Helping Build America
The Love family is remembered in Virginia especially for the legacy of Buckland. Established on John Love’s land in 1798, the industrial town was one of the many innovative sparks in America’s early industrial revolution. Buckland and towns like it were the Silicon Valley of their time—testing, applying and advancing new technologies. All but a few such towns of that era are gone. The Buckland of today is a modest community, which survived the Civil War and suburban development. About a dozen historic buildings and related properties are being preserved as a unique example of a thriving early 19th century commercial and manufacturing village.
William and Judith Love put down roots in the Maryland Colony in 1632 and became tobacco planters. Three generations later, Samuel Love served as a Charles County leader in the Revolutionary War. His sons fought in Virginia regiments of the Continental Army. The next generation served in the War of 1812, and later ones in the Civil War.
Though not of the first rank of families in American history, it is notable that so many Loves formed relationships with so many presidents and Founding Fathers. John Love enjoyed a political career in Virginia and the U.S. Congress, which gave him access to these men. Perhaps more so, geography abetted these relationships. George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the early Love holdings nearby in Maryland bordered the Potomac River, a main travel and trading route in that era of poor roads. The federal government moved in 1800 to its permanent seat in Washington, DC, just forty miles east of Buckland. Though different in purpose and planned size, the new capital city and Buckland developed in parallel.
Agriculture, grist milling, thoroughbred horse breeding, turnpike road building, land investment, general store operations, banking, politics, law practice, and public service are some of the Love family’s occupations and endeavors. Many members owned slaves without whom some of these endeavors would have been impossible. The names of all enslaved people discovered in research for this book are documented in these pages.
The Story of Ravensworth
The story of Ravensworth starts with William Fitzhugh’s purchase of the Ravensworth landgrant in 1685, the largest colonial landgrant in Fairfax County, Virginia – 24,112 acres (37.7 square miles), about one-half the area of nearby Washington, DC. From a population of zero, not counting Native Americans who may have had encampments there, the 2000 Census recorded about 138,355 people living within Ravensworth’s original borders.
The land was repeatedly carved into smaller and smaller parcels through inheritance, sale and subdivision. The once uncharted expanse of forest became first a plantation, then a succession of smaller plantations, then farms – both large and small – served by crossroads villages, and finally today’s thousands of homes and businesses as well as commercial and government centers.
The story of Ravensworth is a story of colonial settlement, early government, tobacco plantations, slavery, civil war, economic expansion, the rise and decline of family farms, and suburban development – next door to the nation’s capital – involving people, places and events both famous and obscure. It explores:
- The people who owned Ravensworth land and disposed of its parts; others who leased, worked, visited and helped shape it
- How the land was acquired, partitioned, leased and used
- Ravensworth’s enduring landmarks
- Events that occurred there
Tracing the step-by-step partitioning of Ravensworth through the generations of changing ownership involved studying land deeds and mapping their metes and bounds (compass direction and distance of boundary lines). The parcels then were georeferenced to place them in their correct geographic location on a contemporary map. The resulting maps enable visualizing the land where people lived and worked and where events occurred in Ravensworth in the context of today’s communities, roads and streets.