Transcription
The rise and fall of
By: Andrew Cain
Picture a thriving port, with a teeming shipyard, a racetrack, five, hotels, a dance hall and a theater that presents operas and plays.
Welcome to Dumfries, Circa 1762.
Within 60 years, Dumfries was dead, a victim of the Revolutionary War, a lessening demand for tobacco and poor planting techniques that filled Quantico Creek with topsoil.
"It's one of the 'ifs' of history," said Doug Harvey, curator of the Manassas Museum. "If the farmers had not silted in that creek, Dumfries probably would have grown like Philadelphia and New York." The rise and fall of Dumfries is one of the great stories of Prince William County's history. It is a story that many county residents have never heard.
Prince William's history always will be linked with Manassas and the Civil War battles that give the city its soul.
Yet, 100 years before the confederate victories near Bull Run, a century before Abraham Lincoln visited Liberia Mansion, county residents were making history 30 miles east of Manassas.
"This was the second leading port in Colonial America at one time," said Jean Hochmuth, a tour guide at the Wems-Botts Museum in Dumfries. The town's rich history has really been overshadowed" by the lore of Manassas, she added.
"The tangible history (of Dumfries) has just disappeared over time, "Harvey said. "It's out of sight, out of mind."
Several of eastern Prince William's remaining Colonial structures are privately owned. These include Bel-Air Mansion, a store structure at minieville that dates to the 1740s, Rippon Lodge at Garfield and the Henderson House, a red brick Dumfries residence built in 1756.
Although few reminders remain, Dumfries and the towns on its borders were frequented by some of the most powerful men in Colonial America.
George Washington recorded in his diary that on Jan. 7, 1771 he attended a play called "The Recruiting Officer" in Dumfries.
In 1774 Dumfries lawyer William Grayson founded one of Virginia's first companies of Minutemen.
Williams ordinary, a Dumfries Inn, hosted Lafayette, Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other dignitaries who passed through Prince William en route to Williamsburg, the Colonial Capital.
Dumfries and Alexandria were both chartered May 11, 1749. Dumfries was "undoubtedly the more important place" during the towns first 30 years, wrote historian Fairfax Harrison in "Landmarks of Prine William,"
The Weems-Botts Museum, a small wood-frame building at Duke and Cameron streets, is a reminder of Dumfries' storied Colonial past. The 1 and1/2- story house dates to the late 18th century.
Mason Locke Weems, a minister who bought the house in the 1780s, was the first biographer of Washington. Weems fabricated the myth of the young George cutting down the cherry tree. He also embellished a tale about Washington throwing a rock across the Rappahannock River. In the book, Washington tossed a silver dollar.
Weems' "life of george Washington" was first published in 1801. The museum has a worn copy published in 1808.
The book's owner, John M. Branden, scrawled an eerie ode to future generations on a page in the slim brown volume;
"When this you see, remember me unlest I should be forgotten when I am ded and in my grave and all my bones are rotten."
Benjamin Botts, a Dumfries lawyer, bought the house from Weems in 1802, according to "This was Prince William," by R. Jackson ratcliffe. Botts was the 1807 treason trial of former vice president Aaron Burr.
Dumfries shipping heyday lasted about 15 years prior to the revolutionary war, Hochmuth said. Farmers from Fairfax, Fauquier, Loudoun, Culpeper and the Shenandoah Valley drove tobacco to Dumfries, where it was placed on ships for export.
Troubles is said to come in threes, and three calamities, agricultural, economic and politival, killed the thriving port.Transcriber
Rachel HughesLanguage
English
