Thomas Marshall, the father of the Chief Justice, two years older than Washington, was also born in Westmoreland County, was a schoolmate of Washington, served with him both as surveyor of the Fairfax estates, and soon afterwards, as an officer in the French and Indian wars; and he, too, as time passed, found like advantage from his experience as a surveyor. In 1753, Thomas Marshall was made agent of Lord Fairfax in the management of his estates. In the next year, he married Mary Isham Keith, daughter of a Scotch clergyman, whose wife was a descendant of William Randolph, of Turkey Island, the ancestor of the famous Virginia family of that name. Their son, John Marshall, the oldest of fifteen children, was born on September 24, 1755, in what was afterwards Fauquier County, at a little settlement then known as Germantown,--now Midland, on the Southern Railroad, a few miles south of Manassas. That was the year of Braddock’s defeat, and Thomas Marshall, like Washington, was in the service, as an officer. In Marshall’s early childhood, his father’s household, situated in a frontier county, must have been agitated with the dreadful rumors, anxieties, and terrors of the troubles with the French and Indians. “So late,” he tells us in the “Life of Washington,” “as the year 1756, the Blue Ridge was the northwestern frontier; and [Virginia] found immense difficulty in completing a single regiment to protect the inhabitants from the horrors of the scalping-knife, and the still greater horrors of being led into captivity by savages who added terrors to death by the manner of inflicting it.” It was not until two years later that the capture of Fort Duquesne relieved Virginia from the frightful ravages that laid waste the region just west of the Blue Ridge. When John Marshall was ten years old or more, his father left the level country and poor soil of eastern Fauquier, for the higher and more fertile region in the western part of the county, just under the Blue Ridge. At Midland all they can show you now, relating to Marshall, is a small, rude heap of bricks and rubbish,--what is left of the house where he was born; and children on the farm reach out to you a handful of the bullets with which that sacred spot and the whole region were thickly sown, before a generation had passed, after his death.