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Early History of
the Calmes Neck Area |
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.Indian
settlement
Indians inhabited this area from 9000
BC to just before whites came here--they got
the word somehow. It was the late 17th Century
that the Indians, for reasons still unknown,
left the valley but used it as a hunting
ground. The Delaware to the north and the
Shoshonees to the south came here to hunt. We
know they burned the valley in the fall. Using
westerly winds, they would start the fires
near Waterloo and burn the valley down to the
rivers edge. All the game had gathered at the
edge of the river. There are a great deal of
Indian relics, and there are still people who
go down there. I find most today are searching
with electronics for Civil War relics instead
of Indian relics.
.
How my
ancestors got here
Everything good starts when you chop
off a king's head. In 1649, my ancestors
chopped off Charles I. If Charles head had not
been chopped off, I certainly would not be
here. The young Charles Prince of Wales went
to Flanders (Belgium today), and with him went
several faithful lords and ladies. One named
Culpeper, who for his fidelity was later given
by Charles II what was called the Northern
Neck--all of the land between the Potomac and
the Rappahannock. The Rappahannock only goes
up into the top of the Blue Ridge down near
Rappadan; the Potomac as you know goes through
and across, and you can at least on paper make
claim to anything from here to the
Alleghenies. Culpeper's daughter married Lord
Fairfax and their son was the one who came
here later, Thomas Lord Fairfax.
.
In our case, two
of my ancestors, Robert Carter and Thomas Lee,
were agents of Fairfax here. I must say that
it sounds like real estate agents in those
days were no better than those today. Carter
ended up with more property than Fairfax had.
As a result they called him King Carter. He
was the biggest man in the real estate
business at the time. He had a grant from
Fairfax for 50,000 acres on the other side of
the river. It basically went from the river to
the Old Chapel, in fact almost to Berryville,
and up to the Boyce railway track, and up to
old Cook's garage, the rise between here and
Winchester, to new Route 50, and back to the
river.
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Fairfax had also
divided his land into manors. There was the
Manor of Leeds, which was on this side of the
river. Leeds was the name of Fairfax's castle
back in the Shire of Kent in England. It was
this Manor of Leeds from which Calmes Neck
became a grant.
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Terms of
leases
The terms for the leases in those
days were interesting. You either leased from
Fairfax for 21 years or three lives, that is
for yours, your spouses, and a child's life,
and there could be other combinations with
grandchildren. After three lives it reverted
back. There were conditions for the lease. You
had to build a house of at least 16 x 20 feet.
It had to have a basement and a chimney, brick
or stone. You had to plant a hundred fruit
trees. George Washington, who did much of the
surveying around here, in fact, always
recommended the planting of apple trees, and
that they be planted 33 feet apart. Apple
orchards are a big industry in the valley
today. The last requirement was that you had
to maintain a good fence around that orchard.
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Wording in surveys
The interesting
thing is to watch the surveys. The survey of
the Manor of Leeds portion, 25,000 acres here
running up the mountain, is dated 1730. A
survey might say "you go from an old tree".
One says not just from a sycamore or an old
oak, but "from a strange tree" to the lot
across the river. What in the world is a
strange tree? This particular survey made by
John Warner (not the incumbent) in 1736 on the
Manor of Leeds, including the Neck, said that
you went, in one case, from an "old hollow oak
tree to a mud hole in the Great Road". Someone
had commented on that survey that mud hole was
going to be there longer than the oak tree.
That was the problem. Apparently some of those
roads were absolutely incredible. Anyone who
came here commented on two things: the snakes
and the roads, and they were both bad.
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Importance of wheat farming
My family legend had it that an
ancestor of mine came up here from
Williamsburg and stayed here because of yellow
fever down there in Tidewater, and because
another king got his head cut off. Our family
has just benefited. If ever I see a king,
there is something about the neck that appeals
to me. Louis XVI got his head cut off and his
successors went to the usual excess, and there
resulted the Napoleonic Wars.
.
As in all wars,
the price of wheat went up. The price of wheat
going up in the 1790's and in the early 19th
century had an immense effect on this area.
This area was a breadbasket for the country
and for the British. And those "island farms",
as we call them across the way (McIntire owns
one and our foundation the other three), were
great producers of wheat, and this was true
all down along the river, and in other parts
of the valley later, as the price of wheat
became higher and higher.
