Leven Powell, at the time of his purchase from Joseph Chinn, was no stranger to Loudoun, for his father, William Powell, had acquired land in the neighbourhood of the present Middleburg as early as 1741. Although these lands had been repeatedly surveyed from the time of the original patents to Raleigh Chinn, Charles Burgess and others, in a day when forest surveys customarily ran to a red or white oak, an ash or a walnut tree, it may be supposed that boundary lines, in spite of "processioning," not infrequently became the subject of vigourous dispute; so in the Middleburg neighbourhood the Chinn and Powell heirs fell out, in 1811, over their dividing lines and the accuracy of the survey made in 1731 by John Barber for Charles Burgess, William Stamp, Thomas Thornton and Rawleigh Chinn the burgess. About 500 acres of arable land and 500 acres of forest were involved and hot was the legal warfare and very numerous the depositions from distant witnesses in Virginia and Kentucky obtained and filed in Loudoun's Superior Court. At the end, the litigation appears to have resolved itself into some sort of compromise; for on the 7th April, 1814, we find the Superior Court ordering "this Day came the Parties by their Attorneys and this suit is discontinued being agreed between the Parties."[60] But the memory of their warfare still ruffled the litigants' minds; for upon the settlement being effected, "Sailor" Rawleigh Chinn, grandson and namesake of the patentee, proceeded to build upon the land set off to him "Mount Recovery" which, burned in the Civil War, was afterwards rebuilt and became the home of Mr. Thomas Dudley, subsequently being sold to Mr. Oliver Iselin; while Burr Powell, the other litigant, built on the tract set off to him a house he called Mount Defiance which in later years was owned by the Thatcher and Bishop families. [60] Loudoun Superior Court Orders C 38. In 1744 John Hough, according to family tradition, settled in these Fairfax backwoods "and served for many years as surveyor for the vast estate of Lord Fairfax." He became the progenitor of the family which has become numerous in Loudoun and includes Emerson Hough, well known American novelist, though the latter was born in Iowa.[61] His surveys were much needed, for by 1750 the pressure of settlers for grants in these uplands had so increased that "Lord Fairfax's land office was crowded with applicants" we are told.[62] [61] Balch Library Clippings, II, 84. [62] _Virginia Land Grants_, 130. CHAPTER VIII THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR [Illustration: SIR PETER HALKETT, Bart. In command of that part of Braddock's Army that marched through the present Loudoun in 1755.]