SUMMARY
William Buckland was a builder and architect best known for his work on George Mason‘s Gunston Hall, in Fairfax County. Born in England, Buckland trained as a joiner and carpenter before coming to Virginia as the indentured servant of Thomson Mason in 1755. He worked on the interior detailing of Gunston Hall for the next four years. Buckland moved to Richmond County in 1761, where he purchased a farm and likely continued to work as a builder, although the specifics of his work have largely been lost. Mentions of Buckland in the Carter and Tayloe papers suggest he may have contributed design and construction to Sabine Hall, home of Landon Carter, and Mount Airy, home of John Tayloe II. In 1771, Buckland moved to Annapolis, Maryland, and there designed the Hammond-Harwood House and the courthouse in Caroline County. He died in 1774.
Early Years
John Moncure Daniel was born on October 24, 1825, in Stafford County and was the son of John Moncure Daniel, a physician, and his first wife, Eliza Mitchell Daniel. He was educated by his father and attended school in Richmond, where he lived with his granduncle Peter V. Daniel, a member of the Council of State and an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Early in the 1840s he read law in Fredericksburg in the office of John Tayloe Lomax.
Penniless after the death of his father, Daniel moved to Richmond in 1845 and worked initially as librarian of the Patrick Henry Society, a gentleman’s literary club. Late in 1846 he became coeditor of the monthly
SUMMARY
John Baylor III was a wealthy planter and one of the most significant importers and breeders of thoroughbred horses in pre-Revolutionary America. The son of a slave dealer described by Robert “King” Carter as “the greatest merchant in our country,” Baylor was educated in England and, upon his return to Virginia, granted land along the Mattaponi River, where he built his estate, Newmarket. He represented Caroline County in the House of Burgesses (1742–1752; 1756–1765) and on the county court before falling out of political favor in a dispute over how best to oppose the Stamp Act (1765). Baylor’s deepest passion was elite horseflesh and it nearly bankrupted him. By the mid-1750s, he had given up racing and was instead importing, at great expense, a dozen or more of the colony’s best thoroughbreds, which attracted the mares of George Washington, among others, for breeding. In 1764, he purchased the thoroughbred Fearnought for the unprecedented price of a thousan
Lee was born on October 14, 1734, at Stratford Hall plantation in Westmoreland County. He was the fourth surviving son of Thomas Lee and Hannah Harrison Ludwell Lee. After Lee’s parents died in 1750, he was left under the guardianship of his oldest brother, Philip Ludwell Lee. Philip Lee decided that Francis Lee was best suited for the life of a farmer and ended his formal education. Consequently, Lee was not educated in England, as his older brothers had been; his schooling never progressed beyond that acquired under the tutelage of a Reverend Craig, who lived at Stratford Hall in the mid-1740s.