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The wheat was
taken down the river. That is why two mills
were built. Great barges went down to Harpers
Ferry, and were broken apart there, and they
sold both the wheat and the wood of the
barges. The canal came in in about the 1830s,
and they went on down to Georgetown to what
was called the falls, where the great mills
were.
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In some ways
there was a connection here between the river
you live on and the Capitol of the United
States being where it is, because Alexandria
and Fredericksburg, VA were at one time among
the biggest ports in the United States.
Alexandria was the port for all the flour that
was milled at Georgetown from this breadbasket
here in the valley. It went to the West
Indies, to New England, and sometimes, during
the Napoleonic Wars when Bonaparte couldn't
control it, it went to England.
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Earlier
settlers of the Calmes Neck area
The point of this is that basically
the people came increasingly into the valley
in the 1790's. But there were already people
here. But who was here from the time of the
Grants? 1736 was when Calmes arrives and is
granted 500 acres in 1747. Who was here then?
That is a whole generation ahead of my family
coming here. Warner's map shows a small stone
cabin about where Kingdom Come is, and that is
the only structure noted on that survey on
this side of the river. Who lived in it we
have no idea. The other names going upriver
were Fishback, Timmers, and oodles of Ashbys,
around the Route 50 bridge and, as you know,
Ashby's Gap. It used to be Ashby's Ferry, and
then Berry's Ferry.
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Arrival
of the Calmes family
My family legend is that my ancestor
had invited from Williamsburg a Marquis de
Calmes, a French Huguenot, to set out a
vineyard for him in the 1790s after my
ancestor had moved up here. In fact, that
couldn't be true because we later learned
someone had dug up a tombstone just across the
river were the Sites live, opposite the end of
your Neck. The tombstone was that of Winifred
Calmes, who died in 1751. So the Calmes family
was not brought here 50 years later as the
Marquis de Calmes; they were here well before
my family arrived. What we now believe is that
there was a Huguenot refugee named Marquis
Calmes I, who came into Stafford County near
Fredericksburg at the beginning of the 18th
century.
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Marquis
Calmes II
He had a son born in 1705, Marquis
Calmes II, who worked his way up from
Fredericksburg, obviously lived at Mannassa
Gap, the mountain above Front Royal, because
that used to be called Calmes Gap. He arrived
and was one of the first circuit judges in
Winchester in the early 1750s, and bought one
of the first lots there (lot 16) from Col.
James Wood, who plotted Winchester when it was
incorporated. In 1747, he bought from Lord
Fairfax 500 acres at Calmes Neck.
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He was one of
the earliest settlers, because there was
hardly anyone here in the valley up to the
1730s. And he prospered. He was a judge in
Winchester, and had one of the four "chairs"
as they called them. A chair was a two-wheeled
carriage. He was in distinguished company,
because the only others were Lord Fairfax and
Joyce Hite, the other big landowner in the
west part of the Valley, and Col. James Wood.
Obviously Marquis Calmes II was a
distinguished person. He was born in 1705,
came here in the 1740s, and died in 1755.
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Where
did Calmes live?
The big mystery is where did he live?
There is no record that Calmes ever lived on
this side of the river. The strange thing is
that Dick Plater has discovered just below his
house, toward the river but still high up on
the bluff, ruins built with the old style
slate, about 6 inches thick, which you see
quarried near the run. These include
foundations of a house which is thought to be
the house where Marquis Calmes lived.
.
John Estin Cook
was a best-selling novelist in his day, just
before and after the Civil War. He lived in
the house where we live; his brother built it.
John Estin Cook, writing in 1851, a hundred
years after that period, wrote "Where did
Marquis Calmes live? Where you see the
threshing wheat near the tilthammer mill [that
is where the stream comes in across from your
beach; that was a sizeable settlement in the
18th Century] once stood the greatest tavern
in all these parts. The level there was the
racecourse ..."
.
Horse racing was
for the 18th Century gentlemen their greatest
source of recreation. We have a local
historian Alec Mackay-Smith who has just
published a book on the quarterhorse. The
quarterhorse was developed here in Virginia
largely because we couldn't clear the forest
for the classic English oval racetrack. They
took whatever open stretches they could find.
