Among the newcomers, in this post-revolution period, was Colonel Burgess Ball, a great-grandson of that dignified old aristocrat Colonel William Ball of Millenbeck on the Rappahannock, in Lancaster County, who had come to Virginia in 1657. During the Revolution Burgess Ball had served on the staff of General Washington, his first cousin, then as a captain in the Continental Line and later had raised and equipped a Virginia regiment at his own expense and served with it as lieutenant colonel. After the war, his health broken and his generous fortune seriously impaired by his expenditures for military purposes and by his extravagant hospitality at his home, Travellers Rest in Spotsylvania County, he in 1795, was obliged to seek refuge in what was still known in Tidewater as the Loudoun wilderness. On the 4th November, 1795, he purchased for £1741 (the proceeds of his back pay for military services it is said) from Abraham Barnes Thomson Mason, only acting executor and trustee under the will of Thomson Mason, a tract of 247 acres including the Great Spring and running to the Potomac. Here Colonel Ball either built a rustic lodge for his home or, as has been surmised, occupied and improved the old home of Francis Aubrey, calling his estate Springwood. On that same 4th November, 1795, there was purchased in trust for Colonel Ball from Stevens Thomson Mason by William Fitzhugh, Mann Page, and Alexander Spotswood "three of the trustees appointed by an Act of General Assembly to sell certain lands devised by James Ball deceased to his grandson Burgess Ball for his life," another tract of 147 acres about two miles north of the Great Spring for £441, current money of Virginia. Other adjacent tracts were purchased by Colonel Ball or by his trustees until he controlled a very large estate from the Great Spring to the Limestone Run of the most fertile land in the county.[132] Far from his old military companions, he kept up a correspondence with them in his distant abode and many of them visited him there from time to time; for whether surrounded by the refinements of Travellers Rest or the wilderness of Springwood, Colonel Ball's lavish hospitality was a part of the very man himself. He died on the 7th March, 1800, and was buried just outside the graveyard surrounding the old chapel above Goose Creek on the hill above the Great Spring. This first Springwood dwelling was not on the site of the present mansion but is believed to have been on the south side of the present road on what is now a part of the Big Spring estate, in recent years known as Mayfield. The existing Springwood residence was built by George Washington Ball, later Captain C.S.A., grandson of Colonel Burgess Ball, between 1840 and 1850. Louis Philippe is said to have been an overnight guest there and, during the Civil War, General Lee, a cousin of Captain Ball who had served on his staff, held a military conference in the present dining room. The estate