USA > Virginia > Virginia county names : two hundred and seventy years of Virginia history > Part 2
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Princess Anne county lies south of the Chesapeake Bay on the Atlantic coast; it is bounded on the south by North Carolina, and North River, its chief stream, flows into the North Carolinian Currituck Sound.
Prince George county lies along the south bank of the James, just across from Charles City. The Appomattox, Blackwater, and Nottoway rivers, together with the James, receive the county's drainage.
Fluvanna is situated between Goochland and Albemarle on the north bank of the James, and is nearly bisected by the Rivanna River.
THREE ORANGE COUNTIES
KING AND QUEEN, Organized 1691 KING WILLIAM, . Organized 170I
ORANGE, .Organized 1734
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CHAPTER IV
THE THREE ORANGE COUNTIES
Three counties of Virginia are named in honor of the House of Orange, a prominent royal family of Holland that became con- nected with England by treaty and by mar- riage.
King and Queen county is so called in honor of King William III of England, who was the Prince of Orange, and of Queen Mary, who ruled England jointly with her husband.1
In 1701, seven years after Mary's death, King William county was named after Wil- liam,2 who was sole ruler of England during the eight years in which he survived his wife. Although William was a prince of Holland, he was grandson of Charles I of England through his mother Mary, who was the oldest daughter of that king. His wife Mary was his first cousin, for she also was a grandchild
1William and Mary College, chartered in 1692, takes its name from these sovereigns.
2Williamsburg was named in honor of King William, and the streets were to have been laid out in the shape of a W, but this plan was only partly carried out.
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Virginia County Names
of Charles I. Thus in William and Mary the line of Stuarts was indirectly represented on the English throne.
There is hardly a doubt that the naming of Orange county in 1734 was a graceful way of extending congratulations to Prince Wil- liam of Orange, who married Anne, the oldest daughter of George II of England, in that year.
The above explanation of Orange county's name is original with me, and I adopted it even before I knew that a county in North Carolina was named in honor of the House of Orange. The historian John Fiske, as I learned in 1900, says without qualification, that Orange county is named after the House of Orange.
Two historians of Virginia give a different explanation of how the county got its name. Martin's "Gazetteer of Virginia"3 states that Orange county derived its name from the color of the soil in the mountainous portion of the county. Howe's "History of Vir- ginia,"4 which bought the copyright to Mar- tin's book, follows Martin in saying that the county was named from the color of the soil. A number of considerations, besides the au-
3P. 253. 4P. 417.
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Three Orange Counties
thority of Mr. Fiske, strengthen my belief that Orange county was named in compliment to Prince William of Orange.
The connection between England and the House of Orange had been long and close. The family influence of George II determined several Virginia county names, both before and after Orange county was named. In 1727 Caroline county was named after George's wife, Queen Caroline; in 1730 Prince William county received the name of his son William; in 1738 Frederick and Au- gusta counties were named after the Prince of Wales and his wife; in 1742 Louisa county received the name of a daughter of George II. Of the seven counties besides Orange that were formed during the sixteen years ending in 1742, five were named after members of George II's family. Counties had been named after both of his sons, after one son's wife, and also after two of his five daughters. As there was already a Princess Anne county, George's oldest daugh- ter, Anne, had not yet been honored by a Virginia county name, There was then no opportunity for bestowing such a distinction, but in 1734 the occasion offered to honor her by naming a county after her husband's
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Virginia County Names
family. . It is hard to believe that Virginia failed to seize the opportunity.
King and Queen county is south of Essex and Middlesex, and is separated from King William on the south by the Mattapony River. The county is drained chiefly by the Mattapony River, partly by the Piankatank.
King William county is enclosed on all except its northwest side by the Mattapony and Pamunkey rivers ; Caroline county bounds it on the northwest.
Orange county, in north-central Virginia, is watered by the Rapidan and North Anna rivers; its western surface is broken by moun- tains. Although its present area is only 349 square miles, Orange county, at its formation one hundred and seventy-four years ago, com- prised all of Virginia west of the Blue Ridge.
