Richard Wheeler-3
John Wheeler-1; William-2; Richard-3; Susannah-4
SUSANNAH WHEELER SIMPSON-4’s father, RICHARD WHEELER-3, according to parish records, was born January 2, 1697/8 [OS/NS] in All Hallows Parish, Anne Arundel County, near Annapolis, Maryland. RICHARD-3 was only about four or five years old when his mother died. When his father, with his new wife, and the family moved to Baltimore about 1718, RICHARD-3 moved as well. RICHARD-3 bought his own lands in 1720 when he purchased a piece of property called “Benjamin’s Beginning” from Benjamin Martin near Baltimore. The land was located on the north side of the Patapsico River and on the north side of Jones Falls. It was only a few years, however, before RICHARD-3 sold this land and moved to where Fairfax, Virginia, would be located.
RICHARD WHEELER-3 married a widow named REBECCA [FRIZZEL?] Davis October 31, 1725, in Baltimore, Maryland. REBECCA was the widow of a man named Davis and had two young children by her first husband. Her children by this marriage were a daughter, Susannah Davis, and a son, Edward Davis. [Yes, she had two daughters named Susannah]
Around 1730, they moved to the area that would become Fairfax, Virginia. RICHARD-3 sold his Maryland land, “Benjamin’s Beginning,” to John Tipton for 2,500 pounds of tobacco on August 24, 1730. [Baltimore Deeds: A, page 667, & LS No. L, page 18.] The 2,500 pounds of tobacco was probably not a great sum of money for the land, it would represent the harvest from one or two acres of tobacco for a single year. Prices for tobacco fluctuated with the whim of the British Government and with other forces not under the control of the planters.
The move wasn’t very far, geographically, about 25 or 30 miles, but the move was probably to secure virgin lands for tobacco crops. Tobacco was hard on the soil and only a couple of crops could be grown before new land had to be cleared and the old fields abandoned.
Arriving in what would later be called Fairfax County, RICHARD WHEELER-3 first rented lands, and is found as a tenant for 100 acres in 1731 on the lands of the Alexander family for which he paid 524 pounds of tobacco yearly. He was listed with the other tenants living “below Four Mile Creek.”
On June 18, 1735, he purchased 100 acres from James Robertson [Prince William Deeds B:455.] This tract was sold in 1767 by his son. [Fairfax Deeds G:120.] The original patent stated it was “three miles from Falls of Potowmack, one mile below Pimmits Run.” Another reference to the same land stated it was “between land of Parson Breckin where Robertson [James, the original patenter] now lives and the land of Broadwater and Dorrell.” [Beginning at a White Oak, pg. 239.]
Charles Broadwater, one of the first five vestrymen elected for Truro Parish, served until he died in 1733. He was a sea captain who had come there in 1715 to buy tobacco, married the widow, Elizabeth West, and settled down on her former husband’s plantation for the rest of his life. His son, Charles Broadwater, Jr., inherited his lands and acquired other Northern Neck Grants. The senior Broadwater had lands on “Pimits Run adjacent William Dorrill’s land.” Charles Broadwater, Jr., was a vestryman of Truro Parish 1744-1765, a Justice of the county, and on Greens’s list with three white tithables and eleven black tithables. He owned around 1,700 acres of land. “Charles Boradwater,” without a designation of “senior” or “junior”, but who must have been “junior,” voted in the 1744 election held for Burgesses. [Fairfax County, Virginia, Deed Book A-1, part 1, pg. 237.]
Some history books state that there were no “poor people” in Virginia in those days. You might say that, if you don’t count the poor slaves or the few unlucky souls who were listed in the vestry books as receiving support from the parish. Actually, the population was much better fed than in England. As the slave economy continued to flourish, however, the yeoman class was pushed further and further into the frontier in order to survive. They could not compete with slave labor. A great many of the yeoman -class farmers had packed up and moved from Virginia into other areas where they did not have to compete with slaves and where land prices were cheaper. At one point in time, the government tried to find out why the yeoman class was leaving, but after debating the point for more than ten years, no conclusion was drawn. [Reminds you of government surveys today, doesn’t it?]
The early Virginians didn’t live in towns or villages. In 1724, Virginia still did not have a town worthy of the name. The planters were distributed in their semi-independent plantations up and down the narrow necks of land between rivers. The ships landed at their individual docks and both brought manufactured goods from England and took away their tobacco in payment. [Americans] Land transportation was rudimentary, in fact, it barely existed. The planters made use of the rivers instead of roads. In 1710, Governor Spotswood wrote about the river transportation,
At the first settlement of the country, people seated themselves along the banks of the great Rivers and knew plantations, being kept in awe by the Indians venturing farther; neither had they any correspondence than only by water.
