County, West Virginia, its
Virginian flavor is the collection of fine old houses which adorn it.
Many of these houses are the homes of families bearing the name of
Washington, or having in their veins the blood of the Washingtons. It is
said that there is more Washington blood in Charles Town (which, by the
way, should not be confused with Charleston, capital of the same State),
than in any other place, if not in all the rest of the world together.
The nearest competitors to Charles Town in this respect are Westmoreland
County, Virginia, and the town of Kankakee, Illinois, where resides the
Spottswood Augustine Washington family, said to be the only Washington
group to have taken the Union side in the Civil War. It is rumored also
that all the Washingtons are Democrats, although that fact is hard to
reconcile, at the present time, with the statement that, among the five
thousand of them, there is but a single Federal officeholder.

The settling of the Washingtons in Jefferson County, West Virginia, came
about through the fact that George Washington, when a youth of sixteen
or seventeen, became acquainted with that part of what was then
Virginia, through having gone to survey for Lord Fairfax, who had
acquired an enormous tract of land in the neighboring county of Clarke,
which is still in the mother State. To this estate, called Greenaway
Court, his lordship, it is recorded, came from England to isolate
himself because a woman with whom he was in love refused to marry him.

In this general neighborhood George Washington lived for three years,
and local enthusiasts affirm that to his having drunk the
lime-impregnated waters of this valley was due his great stature. The
man who informed me of this theory had lived there aways. He was about
five feet three inches tall, and had drunk the waters all his
life--plain and otherwise.

Washington's accounts of the region so interested his brothers that they
finally moved there, acquired large tracts of land, and built homes.
Charles Town, indeed, was laid out on the land of Charles Washington,
and was named for him, and there is evidence that George Washington,
who certainly gave the lines for the roads about the place, also laid
out the town.

Another brother, John Augustine, left a large family, while Samuel, the
oldest, described as "a rollicking country squire," was several years
short of fifty when he died, but for all that had managed to marry five
times and to find, n