Originally published at https://www.commdiginews.com/history-and-holidays/jamestown-yorktown-remembering-the-women-and-black-soldiers-who-founded-america-123784/
The ship, Mary and Margaret, landed in Jamestown September 30, 1608. It was part of the second supply, bringing supplies and more settlers to the new settlement of Jamestown. On board were Thomas Graves, gentleman, his friend Rawley Crowshaw and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Forrest. With the Forrests came Mrs. Forrest’s lady’s maid, Anne Burras (Burrows). A John Burras was abroard, also. He may have been an older brother to keep an eye on his young sister in her first job. The couple had not been married very long, only about three years. There is no indication of children. Mistress Forrest apparently got sick on the journey. Anne was responsible for caring for her employer.
The fort at Jamestown was small at best, covering about 1 acre of land. The houses and the church were shoddily built. The first shipload of men did not believe they would be staying very long, so they threw up poor shelters. There was no where nice for Mistress Forrest to be as she fought her illness. She died within a month or so of arriving. Fourteen-year old Anne was unemployed. The only female among over one hundred men, most unmarried, Anne had the attention of all the inhabitants.
Only two or so months after landing, Anne found a man she could be comfortable with and married John Layton. John was a laborer who was twice her age. They had the first child to survive in the New World in December 1609. And they named her Virginia. At that point, they moved to a small outpost closer to the ocean called Point Comfort. It was fortuitous. For that was the winter of the Starving Time. Those stuck within the fort were unable to get out for months due to Indian attacks. Their food supplies did not hold out. Point Comfort had no Indian attacks and the salt water nearby had plenty of seafood.
They and their growing family survived. During the next few years Alice, Katherine and Margaret joined their older sister.
The family next survived the Good Friday massacre in March 1622. They then moved a little further away from the James River, residing in Elizabeth City (now Newport News) by the muster of 1624. At this point, John had begun to accumulate patents of land. In the muster, it was indicated that he had 100 acres on the east side of Blunt Point Creek, in lieu of 100 acres on the island of Henrico. This city became less favorable after the massacre.
In 1636, John and Anne’s brother, Anthony Burrows, patented 1250 acres near Elizabeth City. They had become moderately prosperous by the 1630s. But even prosperous people could not fight the poor quality of life at that time. It is assumed that Anne died sometime in the mid 1630s.
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In another of a continuing series of sagas of our foremothers, today we discuss Grace Robbins.
Grace, daughter of Arthur Neale and Grace O’Hara, was probably born in Brackley, Northamptonshire. But her true home seems to have been Dunluce Castle in Ireland, where her mother supposedly was born. She was a cousin of Admiral James Neale, who would be a favorite of King Charles I.
At the age of 15, Grace was taken to Virginia aboard the Diana, with Sir George Yeardley. They arrived in 1618. Within a few years, Grace had met and married Lt. Edward Waters, her elder by 14 years. They moved to Elizabeth City where Waters had patented several hundred acres of land. During the disastrous Good Friday 1622 Indian attack, both Grace and Lt Waters were captured by the Indians. While the Indians were celebrating, Edward, a military man, found one of their canoes. Luckily, the couple was not tied up or well guarded. The two stole the canoe and made their way to Jamestown.
Apparently, the couple spent some time in Blount Point, in what is now Newport, Va., before going back to their land in Elizabeth City. Their son, William, born 1623 is recorded as being born there. However, by the census, or muster, of 1625, they were home. A child was born to them that year, Margaret.
Several years later, Lt. Waters visited England, where he died in August 1630, leaving Grace with two small children. After several years, Grace met the widower Obedience Robbins and his . They married. William, older, now, probably went to England for university studies.
Obedience Robbins, a trained surgeon and planter, had been in Virginia since 1628. When they married, they moved to his land on the Eastern Shore, some of which he was granted for bringing people over, including himself, Grace and Margaret. During the next ten years, Obedience and Grace had five more children. Dorothea, John, Obedience III, Mary and Frances (who probably died young).
While Grace handled the plantation management, Obedience, who apparently did not serve in a medical capacity, was politically active. He had already served as burgess in 1629/30 and in quarter courts in the early 30s. Grace was used to this, since Lt. Waters had been in a similar position.
Although Robbins still held offices while getting married in England, he apparently seemed to need time off with the rapid coming of children. He was not as active in politics in the late 1630s, except as a member of the church council, or vestry. However, he did host the “laughing king”, the Indian chief, who came to visit every year in the spring. His and Grace’s hospitality was questioned on various occasions, even bringing the question into the courts, but hailed on others.
Grace had to have had great patience, since Obedience and their neighbor, Edward Scarborough, had great enmity for one another throughout their lives. They argued about boundaries of their own and boundaries of the counties. They argued about the treatment of the Indians, with Obedience being welcoming and Scarborough killing them. It only ended with the death of the men, just a few years apart.
Throughout the 25 or so years of their marriage, Robbins held land which he rented out, grew tobacco, which he sold and had means of transportation, mostly boats, which he rented. They lived on Cherrystone Creek, not far from the Chesapeake, where trade flourished. The family did well.
