Legends of Loudoun: An account of the history and homes of a border county of Virginia's Northern NeckWilliams, Harrison
History
Legends of Loudoun: An account of the history and homes of a border county of Virginia's Northern Neck
Williams, Harrison
Historic buildings -- Virginia -- Loudoun County; Loudoun County (Va.) -- History
As early as 1725 there was, it is said, a group of Irish immigrants
which had established itself on the Virginia bank of the Potomac,
opposite the mouth of the Monocacy. This particular cluster had come
from Maryland having, perhaps, been attracted to the large grant between
the Monocacy and the Point of Rocks which, before 1700, had been
acquired by the first Charles Carroll, founder of his family in Maryland
who, when he acquired the land on the Monocacy, was acting as Agent for
Maryland's Proprietor, Lord Baltimore. Later his grandson, another
Charles Carroll, inherited the grant, added greatly thereto, bestowed
upon it the name of Carrollton Manor and in signing the _Declaration of
Independence_ as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, gave it and himself
immortality. The Carrolls were Irish and Roman Catholics; perhaps they
had encouraged these newcomers to go out to their great holdings on the
Monocacy where life could be begun anew and there was less danger of
interference with their religion than in the strongly Protestant east.
However, whether encouraged or not, our particular covey of Irish seem
eventually to have crossed to the Virginia shore and there planted
themselves with small formality and no title. All was wilderness on both
sides of the Potomac. The matter of a legal title was probably the least
of our adventurers' troubles.
In the first half-century following the founding of Jamestown, few Irish
were to be encountered in Virginia. The Colony was overwhelmingly
English with, it is true, occasional Welsh, Irish and Scotch here and
there; but these were accidental and the basic and dominating race of
the settlers was so wholly Anglo-Saxon that the few others were
submerged and lost in the English flood. But between 1653 and 1660,
hundreds of unfortunate Irish, resisting Cromwell, were shipped as
political prisoners and little better than white slaves to Virginia and
the other Colonies. Again, after the defeat in 1690 of James II and his
Irish supporters by William III at the Battle of the Boyne and the
resultant Treaty of Limerick the next year, great numbers of the Irish
were banished or condemned to transportation and of these many were sent
to Maryland and Virginia where as servants or labourers on the land,
their services were in demand. While the majority thus transported were
ignorant peasants, feudal vassals of their lords, the "Kerns and
gallowglasses" of Macaulay, numbers of the nobility and gentry were
exiled as well, of which we have already recorded a prominent example in
Daniel McCarty. Inasmuch as those transported were so treated as
punishment for their uprising in favour of James and against the de
facto English government of William, they were stigmatized as criminals,
although, as shown, their offense was purely political. But Irish
offenders against the penal laws other than political were also from
time to time condemned to transportation and as the demand for labourers
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