These bottom lands were ideal for it.
Quarterhorse racing prevailed. We have a brick
barn on Foundation land, presumably the oldest
brick barn west of the Blue Ridge mountains,
which was the stud barn for that breeding.
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"The level there
was the racecourse where now old fellows of
the county assemble to back their favorite
horses [this was written in 1851]. The tavern
was burnt down 20 years ago, in 1830. By the
tilthammer, beneath a group of lofty palm-like
trees were some obscure graves, the Huguenot
graves, no doubt a century old. See how the
moss has covered that obscure stone. That
Marquis Calmes lived on the Vineyard Farm
rests only on tradition however. There is no
known evidence that he leased it, and it is
certain that he never owned it."
.
There is no
known evidence that he lived on this side of
the river either. That settlement there had
not only the largest tavern in these parts but
it had a chapel, with a public cemetery.
Winifred Calmes' gravestone was moved to the
Old Chapel; his was so shattered it couldn't
be moved when discovered a hundred years ago.
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The
settlement across the river
There was a tilthammer mill where the
stream opposite your beach joins the river and
makes a falls. Col. Burwell had an iron ore
mine up here in the mountains. A tilthammer
mill works on the same principle as a grist
mill, and there were two grist mills down at
the river. You have a wheel that turns, and
you have a huge lever with a heavy hammer at
the end, hundreds of pounds, and as the wheel
turns, powered by water, it lifts up the
hammer and then lets it fall down again. You
can put whatever you are making--a plow,
buckets, nails--underneath that hammer, so
that you can hammer and mold that hot iron.
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The
settlement around the tilthammer mill
They had vineyards, a tannery, a
grist mill, and a distillery, which did very
well. One of the cheapest ways to transport
your grain is a bottle.
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There is a
judge's record in Winchester, a judge having
ordered someone to keep open the road from
Millwood to the tilthammer mill, so that the
children can go to school. The implication is
that the school was not in Millwood, but right
across the river in the settlement in the
bottom land there. There was a tavern, houses,
cemetery, chapel, and several mills.
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Residents on this side of the river
If the Calmes didn't live here then
who did? The Anderson family lived here, what
I was told, in a house the ruins of which are
at the bottom of Sallie Anderson Ridge. What I
alway heard was that Sallie Anderson was a
man. John Kelly Lloyd said it was always known
as Sallie Anderson Ridge. John Kelly Lloyd was
a blind man who knew more about any of this
than I will ever know. Other names here more
recently were Pierces, Tomlins, and Fowlers.
Warren Fowler of Berryville said his father
was born "in the Neck", not on the Neck or at
the Neck. There was about 100 yards north of
Fran's place the "back barn", a very large
barn, and a little house that may have been
for the person who took care of that part of
the agriculture. But we have no way of
identifying them with Calmes occupancy.
Obviously there were a lot of occupants,
because a lot of farming was done over here.
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The
ferry
Lastly, I will mention how that farm
product got out of here. It got out by rowing
across the river on a ferry. The ferry I knew
as a child was a more recent one, dating from
the beginning of this century, but the older
ferry was at "deep water" just upriver from
your beach. It doesn't look like the most
compatible place to have the ferry. The stream
was not the strongest there. Access did not
seem as good as elsewhere. It may be that they
had to have a place that was deep enough for
the ferry at all times. The ferry was
generally a barge, at least the one at the end
of the Neck when I was a child, a barge about
50 feet long, because a tractor and a
threshing machine could get on it.
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The simplicity
intrigues me, of using nothing but nature's
power. Such ferries go very slowly, and as
Nelson Sipe across the river says, they always
need a little help. You had a heavy cable tied
from one huge sycamore to another. You had a
another cable tied from each end of the barge
to a pulley on the heavy cable. If you put
your wagon with wheat on it on this side and
wanted to go to the other side to the mill,
you would let out the cable at this end of the
barge, and use only the force of the stream
current hitting the slope of the side of the
barge to push it slowly that way, with a
little help. When you get to the other end you
pull it in. When you wanted to come back, you
let out the cable at the other end of the
barge and the current would push it back here
again. That was apparently the power used on
the old original ferries, and that was the
power used when I was a child.
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Conclusion
Since we have gotten up to my times,
I will leave the rest up to you. |
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