GEORGE BEALL. March 7, 1752. Can't you see how difficult it was for the old gentleman (he must then, by the records, have been about sixty years of age or more) to cooperate with the changes that were coming to ruin, as he thought, his comfortable and profitable plantation life? Two hundred and eighty pounds were paid for the sixty acres of the original town. The southern boundary was the river, the western about where the college now stands, the eastern a few feet west of the present 30th Street, and the northern boundary was a few feet south of the present N Street. The only boundary stone still existing is the one that was No. 2 in the survey, the northeastern corner of the town, and is now in the garden of number 3014 N. Street. There were eighty lots in the original town. The name has been variously attributed to George II, the King then reigning; to the two Georges from whom the land was taken, and to George Washington, which last is, of course, absurd, as he was then a young man of twenty, engaged 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!