FOURTEEN HANOVER COUNTIES
BRUNSWICK, Organized 1720
HANOVER, . Organized 1720
KING GEORGE, . Organized 1720 CAROLINE, . Organized 1727
PRINCE WILLIAM, Organized 1730
AMELIA, Organized
1734
FREDERICK,
Organized 1738
AUGUSTA, . Organized 1738
LOUISA, . Organized 1742
LUNENBURG, . Organized
1745
CUMBERLAND, . Organized 1748
PRINCE EDWARD, Organized
1753
CHARLOTTE, Organized 1764
MECKLENBURG,
Organized
1764
CHAPTER V
THE FOURTEEN HANOVER COUNTIES
At Queen Anne's death, in 1714, the House of Hanover came into peaceful posses- sion of the English throne. This line of sovereigns was so called because the Ger- man province of Hanover, with its various duchies, became subject to the English crown when George, the Elector of Hanover, be- came also ruler of England. Hanover re- mained a part of the British kingdom until 1837, when Victoria became queen of the English. It then became independent of England, for, by the German law of succes- sion, no female could reign in Hanover.
Fourteen Virginia counties bear names per- taining to the family of Hanover, and, as might be expected from early settled coun- ties, most of them are in the eastern part of the State. They were all named within a period of forty-five years, beginning in 1720 and ending in 1764. After the latter date names associated with American independence begin to be prominent among the Virginia counties.
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Virginia County Names
Brunswick, Hanover, and King George counties, all three named in 1720, bear em- phatic evidence of Virginia's loyalty to the home government in England. Hanover and Brunswick are named in honor of the House of Hanover and the House of Bruns- wick respectively, though of course the families derived their names in the first case from the German province of Hanover, and in the second case from the duchy of Bruns- wick, which formed a part of Hanover. King George county bears the name of the king himself, George I, who ruled over England and Hanover from 1714 to 1727.
In 1727 George II succeeded his father as king, and during the thirty-three years of his reign nine Virginia counties were named in honor of various members of the royal family. The king's wife, two sons, two daughters, a grandson, a son-in-law, and a daughter-in- law were thus complimented. Moreover, an- other county, Lunenburg, was named in honor of the king himself, for one of the king's titles was duke of Brunswick-Lunebürg, Lune- bürg being the German form of Lunenburg.
Caroline county was formed in 1727, the first year of George II's reign, and derived its name from the new sovereign's wife, Queen
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Fourteen Hanover Counties
Caroline. Caroline was a woman of char- acter and ability, and exercised considerable influence on English politics during the ten years that she lived after becoming queen.
Two counties are named in honor of Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumber- land and favorite-though not the oldest- son of George II. When the prince was only nine years old Prince William county received his name, in 1730. Eighteen years later, when William was commander-in-chief of the British army,1 Cumberland county was named in honor of the duke, in this instance, however, taking his title for that purpose. The duke had won great popularity by his decisive victory over the "Young Pretender" at Culloden in 1746, and a triumphal demon- stration was made at Norfolk, Va., in honor of the victory. England rewarded Prince William with an annual pension of £40,000, or about $200,000, in gratitude to him for
1Dr. B. W. Green, an authority on matters of Virginia history, supports me in this explanation of the name of Cumberland county in Virginia. Spencer's "North Caro- lina History" says that a North Carolina county was named after the duke in 1754. The "American Cyclo- pedia" says that Cumberland county, Pennsylvania, was, in 1750, named after the shire of that name in the north- west of England.
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Virginia County Names
destroying forever the hopes the Stuarts may have entertained of gaining the English crown. The duke's subsequent military career, however, was quite unsuccessful. On his return from an unfortunate war in Han- over he resigned from the army, and was not again given office. He died in 1765.
The county of Amelia was organized in 1734, and takes its name from Amelia Sophia, second daughter of George II. The county of Orange was named in the same year to honor King George's son-in-law, the Prince of Orange, who had just married Anne, the king's oldest daughter. The accomplished and imperious Amelia never married. The princess was addicted to the habit of taking snuff, and on her snuff-box was inscribed, "Noli me tangere" (Don't touch me). An old army officer once disregarded the injunc- tion and helped himself to some snuff from Amelia's snuff-box, whereupon the indignant Amelia had the remainder of the contents of the box cast into the fire. She was born in 17II, and lived through the entire reigns of her grandfather and father, and her nephew, George III, had been twenty-six years king when she died-in 1786.
Louisa county was named in 1742 in com-
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Fourteen Hanover Counties
pliment to Princess Louisa, the fifth and youngest daughter of George II, and was then a graceful, talented and amiable young lady of eighteen. She married Frederick V of Denmark the next year, and died in 1751, at the age of twenty-seven.
