Nathaniel Garner was an employee of Gilbert Royston’s, of about the same middle age, both before and during Royston’s tenancy of Clermont Farm in 1939-1948. He had worked for Gilbert during his tenancy at the Arthur Lee farm prior to Clermont. Nathaniel, or “Skeeter” as he was known to all, has not been found in the U.S. Census of 1940 for Clarke County, but he was living in Clermont at that time.

In 2015, when she was 81 and Clermont was celebrating its annual Farm Day, along with the completion of a National Park Service grant to repair the farm’s 1823 slave quarter, Geneva Jackson was interviewed by the Winchester Star. Her connection was both to that building and to the kitchen building, which served from 1777 to 1971. At age 15, already known for her cooking, she was employed by Admiral and Mrs. John Beardall (Edith McCormick, one of four McCormick siblings to jointly inherit the farm) as the family cook at Clermont.

John R. Bell and his family were the tenants who managed Clermont Farm during World War I and the following period, about 1915 to 1928 or 1929, roughly 13 years. When he and his wife Emma came to Clermont in 1915, they had three children: a son, Ammie, 14, a son, Joseph, 12, and a daughter, Sarah, 8. In the 1920 Census, when they are listed in the tenant house on the hill near the Main Barn, a fourth child, Mary 4, and a fifth, Edith May, had been added.

Named for his father’s best friend at Princeton, Albert lost his father near his 4th birthday. He grew up in Clermont in the aftermath of the Civil War, then graduated from medical school at the U. of Maryland and from the U.S. Naval Academy. An 1889 group photograph with Assistant Surgeon Albert M.D.

James Lee was not a docile slave and was considered by his owners to be a bad influence on other slaves. For this, he was sold in 1855 by his owner, Edward McCormick of Clermont, to Joseph Bruin, who, between 1844 and 1861, when Federal troops closed him up, was the most notorious slave trader in Alexandria, Va.

Josephine Williams was a woman who moved from enslavement at Clermont plantation in Clarke County, VA, to freedom at Emancipation, when she became a successful businesswoman in Berryville, married Phillip Williams, and led the founding of an independent community for freed people, Josephine City (today Josephine Street in Berryville), which was both a shelter from and a place of resistance to the re-emerging white supremacy in post-Civil War Virginia.

The story of Clermont is a story of continuity and persistence. Of farming the land, of families, individuals, and buildings, rather than the story of one big battle or one big person. We see the continuity in this photo, taken over 125 years ago, in the life spans of the individuals pictured, beginning with Ellen Jett McCormick’s birth in 1833 and her granddaughter Edith Jett McCormick’s death in 1997, across 164 years, the same distance in American history as from 1776 until 1940, from the Revolution to WWII.

Ellen Lane Jett McCormick was a woman with a remarkable life trajectory. Born in 1833 in Rappahannock County, Virginia, on a plantation twice as large as Clermont, with twice as many enslaved people, in 1856, she married Edward McCormick of Clermont, whom she expanded and built into a wheat-based powerhouse.

When Edward Snickers bought Clermont from Thomas Wadlington in 1770, his accumulation of businesses, properties, and wealth had raised him from simple “yeoman” status (independent farmer) to that of a “gentleman”, a semi-official title in class-conscious Virginia, appointed as a member of the vestry of Frederick Parish in 1771 and by the Virginia General Assembly as one of the “ten gentlemen” responsible for maintenance of the great roads …

On September 24, 1751, Thomas Wadlington, a 36-year-old landowner, planter, and mill owner, appeared in the Fairfax County, Virginia, Courthouse with two young black enslaved children. He needed to establish an officially recognized age for the young boy and girl, for taxation and resale purposes.

In 1753, Thomas Wadlington, a mill owner and planter from Fairfax County, who lived in the neighborhood of Belvoir Manor and Mount Vernon, 75 miles away via the Fairfax Road from Alexandria to Winchester, bought Clermont from Thomas Vance. Thomas Wadlington was not a stranger. He was a fellow parishioner of George Washington’s at the Pohick Church, their local Fairfax parish, and he had served as the “marker” on two surveys Washington did in 1751 in the vicinity of Clermont.

John Vance was the man who in 1750 asked for and received from Lord Fairfax and his 2.5 million acre Proprietary the specific grant of land later called Clermont Farm. George Washington, age 18 and newly licensed the year before performed the survey of 353 acres on October 19. The order approving the survey written out by Lord Fairfax’s agent makes it clear that Vance had been farming this land (and using the white oak for his barrel-making business) since 1742.

Thomas Fairfax was the ultimate sole inheritor of a grant by King Charles II of 5.2 million acres in Virginia, the Northern Neck Proprietary between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. He became Virginia’s largest land developer, making grants to working farmers rather than rich speculators, often in the 350–500-acre range.

The earliest immigrants to North America were the Native American peoples, whether by land bridge from Eurasia or an early land-water crossing of Clovis-like people from Europe.  While still visible in passage through the Shenandoah Valley and during the war, under pressure from colonists, they had largely moved out of the Valley west to the Ohio country by the time George Washington surveyed “Clermont” in 1750. 

A boy who lost his father at eleven, whose models included his older half-brother Lawrence, his older friend George William Fairfax, and Lord Fairfax (his father’s age), George Washington spent much of his late teenage years and young adulthood (age16-26, 1748-1758) on Virginia’s western frontier (Frederick County, VA) and the wilderness of trans-Appalachia, out to Pittsburgh and north to Lake Erie.