Martha Washington Read Online Free Page B

including a daughter named Martha. Colonial women’s birth dates are even more elusive than their names, but Martha Woodward was born sometime between 1657 and 1665. She is the first of Martha Dandridge’s female ancestors that we can identify with certainty. About 1680, this Martha married Gideon Macon, a Huguenot planter who had immigrated in 1672. Like thousands of other Protestants who fled persecution in France, he brought welcome capital and skills to Virginia. The Ma-cons built a house called Mount Pleasant on Macon’s Island in the Pamunkey River; their plantation incorporated the land that Martha inherited from her parents.
    They had six children between 1681 and 1701; their eldest was another Martha. In early 1702, Gideon died. Within a year, the widowed Martha Woodward Macon, now in her late thirties or early forties, married a wealthy bachelor, Captain Nathaniel West of West Point, a neighbor and perhaps her cousin. Their only child was a daughter named Unity, born about 1703, who will figure in our story later. Widowed, remarried to a Scottish merchant, and widowed again, Martha Woodward Macon West Biggers moved back to Mount Pleasant, where she resided until her death in 1723.
    In January 1703, her daughter Martha Macon married Orlando Jones. His mother was a native-born Virginian, Anne Lane; his father was an Anglican clergyman, the Reverend Rowland Jones, who had emigrated from England in the 1660s. The elder Jones was one of the founders and the first rector of Bruton Parish.
    Orlando studied at the new College of William and Mary, became a planter near Williamsburg on Queen’s Creek, a navigable stream (at least at high tide) leading out to the York River, and served as a burgess. As the eighteenth century brought greater prosperity, Orlando and Martha Macon Jones lived in a brick house with five or six rooms, which included nineteen chairs, pictures on the parlor wall, and a few pieces of silver. Plantation labor had changed, too. Indentured Englishmen had become less common in the tobacco fields, replaced by enslaved Africans. By this time, fully a quarter of all colonial Virginians were black, the majority of them toiling on large plantations. Even a small planter like Orlando owned twenty-one slaves.
    Not only was Orlando and Martha’s house more comfortable and stylish than their parents’ had been, they lived right outside the growing new capital, where they could enjoy at least the rudiments of urban life—a few shops, craftsmen, markets, and taverns. In Virginia, a rural colony with a widely spread population, all the other so-called towns amounted at most to a warehouse, a tavern, and a house or two.
    Marshy, disease-ridden Jamestown was destroyed once too often by fire; in 1699, it was replaced by Williamsburg as the new capital. On the relatively high neck of land between the James and York rivers, the College of William and Mary, built to keep planters’ sons close to home, and the simple brick Bruton Parish Church were incorporated into a handsome plan of wide, sand-covered streets and brick government buildings. Still far from complete, this town was built to last.
    The Joneses’ first surviving child was a son named Lane, born in 1707, followed by a daughter, Frances, in 1710, a break in the line of Marthas. Martha Macon Jones died in 1716, when Fanny was only six. Life in colonial Virginia was uncertain, and the chances of a child growing to adulthood with two living parents were rare indeed; living grandparents were even less common.
    Like most colonial widowers (not to speak of widows), Orlando Jones soon remarried; it was simply too difficult to maintain a household and rear children alone. Reflecting this reality, many colonial documents refer to “now husband” and “now wife” to distinguish from earlier spouses. After three childless years, Orlando also died and left the guardianship of his children to his second wife, Mary Elizabeth