The first county surveyor was recognized at the court held on the 9th August, 1757, when "George West, Gent. produced a Commission to be Surveyor of this County and thereupon he took the Oath directed by the Act of Assembly and entered into and acknowledged his Bond to the President and Masters of the College of William & Mary in Virginia with Charles Binns & Lee Massey his Sureties which is Ordered to be recorded." The first attorneys to qualify to practice law before the Loudoun Court were Hugh West, Benjamin Sebastian, William Elzey, and James Keith. Few institutions of the Northern Neck of those days of slow travel and thin settlement were more important than the inns or as they are usually designated "ordinaries;" and the keeper of an Ordinary was generally a man of parts and consequence in his community. The matter of cost of food, drink and lodging in the public inns was a subject close to the heart of the eighteenth century colonial and Loudoun's Court lost no time in taking control of the ordinaries within its boundaries. Already several were in existence. As early as 1740 William West had acquired land on the Carolina Road near the present Aldie and soon had constructed a dwelling and was keeping an ordinary there. The Loudoun Court on the 9th May, 1759, gave him a license to keep his ordinary for a year--presumably to be annually renewed--but he had been acting as the local Boniface for many years before that. The first Loudoun license for an ordinary, however, was granted on the 10th August, 1757, "to James Coleman to keep Ordinary at his House in this County (at the Sugar Lands) for one Year he with Security having given Bond as the Law directs;" but Coleman, too, had been conducting an ordinary at his residence before then. On the 12th September, 1759, the court licensed John Moss to keep an Ordinary at Leesburg. But on the 9th day of August, 1757, the day before it granted its first license to keep ordinary to James Coleman, the court laid down its rules and regulations for Loudoun inn keepers. That the gentlemen justices gave far more detailed attention to the charges for alcoholic refreshment than to the other matters regulated may or may not have been mere coincidence. "The Court," so runs the record, "proceeded to rate the Liquor for this County as follows: L S d