Frederick and Augusta counties were named in 1738 in honor of the Prince of Wales and his wife, who had just become the happy parents of a son. Twenty-two years later this son succeeded his grandfather as king of England, with the title of George III. Frederick himself died in 1751, during his father's reign, and so never became king. The city of Fredericksburg in Spotsylvania county was founded in 1727 and named after Prince Frederick, when the prince was twenty- one years old.
Frederick's character was full of contra- dictions, and his faults were neither few nor small; but he was a friend to authors, and he encouraged painting. He even attempted poetry himself, and most of his verse, which was wretched, was written in praise of his wife. Augusta's intelligence, her kindness, and her virtue, at a time when license and immorality abounded, deserved the efforts of a better poet.
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Virginia County Names
Augusta was only seventeen when the royal yacht, William and Mary, carried her from her home in Saxe-Gotha to become the bride of Frederick, Prince of Wales, in 1736. As has been said, Augusta herself never became queen of England, but from her have de- scended all the sovereigns of England since her day. Victoria was her great-grand- daughter, and thus Edward VII is her great-
great-grandson. Augusta lived to see Eng- land attain a greater tide of power than she had ever before reached, and she died before the ebb set in: immense possessions had just been wrenched from France in North America, and the foundations of Britain's power had been securely laid in India. It was in 1772, just before the tyranny of George III had lost to England the greater part of her North American possessions, that Augusta died.
Edward Augustus, second son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, was fourteen years old when Prince Edward county was named after him in 1753. During the splendid and elaborate marriage of King George III to Queen Char- lotte in 1761, Edward proved very helpful to his royal brother by his kindly tact. The prince, who seems to have been of a witty and
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Fourteen Hanover Counties
sunshiny disposition, was created Duke of York. He never married, and died in 1761, at the age of twenty-eight.
When the Virginians formed a new county from Brunswick in 1746, they realized that, although the reigning king's wife and various members of the royal household had been honored in naming Virginia counties, no such honor had been paid directly to the king him- self.
The name King George had already been given in honor of George I, and Prince George was not suitable for a king, besides, there was already a Prince George county. But the supply of titles by which George II could be called was not yet exhausted, and accordingly the new county received the name of Lunenburg, the English rendering of the German Lüneburg, for George II, as well as his father, George I, was Duke of Bruns- wick-Lüneburg. This name seems especially appropriate when we consider that Lunenburg county was taken directly from Brunswick. Lüneburg and Brunswick were at one time separate duchies, but in George II's time they constituted a single duchy, Brunswick-Lüne- burg, and were a part of the kingdom of Hanover.
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Virginia County Names
The State of Georgia bears the name of George II.
Three Virginia counties were named to honor George I, ten to honor George II, and two to honor George III, and both of the last were named in compliment to Queen Charlotte, wife of George III. Both coun- ties were taken from Lunenburg, and both were formed in 1764. Charlotte county takes its name directly from Queen Charlotte. Mecklenburg also is named in honor of the queen, but indirectly so, for its gets its name from the German duchy, or rather grand- duchy, of Mecklenburg2-Strelitz, from which Charlotte came, and of which her brother was the duke. Charlottesville, Va., was founded soon after Charlotte became queen, and was named in her honor.
Charlotte Sophia, sister of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, married young King George III in 1761, and was fifty-seven years queen of England. Fifteen children sprang from this marriage, and all but two grew up. There were nine sons and six daughters; the aggregate age of the sons was 494 years; of
"The German duchy of Mecklenburg is divided into the two grandduchies of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and Meck- linburg-Schwerin.
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Fourteen Hanover Counties
the daughters, 371 years. The average age of the fifteen children was 56 years and 8 months; twelve attained the age of 50 years, ten of these reached 60 years, eight attained 70 years, and two lived to be 80. The aver- age age of George III and Queen Charlotte was over 75 years.
Brunswick, Mecklenburg, Lunenburg, and Charlotte counties are situated together in southern Virginia, just east of the center, and are watered by North Carolina streams. Prince Edward lies north of Charlotte and Lunenburg, and is drained chiefly by Appo- mattox waters. Amelia and Cumberland, to the northeast of Prince Edward, are sepa- rated from each other by the Appomattox River; Willis River drains a large part of Cumberland county. Hanover separates Louisa county from Caroline. The North Anna and South Anna rivers drain Louisa, flow southeast, and, together with the Pa- munkey and Chickahominy, also drain Hen- rico. Caroline is watered by the Rappahan- nock, Mattapony, and North Anna rivers.
