Competing for Huguenot Settlers
I recently spoke at the Huguenot Society of Virginia’s Spring meeting about the Ravensworth landgrant and its role in early Huguenot settlement.
In 1685 the King of France cancelled the Edict of Nance, which had protected Huguenot rights and religious freedom of conscience for nearly a hundred years. This triggered a mass migration of French Huguenots to England and other Protestant countries. That same year William Fitzhugh bought the 24,000 acre Ravensworth plantation in today’s Fairfax County. About the same time, the 30,000 acre Brent Town landgrant, on the border of today’s Prince William and Fauquier counties, was purchased by 3 London merchants – Nicholas Hayward, Richard Foote and Robert Bristow – plus Virginia colonist George Brent, a Catholic and neighbor of Fitzhugh’s. The London merchants successfully lobbied England’s King James II to establish Brent Town as a religious sanctuary for people of all faiths. They advertised and strenuously promoted Brent Town to Huguenots for migration to Virginia. Fitzhugh’s relationship with Brent and business ties with Hayward spurred him to also promote Ravensworth for Huguenot migration. He sought 100 to 200 settlers, writing Hayward in 1686 that his land was “more proper for frenchmen, because more naturally inclined to vines,”
The title of the map is “A Map of the Most Inhabited Part of Virginia.” In the 1680s and until well after 1753, most inhabitants in Colonial Virginia were located on major waterways for reliable transportation and tobacco shipment in that era of few and poor roads – especially the Chesapeake Bay and tidewater Potomac and Rappahannock rivers.
Brent Town and Ravensworth were in the wilderness, away from population centers, and therefore more exposed to Native American hostility. They were commercial endeavors not backed by the Virginia colonial government, as was the Huguenot’s successful Manikin Town settlement west of Richmond, chartered later in 1700.
To fulfill their own obligations in purchasing landgrants, the owners needed for the land to be seated, that is, populated with residents, built upon and planted.
The Brent Town owners promised
- Free exercise of religion
- A 1 acre town lot and a 100 acre farm
- Purchase option: £10 plus 4 shillings annual quitrent
- Lease option: £1 annually
- The town would provide mutual safety with a block house for defense
- First-year provisions free, including nails and hardware to build a house and 15 bushels of Indian corn for subsistence
For Ravensworth Fitzhugh offered
- To naturalize at £ 3 per head, so heirs could inherit purchased land
- To sell land for £7 per 100 acres
- To lease land: 200 acres for the duration of “three lives” (typically tenant, their spouse, and a named child) for annual rent of 20 shillings, or a hogshead of tobacco
- First year provisions, including corn and nails for building, to be repaid from crop yields
So, what did settlers sign up for besides emigrating to Virginia and residing on their parcel of land?
At Brent Town
- Build a dwelling 26-28 feet by 14-16 feet
At Ravensworth
- Build a dwelling 20 by 16 feet
- Build a tobacco house 32 by 20 feet
- Plant an orchard of at least 300 fruit trees
Were these recruiting efforts and offers successful in attracting Huguenots to emigrate and settle at Brent Town and Ravensworth? There’s little evidence, and it is inconclusive.
Brent Town – very doubtful
- The land was not surveyed until 1737-38. If settled, parcels would have been surveyed and deeds recorded proving ownership or lease.
- Fitzhugh himself observed in a letter that the town suffered from a “thin supply” of people.
- Historians believe that landowners with French names who held small grants on Cedar Run near Brent Town came in a later migration, about 1700.
Ravensworth – maybe but only briefly
- The earliest recorded leases found are dated in 1750.
- In a 1686 letter Fitzhugh excused a delayed tobacco shipment by noting that “my Plantation its made upon is so far above me and consequently out of my Kenn that they have not got it ready,” indicating actively working the remote land. However, the work may have been by enslaved workers supervised by an overseer, as was the practice in 1750 and later.
- In 1690, Fitzhugh recorded he had “come accidentally upon a French minister, a sober, learned and discreet Gentleman,” whom he employed to tutor his sons.
- The most definitive evidence of a temporary settlement comes from an October 1701 letter by George Mason to the Virginia Governor, which stated, “ye ffrench Refugees is most of them gone to Maryland and have left an ill distemper behind them, the bloody flux, which has effected Some of our neighbours.”
Sources and more information
The Story of Ravensworth and especially the landgant parcel description
Landmarks of Old Prince William, Fairfax Harrison, Chapter 13: “Brent Town, Ravensworth and the Huguenots”
Mrs. Patricia Holbert Menk. “Notes on Some Early Huguenot Settlements in Virginia.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 52, no. 3 (1944): 194–96
Fry Jefferson Map at the Library of Virginia
Postscript
I learned in researching for this talk that George Washington was descended from Huguenots through his paternal grandmother’s line to a French immigrant named Nicolas Martiau (1591–1657). Martiau migrated in 1620 and was a pioneer who played an instrumental role in the survival of the Jamestown colony. Working as a military engineer, he helped design the original fortifications at Yorktown. In poetic historical coincidence, his descendant George Washington would later on October 19, 1781 accept the British surrender on that exact same land, ending Revolutionary War military action and securing American independence.