Tag Archives: John Tayloe II

CULTURAL LANDSCAPES OF MENOKIN: AN HISTORICAL ANALYSIS – PART III

Originally prepared in October 2012 and revised in November of 2013, this research conducted and prepared by C. Allan Brown is part of the The Menokin Glass House Project.
The report will be shared in a serial fashion with the intention of a weekly post as time allows.

PART III

Immediately south of Stephens’ property, (see Part II) Thomas Beale II settled on 929 acres at Chestnut Hill about 1673.[1]  Like Fleete and Fauntleroy, Beale had true Cavalier origins which gave this neighborhood even at its earliest settlement an incongruous aristocratic air amid a near wilderness.  His elegant tombstone (probably carved in England c. 1680) is emblazoned with the family’s coat-of-arms and was the oldest standing marker in the county until it was recently removed from Chestnut Hill for safekeeping.[2]  (Further research on Chestnut Hill plantation, especially deeds and plats, may provide clues for understanding Menokin better in relation to its roads, fields, etc.)

Figure 7

It seems likely that the earliest “road” to Menokin entered from what became the Chestnut Hill property to the south and originally may have been an Indian path linking the sites of the so-called “ Mt. Airy burials” and the “Town of the Great Rappahannocks,” both identified on Figure 7.  Keep in mind that in the mid-seventeenth century most travel in the vicinity was by water routes.  Even so, the open character of the understory did not impede travel through the virgin forests.  Robert Beverley in 1705 described the “Oaks, Poplars, Pines, Cedars, Cypress and Sweet-Gums; the trunks of which are often Thirty, Forty, Fifty, some Sixty or Seventy foot high, without a branch or limb.”[3]  Using GIS technology, the Virginia Department of Forestry has located

Fig. 11. Road traces at Menokin as identified by the Virginia Department of Forestry

a trace (which it judged to be “over 250 years old”) that “extends from the high ground at Menokin . . . south, southeasterly and today terminates in Muddy Run marshlands” (see Fig. 11).[4]  In the 17th century, that track likely crossed Menokin “swamp” below a beaver dam that had accumulated there.

The initial “opening” (i.e., clearing and cultivating) of land at Menokin occurred perhaps as early as the late 1650s, following John Stephens’ 1657/58 patent of the original 1,000 acres.[5]  Of course, the Rappahannocks, if indeed they were resident there, may have cleared and cultivated part of the land prior to Stephens’ patent.[6]  Stephens returned to England for a brief period (c. 1662-1664?) and after his death in 1678, his heirs sold the property to John Grymes of Gloucester County in 1685.[7]Grymes eventually owned sizable acreage in Middlesex, King and Queen, and Richmond counties, as well as his home plantation in Gloucester.[8]  At his death in 1709, Menokin passed to his second son Charles Grymes along with another plantation, Morattico, lower down the Rappahannock River.[9]  Charles Grymes was among the foremost gentry planters in early eighteenth-century Virginia and erected an imposing residence at Morattico (but like Fauntleroy’s, too near the river!).[10]Grymes operated Menokin as an outlying “quarter” with 17 slaves, 36 cattle, 32 sheep, and 56 hogs, according to a 1743 inventory.[11]

Grymes’ son-in-law and daughter, Philip and Frances (Grymes) Ludwell inherited Menokin about 1750, after a protracted settlement of Charles Grymes’ substantial estate; yet they soon sold the property to John Tayloe II who already owned much land nearby.[12]  In 1751 when he acquired Menokin, Tayloe was one of the wealthiest gentlemen in Virginia.[13]  However he had not yet begun to build his impressive new house at Mount Airy (constructed c. 1761-1765) and it seems noteworthy that he passed over the opportunity to establish his seat at Menokin.[14]  (For the location of Tayloe’s earlier house, see Fig. 10.) Indeed, he continued to operate Menokin as but one of a number of outlying quarters until he gave the property to his daughter, Rebecca, and her husband, Francis Lightfoot Lee.[15]  Thus, by the early 1770s when Menokin at last became a principal residence, its lands had been in the process of being cleared and cultivated, to some unknown degree, for more than a century.