At first, they transported their tobacco in casks in canoes, then they discovered that if they took two canoes and lashed them together and put a platform between them, they could transport eight or nine casks in a single trip instead of one. When the roads improved somewhat, another method of moving the casks was to use the cask as a rolling wheel, pulled by a horse and just roll it. In one of Robert Carter’s deeds, it refers to a “Rowling Road.” Is it possible this was a road for “rolling” hogsheads?
The colonial Virginia planter had to acquire the sharp business-sense of the London merchant, the pastoral interests of the farmer, knowing when to plow and plant, and he had to be a physician to his slaves. Life on a large plantation was not that of a simple agrarian system. With many black slaves, craftsmen, both black and white, overseers, stewards and traders, producing tobacco as a money crop, raising food, manufacturing tools and farm instruments, manufacturing cloth and clothing for use of the family, and for sale in the local economy, the planter was forced to be a “jack-of-all-trades” or perish. The plantation was the eighteenth century version of the “company town” rather than a rural romantic village. The planter needed both business acumen and a large store of practical knowledge to meet the day-to-day needs of his plantation. [Americans]
Virginians were no less aristocratic than the English privileged class when it came to the soiling of their hands in trade. In the colonial period, around the year 1750, the social gulf was nowhere wider than in Virginia between the gentleman planter and everybody else. [Americans.] In the 75 to 100 years since our SIMPSON ancestor arrived in the colony as an indentured servant, the family had prospered and joined the ranks of the upper-crust planters, if not the aristocracy.
Virginia was founded on the need for land -- land to use, to waste, to pass among one’s children. Virginians did not restore or replenish the nitrogen and potash which was sucked from the lands by their crops. Only virgin land could make tobacco flourish, with the second crop being the best. After that, it might be used for another three or four years for corn or wheat, then be left to revert to the brush and wild pine. With this system, the planter dared not put more than a small portion of his land into cultivation. He was required to continually acquire more land and had to be a land speculator or perish. Even prosperous planters with great amounts of land had to send their sons out in search of new lands. [Americans.]
Virginia was governed by its men of property. There was no family of substance without members on the Governor’s Council, the House of Burgesses or County court or other public office. The men of substance dominated the governing bodies in Virginia. It was presumed, and usually was in fact, that these men were best and most knowledgeable of the economic and political problems of the community. They knew the price of tobacco, the price of production, the quality of imports, the location of markets, and the best methods and places of marketing the cash crop---tobacco.
In the list of ninety-one men appointed to the Governor’s Council from 1680 till the American Revolution, there appear only fifty-seven different family names, nine names providing nearly a third, and fourteen others about another third. [Americans, pg. 109.]
The parish was a division of the established church, much as the county was a division of the civil authority. The parish, through the vestrymen or their deputies, the church wardens, wielded some of the powers of the modern sheriff, or of a district attorney, and of a grand jury. Among other things, vestrymen had the duty of presenting to the court persons guilty of such moral offenses as drunkenness, blasphemy, profanity, defamation, Sabbath-breaking, staying away from church services, fornication, and adultery. The vestry levied parish taxes, assessed property for their payment, and defined the boundaries of landed property. Once in every four years, under the supervision of the courts, the vestrymen appointed two persons to “procession” the land in the area. Landmarks were examined and renewed and the bounds of the planter’s property was literally “processioned,” or walked around by the adjoining landowners.
The parish was also the main social welfare agency and called attention to cases of extreme poverty or need. The vestry would also bind out orphans or bastards so the children did not become a burden on the taxpayers. This was a form of “foster care.” Sometimes the mother of a bastard child was bound out and the child could be bound out until age 30. Other times, the reputed father of the bastard child was made to pay the child’s expenses. Given the life span of people in the Virginia frontier, to be bound out until age 30 was a virtual life sentence of slavery.
In the eighteenth century, it was not unusual for the parish taxes to be three or four times as much as the county taxes. Prior to the Revolution, the two parishes in Fairfax County had a much larger budget than the county. [Fairfax County, Virginia---1649-1800.]
Originally, the vestrymen of a newly formed parish were elected by the parish freeholders, but afterwards, if a vacancy occurred in the vestry, the vestrymen themselves appointed a successor. The vestry was not always responsive to the community. On the whole, though, these self-elected representatives of the parish did their jobs well. George Washington, George Mason, and George William Fairfax were all vestrymen in Truro Parish, Fairfax County, Virginia. [Fairfax County, Virginia---1649-1800, pg. 47.]
The vestry met at least twice a year, normally at the home of one of the members. The power to choose the minister, and to continue or to terminate his employment, rested with them. Qualified by education, morals, and property, they appear, in the main, to have exercised their powers with wisdom and restraint. [Americans.]