The Robbins did well for their children, too. Obedience’s daughter, Margaret, married Grace’s son, Col. William Waters. Their other children married into the most prominent families, like the Scarboroughs.
When Obedience died in 1662, Grace inherited a large, well-functioning plantation. Her remaining children and grandchildren inherited it when she died twenty years later.
Cecily Farrar is considered the first Southern belle, the first to master flirting in Virginia. Needless to say, she was beautiful. She was also quite a good business manager.
Cecily was the daughter of Joan Phippen and Thomas(?) Reynolds, a sea-faring man. Cecily was born in 1600, the same year her father died in a sea disaster. She was his only child.
Joan, only just past 20, remarried William Pierce, an up and coming politically active man and soldier. He soon saw the wisdom of signing up to join the Virginia Company. They had a child, Jane, in 1605. By 1609, William had decided to go to Virginia with the family. Mother, father and Jane left on two separate boats, leaving Cecily behind with relatives, to await orders to come.
Joan and Jane, on one boat, were hit by a hurricane but made it through, landing in August, 1609. William’s ship was damaged, landing in Bermuda with two other ships. It took months to rebuild one ship out of the ruins. He finally made it to a reunion with Joan May 20, 1610, introducing her to his travel mate, John Rolfe.
Cecily finally was called and she arrived in August, 1611, during the Anglo-Powhatan war. She was 11. The war ended in 1614, when John Rolfe married Pocahantas.
In 1618, the governor proclaimed a title of “ancient planter” to anyone who had lived in Virginia for three years and had paid their passage. Each of those planters would receive 100 acres. Cecily met the qualifications. She was only one of four women who did.
In the year 1620, she married Samuel Jordan and moved to his new estate. This was a 450-acre plantation on the James River, which eventually was called Jordan’s Journey. Jordan was considerably older than Cecily. He had a son her age. With the couple lived a little girl named Temperance Bayley, the heiress of the large estate next door. It appears that a Mr. Bayley may have been Cecily’s first husband, dying and leaving her with a baby. We may never know who are the parents of Temperance, but it seems strange for the Jordans to take her in if they had no interest. The next year, the couple welcomed a daughter, Mary.
1622 was a bad one. The surprise attack by the Indians killed a large portion of the population. Jordan’s palisaded fort became a haven for many who were not lucky and lost most of their possessions. One of the men who moved to the compound was William Farrar, a lawyer, who went to work for the couple and built up the plantation.
Right after the first of the year 1623, Samuel died. Cecily was pregnant with her daughter, Margaret. Within days of the funeral, the minister who had presided, Rev. Grenville Pooley, decided that the widow was too good to pass up. He came to visit her and offered her marriage. Having been widowed less than a week, she may not have been interested. She suggested that they not discuss it until after the birth of the baby. He took it as a yes and started to brag around the neighborhood. A few months later, Cecily contracted herself with Mr. Farrar in front of the governor and officials. Pooley sued for breach of promise and this was the start of a two-year law suit. There are witness testimonies extant today, giving credence to her side of the story, that she didn’t mean to get engaged to the minister. Eventually, Pooley found another woman who was acceptable to him and dropped the law suit before it got into court.
Cecily and William Farrar lived on Jordan’s Journey together. In the 1624 muster, they are listed as co-heads of the place. They quickly married as soon as the law suit was over. They had three children, Cecily, William and John. Within a few years, they moved to William’s plantation near Henrico where the younger children grew up.
William died in the mid-1630s. Cecily may have lived on for years, enticing people with her beauty and social skills. But she may not have married again.
Mary was one of eight children of Reverend Francis and Bridget Doughty. The reverend was ostensibly an Anglican minister who seemed to always have his own opinion on how things really were and how he should preach the word of the Gospel. Many credit him with being the first Presbyterian minister in the Americas. Most thought he was a crazy windbag. He lost his church in England after saying that the king had been elected. He then brought his family to Massachusetts, where he had difficulty getting and holding on to a church. He tried his luck in Providence, Long Island, Manhattan and Flushing before moving to Maryland.
Living a very unstable childhood, Mary finally met a stable, intelligent man, at age 17. Adrean Von der Donck was a multi-talented man eight years her senior. He already had an impressive career as a lawyer, explorer, political advisor, writer and, it appears, surgeon. After their marriage in 1645, Adrean patented thousands of acres of land on the mainland, just north of Manhattan island. The area eventually became known by an anglicized version of the Dutch word for gentleman, “Jonker” (Yonkers). They built a house there but did not spend much time at home. Adrean was sent back to Amsterdam for three years and did not return until 1652/3. While in Amsterdam, he published a very precise, descriptive book of the lower Hudson Valley, considered remarkable in scope. Returning to their plantation, he died within two years. Mary was about 27 when she was widowed. She may have had one son. Historians are unsure of this child.
A year or so later, Mary married an Irishman who had shown up in Manhattan, Capt. Hugh O’Neale. Their first child, Daniel, was born in New York. Since her father had already moved to Maryland, Mary and Hugh followed him down. The large plantation was left in the hands of her brother, Elias Doughty, to manage. He soon sold it.
