Research Notes: New Discoveries in Old Sources A Neglected Ledger Reveals the Persons and Processes of Building in Late-Colonial Virginia

摘要

Betty Littlepage faced a dilemma. Widowed in December 1766, with a precocious boy of four and a girl still a babe in arms, she found that her much older husband, James Littlepage, had left an extensive but significantly indebted estate. "South Wales," some three thousand acres on the banks of the South Anna River in Hanover County, Virginia, would have to be sold and its residents dispersed. That Betty was Colonel Lit-tlepage's second wife and stepmother to his first five nearly grown children brought other layers of complication. Where was she to go, and how would she live?1 Betty's resolution, clarified over the next twenty-three months as the executors winnowed out her former life, led her home. Spot-sylvania County, to the northwest across the North Anna River, was the community of her birth and where most of her siblings still lived; her brothers resided on lands inherited from their father and her sisters settled nearby with generous dowries brought to their own marriages.2 But Betty had another objective. She did not deliver herself to the encompassing control of a new husband as was customary for most young widows in need of support. Instead she proceeded to set up her own domain on 480 acres purchased from her youngest brother Benjamin Lewis. There she would build, organize, and manage a plantation.