolls beginning in 1798, because (1) the value does not change over the years up to and including the time after Sarah lane Rowles married Benjamin Higgs in 1816 and went to live at Oak Hill Farm according to her son, and (2) because of the tombstones in back of the house dated 1805 and 1806 at the earliest. The information Mrs. Lightbown copied from the tombstones is very interesting. It leads us to more of the story of the William Carr Lane family, which would have furnished good material for Dickens or Trollope or Thackery. Not so much for American novelists of that period, because, while Oak Hill Farm has its ups and downs, it is not so melancholy as "House of the Seven Gables."

THE LANE DAUGHTERS AND THE FITZHUGH HEIR

Sarah Lane Rowles Higgs was not the first of William Lane's daughters to marry Joseph Rowles and live in the house at Oak Hill Farm. Hannah Eskridge Rowles, who is buried behind the house with her infant son, William Carr Rowles, was Sarah's sister; and she, too, was married to Rowles. Hannah had been married before, probably when she was 16 or 17, to Nathaniel Fitzhugh, who died in 1800. (Loudoun County Deed Book Y-334 and Fairfax County Will Book E-1, p. 151) Fitzhugh's will specified that his plantation of "Ridgefield", 1,000 acres straddling the Fairfax-Loudoun line along Horsepen Run, was to be divided between his wife and their son, John, then an infant. Hannah was to have the half containing the house, but apparently she did not live there long after her husband's death.

Instead she married Joseph Rowles and moved to Oak Hill, taking John with her. Joseph and Hannah had a daughter, Julyan, who was gifted in her grandfather's will with the 800-pound debt owed William Lane by Joseph Rowles, to paid to her with interest on her 21st birthday. The only property that Joseph Evans Rowles bought in Fairfax County was a lot in the ill-fated town of Matildaville on the Potomac bypass canal (Fairfax County Deed Book A-2, p. 306 of 15 May 1798). He is described as the surviving partner of Joseph E. Rowles and Company of Georgetown at that period. (Re Mr. Robert Lyle, Georgetown Library reference specialist). Rowles in any event was not a member of the landowning families of southside Virginia, which may have been part of the trouble that developed.

When Rowles married Hannah, John Fitzhugh's mother, he became the boy's guardian, and he continued in that role after her death. According to his records, he did not take any money from Nathaniel Fitzhugh's estate for John's support. (Chancery Case of Fitzhugh vs. Lane, Final #30) That Joseph Rowles tried to make a go of farming at Oak Hill is evident from the accounts of John Fitzhugh's subsequent guardian, his grandmother Sarah Lane, widow of William. Mrs. Lane bought livestock and equipment from the sale of Rowles' possessions after his death to be used at "Ridgefield." (Fitzhugh vs. Lane)

Not everyone in the family was happy with Rowles' management of the little boy's sizable estate, however. The Fairfax County Court Minutes show that, beginning in 1803, Harrison Fitzhugh, husband of another William Lane daughter, Ann Carr, began to demand an accounting from John's guardian. What relation Harrison Fitzhugh was to John Fitzhugh was not stated, only, in the 1807-1808 Minutes, p. 365, that he styled himself the boy's "nearest friend."

In about 1807 Joseph Rowles married his wife's sister Sarah at Burlington. (Here Miss Lewis' date of 1809 must be wrong, since William Lane's will refers to his daughter as Sally Rooles in 1808), and in 1809 the formal requests for an accounting in the Court Minutes ceases. This may have been when Joseph Rowles decided to give up farming and go back to business in Georgetown, where the family history indicates he died of typhus in 1811.

You may remember from the 1814 and 1812 Tax Records that the Rowles did not go back to live at Oak Hill. If Sarah Lane Rowles and the children in her charge had remained in Georgetown after her husband's death, it seems odd that the Fairfax County tax collectors didn't know her whereabouts. Her 1816 accounting to the Orphans Court of the District of Columbia as executrix of Joseph Rowles' estate was through her attourney. (Chancery Case Fitzhugh vs. Lane Final #30 7 October 1834) The orphans in her charge were: her sister Hannah's two children, John Fitzhugh, whose room and board were paid from his estate by his grandmother and guardian, and Julyan Rowles, whose guardian after her father's death was Jeremiah Moore, the well-known Fairfax County Baptist preacher (Will Book K-1, p. 25, 20 July 1812), and her own two children by Joseph Rowles, Joseph R. and Susan, who was born after her father's death in March, 1812.

If Sarah Lane Rowles was not at Oak Hill or in Georgetown, it it possible she went to Baltimore, since her second husband, Benjamin F. Higgs, was a businessman from that city. The accounting for John Fitzhugh's estate shows a payment for stage fare to Baltimore in 1816. The 1775 census (Brumbaugh's Maryland Records from Original Sources re Mr. Lyle of the Georgetown Library) shows a Joseph, Mary and Matthew Rolles living on the Susquehanna Hundred, Harford County, outside Baltimore. The possibility is then that Sarah took the children and went to live near her late husband's family and there met Benjamin Higgs, whom she married at Burlington in 1816.

What happened to the house at Oak Hill Farm in the interim? Was it empty, or was it under the rental management of Sarah Lane, Sarah Rowles' mother? In the latter case the renters could have been unaware of the owner's whereabouts, since it did not concern them.