The reverend had moved on to Virginia, where they briefly followed, only to move to Charles County, Maryland, soon after. This was a spot on the north shore of the Potomac River, not too far from the capital of St. Mary’s. Hugh became known as an Indian fighter, there. They developed a plantation of several hundred acres.
Here, Mary set up practice as a “healer”. She worked with herbs, but occasionally added surgery to her repertoire, seeing as she had been married to a man who could do surgery. There was no control of shysters, at that time, and it is not known whether Mary was really any good at her chosen profession. Seeing as how she was brought to court, often, we wonder how well versed she was in aiding others. Some of the suits were patients trying to get refunds, others were to defend her mistakes. Some were brought against clients demanding payment. There are almost a dozen court dockets from the 1660s and 70s with Mary and Hugh as participants. Often, they lost.
Mary had three more children, Charles, Joy and Winifred. She lived to see them all grown. Mary died in 1689. Hugh lived on until the beginning of the 18th century.
Work, work, and more work. That pretty much describes the lives of the colonials, whether it was New England or Virginia. Whether you were male or female, young or old, literate or illiterate, you worked. What you worked at depended on whether you lived on a farm or in town. People in town ran small shops, taverns or manufacturing. Men worked in those places with their older sons, by about age 11. The women stayed home, trying to maintain the house, which was often very difficult, unless there were servants. Maintaining the fire, baking, cooking, cleaning, sewing. All this was daily work. The children were expected to watch their younger siblings, help with cooking and cleaning and learn their letters. The idea was that children needed to be trained to do all the things they had to do as adults. Teenaged boys were expected to work in the businesses and learn them from the ground up. On farms, there was a bigger variety of work. Men had to farm the land, planting food as well as raising animals for meat. They also had to hunt and fish to supplement the meals. Those who had tobacco farms had even more to do, including plucking the flowers off the tobacco plants in order for the leaves to grow bigger. Women were obligated to help with the farm, especially handling the herb gardens and the personal vegetable and fruit plants. It was the woman who would can and dry all the foods come fall. The children began to help by the age of 7 or 8. They could collect eggs, pick flowers off tobacco, run errands, even milk the cows. By 11, the boys could be trusted to work in the fields. Teenage boys were educated enough to copy letters for their fathers (no carbon paper back then) and were junior members of the farm community. Girls were required to learn how to turn wool into thread, use a spinning wheel, run a loom and other things necessary to produce clothing. They could recognize their names when written, but they did not always have benefit of education as the boys did. But they learned how to keep their families warm and fed, which, back then, was more important, anyhow.
Mary Scarbugh, born to wealth and prestige, was to be one of the primary characters in a life-long battle that makes today’s soap operas look tame.
At this time, we do not know her maiden name or anything about her childhood. We meet her when she became engaged,
somewhere between 1635 and 1638. Mary was betrothed to Edmund Scarborough, whose father had taken the family to Virginia in 1620. Edmund’s brother was Sir Charles Scarborough, physician to the king. Edmund, a lawyer, a merchant and a trader, would have been a good catch for Mary, who probably had no problem moving to Virginia.
Edmund had gotten a number of patents of land in Accomac County, on the Eastern coast. He added on to his land grants pretty much as often as he added onto his family. Mary and he had Tabitha, Charles, Matilda, Littleton, Henry and Edmund within thirteen years. The plantation he built was on the Chesapeake Bay side of the peninsula, sitting in the middle of thousands of acres.
Edmund turned out to be a man of unrestrained passion, be it lust or anger. His sole aim seemed to be to accrue wealth and prestige. Mary stood by his side while he took land from others and cheated many. During one of the Dutch English wars, the Dutch took one of his ships. He, in turn, took several of theirs. When a former black servant received land after his indenture time, Edmund took him to court and procured it. When he sold guns to Indians and then attacked them for owning guns, court found him not guilty.
Mary was expected to open her house to the public, since Edmund was sheriff, justice, Burgess, royal surveyor and collector of rents at various times during his career.
As hard as it was to put up with such a man, Mary had to face him going into business with a younger woman, Ann Loft, in 1651. This business made Edmund and Ann very rich, and parents of three girls. When the pastor of the parish began to comment on Edmund’s irregular activities, Edmund spread the word that the 27 year old pastor was having an affair with Mary, 46 at the time. Mary never uttered a word and let it play itself out. She did not divorce him or leave him.
Edmund continued to antagonize neighbors, friends and even Governor Calvert of Maryland, regarding borders. He hated anyone not like himself, Puritans, Quakers, Indians or Catholics. He made no doubt about it, even chasing Puritans into Maryland to get rid of them. This says something about Mary’s teaching of tolerance. Some of her grandchildren became Quakers. They did not inherit their grandfather’s distaste for others.
Edmund died in 1674. Mary lived until 1691. By then, she was a rich woman in her own right. She was able to give elaborate legacies to children and grandchildren. Her will shows a sense of righteousness: she refused a legacy to her oldest son, Charles. It appears that he had ignored her for decades. One of the children had inherited their father’s cruelty.
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