That circumstance surely influenced the site-planning decisions made by the Lees and their generous benefactor, her father, John Tayloe II.  It seems logical to assume that the approximate 1,000 acres of Menokin were first “entered” and “opened” from the south; with sequential clearing of the several, adjacent plateaus proceeding generally northward over time.  A chronicler of agricultural practices in late colonial America explained why large tracts were required for tobacco cultivation, in the constant search for “fresh” fields as old ones were exhausted of their fertility: “This want of land is such, that they reckon a planter should have 50 acres of land for every working hand.”[16]  A field typically was considered “worn out” after 3-4 years of tobacco cropping; and required about 20 years lying fallow to regain its fertility.[17] Selective felling of the most useful hardwood trees within the surrounding ravines (yet with care not to denude the “highly erodible soil”)[18]  had likely also been ongoing for some decades.  The extensive canebrakes of the adjacent tidal marshlands may have been left largely intact until the nineteenth century.  Most significantly, an existing pattern of fields, fences, and (at least rudimentary) roads no doubt was already in place by 1769 when Menokin house was begun.  And, of course, the resident laborers long had known it as their home (some for perhaps more than one generation).[19]


[1]Virginia Land Office Patent Book 6, p. 24.  The plantation remained in the Beale family through the early nineteenth century.

[2]Harper, Richmond County, p. 32.

[3] Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia ed. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill, 1947), pp. 123-124.

[4]Virginia Department of Forestry, “Forest Stewardship Plan for Menokin” (July 2002), p. 28.

[5]Wells, “Menokin in Time,” p. 8.

[6] For native American agricultural practices, see Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests:  A Historical Geography (Cambridge, U.K., 1989), pp. 35-43.

[7] Wells, “Menokin in Time,”., pp. 8-9.

[8] Ibid., pp. 10-12.

[9] Ibid., pp. 12-13.

[10]  For information on the elegance of Morattico, see Thomas Tileston Waterman, The Mansions of Virginia, 1706-1776 (Chapel Hill, 1945), pp. 62-67, 409-410.

[11]Wells, “Menokin in Time,” p. 14.

[12]Ibid., pp. 14-15.

[13]See Laura Croghan Kamoie, Irons in the Fire:  The Business History of the Tayloe Family and Virginia’s Gentry (Charlottesville, 2007), p. 33.

[14] See William M. S. Rasmussen, “Palladio in Tidewater Virginia:  Mount Airy and Blandfield,” in Building By the Book ed. Mario di Valmarana (Charlottesville, 1984); Camille Wells, “Dower Play/Power Play:  Menokin and the Ordeal of Elite House Building in Colonial Virginia,” in Constructing Image, Identity and Place ed. Alison K. Hoagland and Kenneth A. Breisch (Knoxville, 2003), pp. 2-21.  William Tayloe, the original settler, had built a house nearer to the Rappahannock River, about 1682; it reputedly burned in the early eighteenth century.

[15]Wells, “Menokin in Time,” pp. 18, 28.

[16] Harry J. Carman, ed., American Husbandry (London, 1775; reprint, New York, 1939), p. 165.  See also Lois Green Carr and Russell R. Menard, “Land, Labor, and Economies of Scale in Early Maryland:  Some Limits to Growth in the Chesapeake System of Husbandry,” Journal of Economic History v. 49 (1989), pp. 407-418; Paul G. E. Clemens, “The Operation of an Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Tobacco Plantation,” Agricultural History v. 49 (1975), pp. 517-531.  At Menokin, the most productive soil has been considered to be the Kempsville Sandy Loam found as the topsoil of the upper plateaus.  For an interesting account of period clearing practices, see Carville V. Earle, The Evolution of a Tidewater Settlement System:  All Hallow’s Parish, Maryland, 1650-1783 (Chicago, 1975), pp. 30-34.

[17] Earle, Evolution, p. 25.

[18]Wildlife Service, “Rappahannock River,” section 3-2.  This is the Rumford soils of the slopes.

[19]Camille Wells has noted that listings of slaves by their given names “suggest that when [John] Tayloe arranged to buy Menokin in 1751, he agreed to buy its inhabitants as well,” idem, “Menokin in Time,” p. 18.  (See also Ligon Brooks’ research notes in Menokin Foundation files.)

 

Menokin’s Original Presentation Drawing

The Foundation recently purchased a high resolution copy of the original presentation drawing for Menokin from the Virginia Historical Society.