It is surprising that the little family cemetery behind the house does not have more headstones. Perhaps there were more and they were lost. Three of the Higgs children died at Oak Hill: two apparently in childhood, Lydia in 1825 and William Henry in 1830, and Charles Ford in 1847 when he was 16. Sarah's second husband, Benjamin Higgs, died in 1835, not long after the close of the Chancery Case, a family feud which must have been painful; and her son, Joseph R. Rowles, died in Florida in 1844. (Miss Lewis' ms.) It must have seemed to Sarah Higgs as if all her nearest and dearest were being taken away, because in her will, drawn up in 1849, she left Oak Hill Farm to her son Benjamin, "if he should live to be 21", and if not, it was to go to his younger brother Charles Ford, who died in Richmond in 1861. Sarah Higgs died at the end of the Civil War years in 1866. Her will also specified that Oak Hill should always be home for her daughters Julyana and Susan, while they needed it. (Will Book A-2, pp. 185-86) If these were Joseph Rowles' daughters mentioned earlier, they would have been middle-aged spinsters by 1849, so presumably they needed it. Miss Lewis' data does not tell us what happened to them.

Three of Benjamin and Sarah Higgs' daughters married at Oak Hill, and their children became heirs of Oak Hill Farm; since, while Benjamin Higgs lived to be not only 21, but 86, he and his wife had no children. His niece, Sallie Lane Lewis, who compiled the family history, was one of the granddaughters of Caroline Higgs and William F. Lee, married in 1843 at Oak Hill, instead of, as one might first think, a granddaughter of Julia Higgs and Francis M. Lewis, who were married at Oak Hill in 1853. Elizabeth Ford Higgs and Benjamin Rose were married at Oak Hill in 1848 and went to live in Texas.

You may have acquired Albion, the home of William F. and Caroline Higgs Lee when you bought the Leight Lawrence Tract #1. The Higgs, Lewis' and Lees seem to have been a close and happy family, witness Miss Lewis' account of Uncle Ben's 85th birthday party. At his death in 1917, the continuity of ownership of Oak Hill Farm, dating from the late 18th century, came to an end.

The intervening century had not been kind to Fairfax County farmers. The first settlers, such as James Lane, had tobacco plantations worked by slaves. This wore out the land, and there was a general exodus in the 1820's and 1830's. (Fairfax County, Virginia: A History by Netherton et al, pp. 161-65) William Carr Lane, Jr. died in Scott County, Kentucky, around 1830. Harrison and Ann Carr Lane Fitzhugh must have been in the same area, for they sold their interest in Lane's Fairfax County plantation of Burlington to a John Bryce who acted as attourney in fact for the heirs at the 1831 sale of the 500-acre estate to Alexander Grigsby for $750.00. (Fairfax County Deed Book Z-2, pp. 229-31.) John Fitzhugh and his wife sold Ridgefield, which must now be part of Dulles Airport or its access road, in 1833 for about $1,200. (Deed Book A-3, pp. 469 and 487-88.)

Sarah Lane Rowles Higgs was one of the descendants of early Fairfax County settlers who hung on to her inheritance and adjusted to what must have been a lesser standard of living. The inventory of her property, her husband's and son's, indicates they ran Oak Hill as a small general farm. There were always several cows and horses, in one case, an ox, and various assorted ploughs and farm equipment. One item in Mrs. Higgs' inventory, was a carriage and harness valued at $100, far above the ploughs at $5 and horses at $30, perhaps representing bygone days of greater affluence. It seems strange, too, that the son of this widow of two businessmen and granddaughter of an 18th century surveyor, could only sign his will with an "X". (Will Book 2-8, p. 488). Public education did not come to Thomas Jefferson's home state until 1870.

The 298 acres of Oak Hill in 1808 had dwindled to 233 by 1917. After further subdivision, 100 acres went with the house when you bought it.

Farming at Oak Hill was on a very small scale in the 1920's, according to Mr. Joseph Beard, who went to school with the children of R.W. Higdon, Oak Hill owner from 1922 to 1934. Mr. Beard remembers that Mr. Higdon was a widower with five or six children. To make ends meet, Higdon did small general farming at Oak Hill and worked as a day laborer on the side.

The manner in which you have turned Oak Hill Farm into a successful, larger operation, Mr. and Mrs. Franklin, resembles putting Humpty Dumpty together again, although probably not with the same acreage. That it may soon be fragmented in a different way for different reasons proves that history doesn't repeat itself exactly.

In passing on the information you have about the house and it owners, you have added valuable information about other forgotten names and plantations of Fairfax County. Ridgefield, Burlington and Albion, as well as Oak Hill, were not indexed in our historical records. Since many descendants of old County families come back to ask the record keepers at the Courthouse for help, they are happy to have your dates to add to their store of knowledge.

Please do ask any questions you may have when Mrs. David and I come to see you on Friday. And again many thanks for your help and contribution to Fairfax County historical fact gathering.

Sincerely,

Mrs. S.J. Evans

The Franklin Farm Foundation - 12700 Franklin Farm Rd - Oak Hill, VA  20171
Phone:  703-620-6230     Fax:  703-620-9021     E-Mail:  foundation@franklinfarm.org
Map of Franklin Farm      Map of the foundation office at the above address

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