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accomplishments. They dress in their silks daily but have too much good sense to
be proud. The young Lady I anticipate making my future companion is devoid of all the affectation and common prudery of modern girls. She is sincere, candid, intelligent, and sensible.”
Elijah Fletcher and Maria Antoinette Crawford were married in 1813. He made the transition from schoolmaster to estate manager in 1815 when his father-in-law died, leaving his considerable plantations to Fletcher’s stewardship. Going from penniless tutor to prominent landowner in five years, Fletcher was able to parlay his wife’s connections into two terms
as Lynchburg’s mayor and became a powerful force in that city. The couple had four surviving children; their eldest daughter, Indiana, became the founder of Sweet Briar College.
An August Southern Lineage
His marriage to Maria connected Elijah to two
of the oldest and most
active families in central Virginia: the Penns and the Crawfords, whose ancestry was set forth in a privately published genealogy in 1883.
Several pages of this imposing
tome are devoted to Maria’s
grandfather, Gabriel Penn, who was born in 1741 and died in 1798. He fought in the French and Indian War as a sergeant in a regiment under Colonel William Byrd, and in the American Revolution he was the captain of one of two companies of recruits from Amherst County. He
had a successful mercantile business and served as magistrate both before and after the Revolution; he was also the Amherst delegate to the revolutionary committee that crafted Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights” in 1776. Gabriel Penn was clearly a man of note in Amherst County. He also had nationally renowned relatives: his cousin John Penn was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and another relation was the Quaker leader William Penn.
In 1761 Gabriel Penn married
The genealogy of the Crawford family, privately published in 1883
Sarah Callaway, the daughter of a well- known Bedford County family, and
the couple had ten children. In 1779, Penn purchased a house worthy of his status, “The Glebe,” which still stands in Amherst County. One of their daughters, Sophia, married William S. Crawford, who had established a successful legal practice in Amherst County, and they made their home at Tusculum.
The house itself was built by a Crawford; genealogical records indicate that the David Crawford who built Tusculum was the third of that name in his family, the first two being his father and grandfather. In his will, David Crawford II, who died in 1762 at the
age of one hundred, stated that his land was to go, on the death of his wife, to Susannah, the oldest child of his oldest son. Whether Tusculum was included
in this bequest is not known, but in the late 1700s, the property came into the hands of William S. Crawford, who also served as the clerk of the court of Amherst County from 1794 to 1814 during the time he resided at Tusculum.
This book is very useful for untangling the threads that tightly bound Virginia families, since it compiles the records of the Crawford family, which boasted “an ancestry intelligent, brave, patriotic and trustworthy” according to the genealogy. Dedicated to Robert Leighton Crawford, and “recommended to the most careful
David Shepherd Garland, above, resided at Brick House.
FALL/WINTER 2008 