Page 5 - Demo

The Early Years
Now called Clifford, New Glasgow was a thriving community by the first quarter of the nineteenth century, with taverns, schools, stores, a tanyard, a hotel, distill- eries, a church, and even a race track. Da- vid S. Garland, whose Brick House still stands, was a member of the U.S. Con- gress, and served in the state legislature for more than twenty years. Garland was also the largest slave holder in Amherst County in 1810.
By then, the community already had transformed into a significant spot on the map. William Cabell, an Englishman, established the first large white presence during the 1730s and ’40s, claiming most of the land along the James River from today’s Nelson County upstream almost to Lynchburg.
Early deeds in the New Glasgow area refer to land on the waters of the Buf- falo River. The Buffalo is one of three rivers—the other two are the Piney and the Tye—that flow into the James River in present-day Amherst and Nelson counties. The James was originally called the Fluvanna River and the countryside where New Glasgow would stand was first part of Goochland, then Albemarle County. Eighteen years later, in 1761, Amherst County was created, including present-day Nelson and Amherst. Nelson became a separate county in 1816 after
a contentious petition drive to split it off from Amherst.
In 1738, Tidewater land speculator George Braxton received a grant from the King of England for 5,000 acres on the waters of the Buffalo River. This is likely the land along Virginia 151 between U.S. 29 and present-day Clifford, including the present-day Winton Country Club. No records indicate Braxton ever visited the region, which was then the backcoun- try of Virginia not long removed from frontier status.
Unlike Braxton, the Rev. Robert Rose, who patented 23,700 acres north of New Glasgow along the Piney and Tye rivers in 1744, did move here. He brought some of the first slaves as well and set them to work clearing fields to grow tobacco. In the late 1740s, Rose pioneered the prac- tice of rolling hogsheads of tobacco to the river and shipping them downstream to Richmond in two canoes lashed together. His slaves built some of the first roads in what was called the lower region of Am- herst County.
By the mid-1750s the Crawford fam- ily was living near what was to become New Glasgow, on a plantation later called Tusculum. (The Tusculum house, certainly one of the oldest, if not the oldest house in Central Virginia, was dismantled recently and will be rebuilt as the home of the Tusculum Institute for local history at Sweet Briar College. See page 14.)
Much of the early history of New Glasgow is documented through the his- tory of St. Mark’s Church, which also survives as one of the oldest congrega-
Brick House
tions in Central Virginia.
The place was called New Glasgow at
least by 1775, when a tract of land called New Glasgow “along the church road” was sold. The name sounds as if it comes from Scotland, and Scottish merchants were active in Virginia in this era. Rose was Scottish, as was Dr. James Murray Brown, a doctor who was one of the early inhabitants.
One of the first lists of county resi- dents and their slaves is from 1782. By then, Gabriel Penn had forty-two slaves on his lands, which included the Glebe. Like the Brick House, this house still stands, near the intersection of Virginia 151 and U.S. 29.
Both Penn and his neighbor, Samuel Meredith of Winton, were officers during the Revolutionary War. Meredith owned fifty-eight slaves in 1782.
The Rev. Robert Rose died in 1751, but the enterprises he founded endured.
Amherst County Museum and Historical Society
St. Mark’s Church
Amherst County Museum and Historical Society
FALL/WINTER 2008 