Washington, George, & George Hume | George Washington, surveyor

Washington, George, & George Hume
Autograph manuscript survey, with plat map, signed by George Hume ("Ghome"), of "Mr. George Carter Decd. Land on Opekon"

2 pages (323 x 235 mm) on a sheet of laid paper (watermarked Pro Patria), [Northern Virginia, in present day Clarke County, just south of Winchester 1746–1748], two contemporary file dockets on lower margin of verso, "The plat of opecon Land G Carters Estate" and "Geo: Carter Decd. Land on Opeckon 9 Lotts"; some light browning, fold separations, occasionally costing a bit of a letter, artlessly repaired.

A significant colonial Virginia survey with intriguing connections to George Washington.

As a youth looking for a path to prosperity, George Washington began the study of surveying. (In an article on Washington's backcountry surveying, the Washington scholar Philander Chase claimed that frontier surveyors "could earn an annual cash income that was exceeded only by the colony's finest trial lawyers.") His exercise books preserved in the Library of Congress include several practice surveys he completed as a fifteen-year-old, including one of the turnip garden at Mount Vernon. In 1748, Washington gained invaluable experience when he accompanied the Surveyor of Prince William County, James Genn, on a journey to survey the western lands of Lord Fairfax. And by the following year, largely due to the patronage of the Fairfax family, Washington was appointed the surveyor for the newly formed Culpeper County. But to the extent that Washington served even an informal apprenticeship in surveying, it was accomplished under the tutelage of George Hume during his survey of the George Carter estate in what is now Clarke County, which was cut from Frederick county. George Hume (1698–1760) was born in Scotland, but banished to the colonies for his role in the Jacobite Rebellion. Hume—who usually spelled his name, as on the present survey, "Home" until about 1747—studied surveying at William and Mary and is credited with making the first survey of Fredericksburg.

The present survey derives from the vast property holdings of Robert "King" Carter, who left his heirs more than 300,000 acres of land. The land surveyed here belonged to "King" Carter's youngest son, George, who died intestate in England in 1742. In order to settle George's estate, his trustees were directed to sell his lands. Hume's survey, on which young George Washington almost certainly worked, covers a parcel consisting of approximately 7,323 acres divided into nine lots. Remarkably, there are currently five properties within this nine-lot survey included on the National Register of Historic Homes: Meadea (built in 1760 by Col. Richard Kidder Meade), Saratoga (built in 1779 by Gen. Daniel Morgan), Lucky Hit (built in 1791 by Col. Meade), The Tuleyries (built in 1833 by Col. Joseph Tuley Jr.), and White Post District.

Washington's original contribution to the Carter survey was evidently not to be his last involvement with this document. Twenty years after the trustees of George Carter's estate had been ordered to sell his land holdings, less than half of the property had been sold. Carter's heirs petitioned the Virginia Assembly to appoint new trustees to complete the task, and in 1766, George Washington, Robert Burwell, and Fielding Lewis were named as the new trustees. (The following year, Washington purchased 2,682 acres of the Carter land on his own account.)

As part of his duties, Washington was hired to resurvey the land covered by the earlier Hume survey. At the very least, he redrew the plat of the nine parcels, which he titled "Geo. Carter Esq. Land on Opeckon, 8365 acres." The editors of the George Washington Papers date this plat (which is housed in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania) to March 1769; see https://www.loc.gov/resource/mgwd.wd02/?sp=153.

Washington's autograph plat of the Carter property is essentially an exact, to scale, replica of Hume's original plat. It seems likely that Washington had access to Hume's original survey and that his plat drawing was based, in fact, not on a new survey but on his and Hume's original work. The acreage of the nine individual lots are also exactly the same (one of 806 acres, one of 827 acres, one of 800 acres, and six of 815 acres each), so it is not clear why Washington's total acreage of the survey was so inaccurate.

REFERENCE
John L. Failla, "A George Washington Survey," in Professional Surveyor Magazine, Vol. 27, Issue 5 (May 2007); Edgar Erskine Hume, "Memorial to George Hume, Esquire, Crown Surveyor of Virginia and Washington's Teacher of Surveying, with Notes on his Life," in Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 1 (July 1939):6-54 & No. 2 (Oct. 1939):70-120; Curtis Chappelear, "The George Carter Tract: The Disposition and Settlement of the George Carter Tract of Land in the Shenandoah Valley," in Proceedings of the Clarke County Historical Association, Vol. 3 (1943):18–27

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