This beautiful image is so well scanned that you can see the creases in the paper, and clearly make out the handsome handwriting outlining the intended use for each room. Though the drawing is not signed, handwriting analysis suggests that John Tayloe II was its creator.

Pen and Ink Plan for Menokin c. 1769. Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society.
Pen and Ink Plan for Menokin c. 1769. Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society.

The story of how this drawing came to be the property of the VHS is an interesting one. An collection of oral history events surrounding Menokin, that was created in the Foundation’s early years, tells the story like this:

On that same day in 1964 that the last of three maiden Tayloe aunts moved out of Mt. Airy, Polly Montague Tayloe moved in. Because her husband, Colonel H. Gwynne Tayloe, Jr., was stationed at Fort Monroe, she was alone in the great stone house, the home of Rebecca Tayloe Lee before her marriage, nearly 200 years earlier.

Without immediate neighbors, and not yet knowing the people of Warsaw, Mrs. Tayloe spent her days in the relative warmth of the dining room sorting Tayloe papers into three wicker clothesbaskets. The first basket held piles of papers from cabinets beneath window seats. The second and third were for things to keep and things to discard.

“They had every letter in the world,” said Mrs. Tayloe. “I thought most of it was important enough to keep. I found the bill for the church communion service. It was 100 years old.”

What she found as well was the original 1769 presentation  drawing of Menokin, prepared not as a blueprint, but as an appealing pen-and-ink illustration of the proposed finished residence. Although Mrs. Tayloe had never seen Menokin, she was aware of its existence and recognized the drawing immediately by its similarity to the wings at Mount Airy.

Subsequently, after finding a trunk filled with more family papers, she phone John Jennings, then Executive Director of the Virginia Historical Society, to see if he’d like to visit some day to peruse the collection. He arrived one hour later.

“I showed him the Menokin drawing,” said Mrs. Tayloe, “and he nearly fell over.” He took that and other family papers back to the Historical Society. “There were 52,000 pieces in all,” said Mrs. Tayloe, “and some were dated in the 1600s.”

“The odds of locating that drawing were a million to one,” said Taliaferro (Harry “Tuck” Taliaferro III, founding Menokin Trustee and current Honorary Trustee). “Mount Airy was gutted by fire in the 19th century. When Mrs. Tayloe found the drawing, people flipped.”

It is one of the only original presentation drawing from colonial Virginia to survive.

Meet The Family

The current issue of Virginia Living has an article about the magnificent colonial plantation home, Mount Airy. This 18th-century architectural masterpiece was the girlhood home of Rebecca Tayloe Lee, wife of Francis Lightfoot Lee of Menokin.

In fact, the Menokin property was once part of the estate of John Tayloe II, who carved out 1,000 acres and financed the building of Menokin as a wedding gift for Frank and Becky.

These exquisite photographs by Roger Foley give you a peak into the genteel lifestyle of the Mount Airy residents. The article offers poignant insight into the nature of living in – and caring for – an iconic family home.

Here is a link to the article in Virginia Living.

These 10th generation great nephews of Rebecca Tayloe Lee are playing, living and growing in the same house where she grew up.
You can almost feel the breeze wafting through the great hall of Mount Airy.
Moose has gone to heaven, but lived a heavenly life at Mount Airy alongside his statuary brethren.

Planter Oligarchy on Virginia’s Northern Neck

Virginia Historical Society Banner Lecture Series

Dr. John C. Coombs, Presenter

Co-sponsored by the Virginia Historical Society.
Program held at the VHS located at 428 North Boulevard, Richmond, VA

The rise of a distinct class of affluent families to economic, social, and political dominance in Virginia during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is without doubt one of the most important developments in the Old Dominion’s early history.

As a group, however, the “gentry” were far from homogenous. John C. Coombs will draw on research for his forthcoming book The Rise of Virginia Slavery to discuss the foundations of power that were common across all ranks of the elite, as well as the circumstances that allowed the Carters, Lees, and Tayloes to achieve distinction as the colony’s “first families.”

Dr. Coombs is a professor of history at Hampden-Sydney College and coeditor of Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion.

Reservations are not required. Admission is $6/adults, $5/seniors, $4/children and students, free/members (please present card) and to Richmond Times-Dispatch readers with a Press Pass coupon. Parking is free.For more information visit: www.vahistorical.org/news/lectures_banner.htm