King George lies on the opposite side of the Rappahannock from Caroline, and has the Potomac on its northern boundary. Prince William, also adjacent to the Potomac, has
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Virginia County Names
the now famous stream of Bull Run on a part of its northern border, while the village of Manassas is within its territory.
Frederick, in the Shenandoah Valley, is the most northern county in the State; while Augusta, also in the Valley, is the largest county in Virginia.
Mecklenburg county is justly famed for its wonderful mineral springs.
The nine counties named after the Stuarts, though small in area, are rich in historical as- sociations. James City county contains Jamestown, which was the colonial capital until it was burned in Bacon's Rebellion in 1676; and it also contains Williamsburg, which became the capital in 1699, and so con- tinued until it was succeeded by Richmond, in I779. Henrico owes much of its historical interest to its chief city, Richmond, the capi- tal of the State and also of the Confederacy during most of the Civil War of 1861-65. President Tyler died in Richmond, and Presi- dent Monroe is buried there, in the beautiful Hollywood cemetery. It seems rather strange that Charles City county, which contains only 183 square miles, should have been the birth- place of William Henry Harrison and of John Tyler, who became President and Vice-
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Fourteen Hanover Counties
President respectively of the United States in 1841. Tyler became President a month later, at Harrison's death.
Orange is probably the most interesting historically of the three counties named after the House of Orange. In Orange President Madison died, and there President Taylor was born.
Among the Hanover counties, Hanover itself gave birth to Patrick Henry and to Henry Clay. King George was the birth- place of President Madison. Prince William county makes the 'old Confederate soldier thrill with pride as he remembers the two bril- liant victories of First and Second Manassas.
C
PART III OTHER NAMES FROM ENGLAND
1
THIRTEEN COUNTIES NAMED AFTER PROMI- NENT ENGLISHMEN
WARWICK, Original shire, 1634
SOUTHAMPTON, Organized 1748
NORTHAMPTON,
Original shire,
1634
RICHMOND, . Organized 1692 FAIRFAX, Organized 1742
ALBEMARLE, Organized I744
LOUDOUN,
Organized
1757
AMHERST, . Organized 1761
CHESTERFIELD, . Organized 1748
HALIFAX, . Organized 1752
PITTSYLVANIA, Organized 1767
GREENVILLE, . Organized 1780
ROCKINGHAM, Organized 1777
CHAPTER VI
THIRTEEN COUNTIES NAMED AFTER PROMI- NENT ENGLISHMEN
Eleven Virginia counties, and more prob- ably thirteen, are named in honor of various prominent Englishmen that lived during the days when Virginia was a colony. With re- gard to the naming of Richmond and Green- ville counties, there attaches considerable doubt; hence I have adopted the explanation that seems to me most probable.
Assuming that all thirteen of the counties were named as I suppose, the explanations will be as follows : two counties, Warwick and Southampton, were named after two English earls, members of the London Company for Virginia; Northampton is named after an English earl killed in fighting for King Charles I; Richmond county takes the name of an English duke; Fairfax is named in honor of an Englishman who owned extensive tracts of land in Virginia; Albemarle, Lou- doun, and Amherst counties are named after English generals; and Chesterfield, Halifax,
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Virginia County Names
Pittsylvania, Greenville, and Rockingham re- produce the names of English statesmen.
Warwick county, one of the original shires and at first called Warwick River county, is named after Robert Rich,1 the second Earl of Warwick, who was a prominent member of the London Company for Virginia. Rich obtained celebrity in the Civil War, was ad- miral for the Long Parliament, and enjoyed the confidence of Cromwell. He died in 1659, the year before the monarchy was re- stored.
Southampton county derives its name indi- rectly from Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton;2 for the "hundred" of Southampton, a division of the colony smaller than the county, was named in the earl's honor while he was treasurer for the London Company. The county itself did not receive the earl's name until 124 years after his death.
