is a few miles from Staunton, of which town he was the founder. It is
the oldest town in the valley. He obtained patents for a hundred
thousand acres of land in different parts of the circumjacent country,
and left an ample inheritance to his children.

In the spring of 1736 John Lewis, the pioneer of Augusta, visiting
Williamsburg, met there with Burden, who had recently come to Virginia
as agent for Lord Fairfax, proprietor of the Northern Neck. Burden, in
compliance with Lewis's invitation, visited him at his sequestered home
in the backwoods; and the visit of several months was occupied in
exploring the teeming beauties of the Eden-like valley, and in hunting,
in company with Lewis and his sons, Samuel and Andrew. A captured
buffalo calf was given to Burden, and he, on returning to Lower
Virginia, where that animal was not found, presented it to Governor
Gooch, who, thus propitiated, authorized him to locate five hundred
thousand acres of land in the vast Counties of Frederick and Augusta,
(formed two years thereafter,) on condition that within ten years he
should settle one hundred families there, in which case he should be
entitled to one thousand acres adjacent to every house, with the
privilege of entering as much more at one shilling per acre. This grant
covered one-half of what is now Rockbridge County, from the North
Mountain to the Blue Ridge. The grantee was required to import and place
on the land one settler for every thousand acres. For this purpose he
brought over from England (1737) upwards of one hundred families from
the north of Ireland, Scotland, and the border counties of England, and
it is said that he resorted to stratagem to comply apparently with the
conditions.[429:A] The first settlers of this Rockbridge tract were
Ephraim McDowell (ancestor of Governor James McDowell) and James
Greenlee, in 1737. Mary Greenlee, his sister, attained the age of one
hundred years and upwards, and was known to two or three generations.
The Scotch-Irish retained much of the superstitious nature of the
Highlanders of Scotland, and Mary Greenlee was by many believed to be a
witch. At a very advanced age she rode erect on horseback. Robert and
Archibald Alexander also settled in the Rockbridge region. Robert, a
graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, taught the first classical school
west of the Blue Ridge. Archibald, who was agent of Burden and drew up
all his complex conveyances, was grandfather of the Rev. Dr. Arc