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.

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.