I love the feel of a book, the older the better. Writing online is fun, saves trees, yadda yadda yadda....but for the sheer thrill of holding something that connects past and present, there's no place like the Virginia Room in Fairfax County's Regional Library in Fairfax City. Just a few miles from home, it's where I go to learn more history about where I live.
This week I went to find out more about grist mills that once operated along county streams, but I got sidetracked. There are shelves full of books about Civil War reparations, Confederate soldiers, cemeteries public and private where locals probably locate ancestral secrets.
But my family ancestry stretches to Eastern Europe (where many relatives still live), so in Fairfax I must live vicariously by researching someone else's roots. And sometimes roots turn up in a place you least expect it--like the Fairfax Museum and Visitor Center.
A few months ago, I took my sister and my brother-in-law from southeastern Pennsylvania to the Fairfax Museum, a well-cared-for former schoolhouse with a permanent exhibit on former local residents and area history. A 1756 map showed land just one tract away from George Washington's Mount Vernon owned by John Posey--my brother-in-law's surname. John Posey operated Posey's Ferry, also marked on the map, which ran from a dock on the western side of the Potowmack River to Maryland.
As a retirement project, through ancestry.com my BIL Lee Harrison Posey has started compiling a family tree, something he hopes that his four children and eight grandchildren will some day appreciate. John Posey may be the most famous ancestor he's found.
On a search for ancestral land, we drove to the Mount Vernon area. The piece of land sloping down to the Potomac that was Posey's still sports a small dock, but it's a private land in an area where million-plus-dollar houses are going up fast. We stood in the roughed-in-street near a developer's trailer and imagined what it might have looked like more than 250 years ago. The creeks and inlets that pierce the land all around here once were John Posey's. We drove to a street around which the river bends, gazing at well-secured mansions, each home distinctive in its own way.
At the library, in abstracts of Fairfax County deed books, I learned that Posey rubbed elbows with George Washington. His land, which grew to 351 acres, was separated by only one tract of land from Mount Vernon. He is identified as a "planter," later landowner and "gentleman"--a self-made man. He had as many as four tenants who worked the land for him, and owned nine slaves. (By comparison, according to the records, Washington owned more than 2,000 acres and had 88 slaves. Not all landowners had slaves.)
Posey's ferry, according to records, "later belonged to Washington, who had it discontinued because of lack of use." Records starting in 1754 detail Posey's buying and selling land. He was indentured to others, and others to him. Land changed hands often, for money "pounds sterling," "current money in Virginia," or "pounds and shillings."
In 1754 Posey sold 630 pounds of tobacco (I think; the record was unclear). Did he plant tobacco?
Whatever he planted, he got in a bit over his head. In 1766 Posey and 4 others were brought to court before Sheriff Sampson Darrell for owing "one thousand pounds current money in Virginia," owed to "Sovereign Lord George the Third"--the English king. One of those who owed was Abednego Adams. An African American?
Later Posey sold to George Washington slaves to satisfy a debt. Posey had married Martha of the Harrison family, which increased his land holdings. By 1767, it looks like he was in way over head; records (including one in his own hand) show that for 200 pounds sterling he sold to Washington "goods and chattles to wit twenty horses and mares...80 heads of hogs...8 good feather beds...4 guns, 2 of which are silver mounted" plus 1 ferry boat, 1 scow, 1 battle (a flat-bottomed boat), 1 tent, and 3 cases with silver spoons. So much for the wealth.
My brother-in-law says his "second cousin, six times removed" was indeed an interesting person. Thanks, he says, but he's not a direct descendant. He does, however, have a brother named John, and the Harrison name has been used as a first or middle name for generations in the Posey family. Now it's clear why.
Next time at the library, I swear I'll learn more about Fairfax County grist mills.
I'll bet some of my neighbors could share their famous local ancestor stories. (Post a comment below.) Promise I won't get sidetracked like I did with John Posey. But he must have been a heck of guy to go from modest means to wealth and back again (or worse, if he's selling his beds and pigs to George Washington).
If only he'd been able to keep that land near Mount Vernon, history would have been rewritten.
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