ged in surveying the properties of Lord Fairfax.

Chapter II

_The Original Town and Its People_

George Town flourished and became more and more a busy port. Its
population in 1800 was 2,993; by 1810 it was 4,948. Its wharves were
thronged with vessels sailing across the seas laden with the "precious
weed" and with wheat brought in from plantations for the "flouring
mills" in great Conestoga wagons painted red and blue drawn by six-horse
teams adorned with gay harness and jingling bells. Also, there was a
thriving coastwise trade, up to old Salem and Newburyport where the
clipper ships were built, and down to the West Indies. These ships
brought back sugar, molasses, and rum, and from the old country came
clothing, and furniture, and all sorts of luxuries, for the thriving
merchants were building comfortable homes and furnishing them in
elegance and taste.

General Edward Braddock, after a brilliant military career under Prince
William of Orange, in Holland, had been made a major-general and put in
charge of troops in Virginia against the French. He landed his troops in
Alexandria, marched them up to where the ferry crossed to George Town,
where they divided, part going through Virginia, and he, with the
remainder, crossing the Potomac to George Town from whence he continued
on his fateful march to Fort Duquesne, where he met his terrible defeat
and lost his life.

He had come from Perthshire in old Scotland, so, of course, had received
a warm welcome in this Scottish town. And thus he had written back to
England to George Anne Bellamy, the gifted actress, in 1755: "For never
have I attended a more complete banquet or met better dressed or better
mannered people than I met on my arrival in George Town, which is named
after our gracious Majesty." If only he had mentioned in whose house the
banquet was or the names of some of these agreeable people he met!

James Truslow Adams, in his fascinating book, _The Epic of America_,
speaks over and over again of the culture of the pre-Revolutionary towns
along the Atlantic seaboard, and what a high point it had reached. No
better example could be found than this old town with its families who
had come from well-to-do circumstances, not, as was the case with so
many settlers of the new country, in order to escape trouble. They came
mostly from Scotland; witness the names as time goes on. Indeed, to such
an extent, that the little settlement had first of all been cal