RICHARD WHEELER-3 is shown on the voting lists with GEORGE SIMPSON-3 and others of that area in 1744. RICHARD-3 voted for Col. John Colville and Capt. Lewis Elzey for Burgesses. He was apparently the only man named Wheeler who voted in that election. [Poll recorded Liber A, No. 1, pg. 237.]
RICHARD WHEELER -3 left a will in Fairfax, Virginia, written June 5, 1750, and probated March 26, 1751. Since he mentions his daughter, “SUSANNAH [WHEELER-4] SIMPSON,” we know she was married prior to his death. The earliest confirmed date of birth of any of the children is the birth of RICHARD SIMPSON-4, in 1743, though, so we know they had probably been married for six or eight years prior to RICHARD WHEELER-3’s death. Some of the descendants of Jemima Simpson-4 place her birth less than a year before RICHARD-4’s, using the parish records of the birth of Jemima “Simmons,” but this is apparently an error.
Will of Richard Wheeler-3
June 5, 1750
In the name of God, Amen, I Richard Wheeler of the Parish of Truro, in the County of Fairfax, and Colony of Virginia, Planter, being week and low in body but perfect mind and memory and knowing the casualties and uncertainties of this sick body, make this my last will and testament in and form following.
And first I commend my soul to God who gave it, and my body to the earth to be decently buried at the discretion of my executors hereafter mentioned, and for the worldly goods which God of his mercy has been pleased to bestow on me.
I give and bequeath as follows, Imprimis, I give and bequeath to my loving wife, Rebecca, the plantation where on I now live, my own ridding mare, with the use of two Negroes Solomon and Rose, her choice of the furniture and which to her intire use and to be no ways molested by any during her life, and if my son Drummond, and my wife is willing, my will is that he may live with her and during remainder of her days.
Item -- I give to my dear son Drummond Wheeler, two Negro wenches named Sarah and Lydia and their increase to him and the heirs of his body, lawfully begotten forever. And after the death of my wife, the plantation and land where on I now live to him and his heirs of his body lawfully begotten forever and in case he should die without child the said plantation and land to descend to my daughter Susannah Simpson and the heirs of her body lawfully begotten forever.
Item -- I give to the said Drummond Wheeler after his mother has taken her choice, a bed and furniture, a gold ring, silver watch, a pair of silver shoe buckles, and all my wearing apparel belonging to me.
Item -- I give to my dear daughter Susannah Simpson three Negro wenches named Jane, Nann, and Bet [Bess?] with their increase to have and the heirs of her body lawfully begotten forever.
My will and desire is that the tract of land I bought of Maj. John Carlyle, containing five hundred and seventy acres be up at public Vendor and what money it sells for be equally distributed between my wife, Rebecca, and my son Drummond, and my daughter, Susannah Simpson, as share in the remainder part of my estate in every particular be equally divided between the above three, vis -- my wife Rebecca, my son Drummond and my daughter Susannah Simpson.
I constitute and order my dear son Drummond and George Simpson my sole executors of this my last will and testament .... In witness where of I have here unto set my hand and seal this fifth day of June in the year of our lord one thousand seventeen hundred and fifty
o His mark
Richard Wheeler
Probated March 26, 1751
[Fairfax Co., VA Will Book B-1, pg. 436-437.]
It is interesting to note that though both RICHARD WHEELER-3 and his father, WILLIAM WHEELER-2, were prosperous planters, neither of them could sign their names. Apparently, neither man held either civil, political, or religious office in either county in which they lived, though they did exercise their rights as freeholders to vote.
RICHARD WHEELER-3 mentioned seven slaves in his will. He may have had more, but even owning seven meant he was one of the leading planters, though he was not as well off as his father had been. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was becoming more difficult to rise in financial status than it had been in previous generations, and economic opportunity would continue to decline in Virginia.
The provision for the widow in his will was unusually generous. She was given a “life estate” in the home plantation, and two slaves. She was also allowed to decide if she wanted her son to live with her or not, so she was given some control over her situation after the death of her husband. The provisions made for her were in excess of the “one-third” dower in Virginia. At some times Virginia considered slaves as “real estate” and at other times “personal property.” She was given a “life estate” in the slaves only, and could not will them after her death. [Women and the Law of Property].
Major John Carlyle, mentioned in the will as having sold RICHARD WHEELER-3 500 acres, was buying land by 1746 in the Fairfax area. He was listed as a Presbyterian, Captain, Justice, and merchant of the lower parish. He had seven slaves listed on the 1749 tax list. He accumulated many tracts of land and owned over 6,000 acres at one time. His lands were mentioned in 1750 as on “Timber Branch of Great Hunting Creek between lines of Capt Awbrey, Pearson and Simpson.” [Beginning at a White Oak, pg. 136.]