Wriothesley is said to have been especially active in procuring for Virginia the first char- ter of the London Company; and the second
1Dr. B. W. Green is authority for this, though I had already thought it probably the origin of the county name. 2Dr. Green says the county is named after the earl; so also Bishop Meade. I had already learned that the "hun- dred" took the earl's name.
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Thirteen Named After Englishmen
charter of the company made him treasurer, which then virtually meant governor, for the company. He held this office until the com- pany was dissolved in 1624. A few months later he died of a fever that was contracted while he was engaged in an expedition against the Dutch. The Earl of Southamp- ton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated "Venus and Adonis" and the "Rape of Lucrece," is the only man from whom Shakespeare ac- knowledeges having received a benefit. A son of Shakespeare's friend became the fourth Earl of Southampton, and was Treasurer of England during the first seven years of Charles II's reign.
Northampton county was one of the eight original shires into which Virginia was di- vided in 1634. Its name until 1642-43 was "Accawmacke," called from the name of an Indian tribe that lived on the "Eastern Shore," which is that part of Virginia lying between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, and containing the counties of Acco- mac and Northampton. The county name of Accomac was revived in 1672, when North- ampton county was divided, and the northern part called Accomac.
The Eastern Shore county of "Accaw-
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Virginia County Names
macke" doubtless had its name changed in 1643 to honor the memory of a brave Roy- alist, Spencer Compton, second Earl of Northampton, who that year gave his life in the cause of King Charles I. This explana- tion of the name is original with me, but the enthusiastic loyalty of the Virginians to the royal cause and the fact that the name was changed at a time when the colonists would be wanting to show their loyalty, make it al- most certain that the death of the earl and the naming of the county in the same year stand in the relation of cause and effect.
Spencer Compton,3 second Earl of North- ampton, born in May, 1601, a partisan of Charles in his struggle with Parliament, served actively in the royal army, and, while com- manding the royal troops, was killed at the battle of Hopton Heath, March 19, 1643.
It is interesting to note that the North Carolina4 county of Northampton was named in 1741 in honor of George, probably the fourth Earl of Northampton. Spencer Compton, third son of the third Earl of Northampton, was created Viscount Pevensy and Earl of Wilmington in 1730-whence
3"Century Cyclopdia of Names."
4Spencer's N. C. History, appendix.
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Thirteen Named After Englishmen
probably the name of the city of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Of course the county of Northampton in Virginia could have been named after the English shire of the same name, and a writer in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography5 gives this origin of the name. He states that the name is said to have been changed from Accomac in honor of Colonel Obedience Robins, who was from Long- buckie, in Northampton, England.
As has been said, the origin of Richmond county's name is very doubtful. There is no English shire after which it could have been named. The beautiful city of Richmond® on the Thames gave the name to the present cap- ital of Virginia, but there is no reason to be- lieve that the Virginia county got is name from the English city. There remains the possibility that the county may take the name of some English Earl or Duke of Richmond, living, or in public remembrance, at the time the county was named.
Such a nobleman was Charles Lennox, first Duke of Richmond and a natural son of King
"Vol. ix., No. I, p. 94; reference through Dr. B. W. Green.
6Howe's "Virginia," p. 305.
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Virginia County Names
Charles II. The duke was born in 1672, and was therefore twenty years old when, in 1692, the old county of Rappahannock was divided into the two new counties of Rich- mond and Essex, and itself ceased to exist. The present county of Rappahannock has no relation to the former one, except that it bears the same name.
Macaulay, in his "History of England," relates that King Charles on his death-bed parted with peculiar tenderness from the Duke of Richmond. At the Revolution of 1688 Richmond went to Paris in the service of the fugitive James, but later, changing both his politics and his religion, he became reconciled to King William and entered the Church of England. William's wife was a daughter of James, and Anne, another daugh- ter, was, with the exception of the king and queen, probably the most prominent charac- ter at court. In 1691 a county had been named after the king and queen jointly and another county had received Princess Anne's name. It seems, therefore, not unlikely that the county of Richmond, formed in 1692, re- ceived the name of the Duke of Richmond, who was so closely connected with the royal family of England, and whose reconciliation
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Thirteen Named After Englishmen
with the king doubtless attracted the attention of the colonists in Virginia. I do not, un- fortunately, know the date of the reconcilia- tion, but, as the duke was "an unprincipled adventurer,"7 he most likely had gone over to William before 1692. Richmond died in England in 1723.
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