It was an autumn day in the year 1753. A group of men lounged in the sunshine before a rudely constructed log tavern in a Virginia wilderness clearing. Their rough attire of buckskin and homespun and their knives and rifles proclaimed them to be hunters, trappers and settlers. Suddenly they were aroused by a noise in the forest. The drooping tree boughs came to life and the tall grasses were pushed aside as an amazing spectacle for this frontier setting emerged. With a great rattling of wheels, creaking of leather and clumping of hooves, four shiny horses came forth drawing behind them an English chariot that would very well have graced the streets of London. The liveried driver drew up before the hitching rack and the footmen descended from behind and opened the door of the chariot. Out stepped a middle-aged man, so tall and so gigantic in frame, that he had difficulty in getting through the opening. He was richly clad in a coat of brown cloth decorated with embroidery and a waistcoat of yellow silk, ornamented with silver thread and flowers. His peruke was carefully powdered and his shirt ruffles were snow-white. As he issued from the chariot he drew about him the folds of a red velvet cloak, and then bowing his head slightly to the admiring crowd, he entered the tavern. This man was no stranger to these frontiersmen. Most of them had hunted with him, or eaten at his "broad board," or transacted business with him in his little stone office. But it was rarely that they saw him thus, in the trappings of an English gentleman. They had seen him stab his hunting-knife into a deer's throat, and hold up the brush of a fox at the end of the chase, but then his garments had been weather-beaten and on his head he had worn an otter-skin cap with a buck's tail stuck in it. But this strange gentleman had no hunting trip in mind to-day. He soon came out of the tavern and the chariot was rumbling away down the forest road, for he was due to preside over a session of the justices' court at the frontier town of Winchester. And although the Shawnee Indians were still not too far distant, this gentleman evidently believed in carrying into the wilds of the New World something of the English idea of the propriety of full dress on occasions of ceremony. And who was this man who could change so easily from back-woodsman to gentleman? None other than Thomas, sixth Lord Fairfax of Cameron, and sole proprietor of that vast tract of land known as the Northern Neck. This, his inheritance, embraced all lands lying between the headwaters of the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers to the Chesapeake Bay, comprising more than five million acres. Thomas, sixth Lord Fairfax had inherited, in 1719, the Northern Neck of Virginia, through his mother, Catherine, daughter of Thomas, Lord Culpeper, and wife of Lord Fairfax. It was through this marriage that the grant became known as the Fairfax Proprietary.