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| Edgehill manor house. |
Recently I received an email
stating that the sender, Judy, was a great granddaughter of William Fairfax
Tapscott and asking if I knew anything about her origins. Indeed I do, Judy. William
Fairfax was a great grandson of Samuel Chichester Tapscott, a GG grandson of
Chichester Tapscott, and a GGG grandson of Capt. Henry Tapscott. It was into
Chichester’s and then Samuel Chichester’s hands that Capt. Henry’s Edgehill Plantation
eventually passed. I was going to suggest that Judy take a look at my posting
on this site about Edgehill, but found to my amazement that no mention of Edgehill
has previously appeared in these pages. Here is a post long overdue.
Until recently, on the east side
of Virginia State Highway 354 (River Road) in Lancaster County, where
Belle Isle Road enters from the west, at the end of an unpaved driveway heading
up a small hill, stood a white, two-story, frame house dating from around 1770.
This was the manor for Edgehill, Capt. Henry Tapscott’s home plantation.
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| An upstairs room. |
Edgehill was large plantation, almost
200 acres, and the manor was a fine house. Capt. Henry was, after all, far
wealthier than his brothers, Edney and James. But eventually the plantation passed
to those not bearing the Tapscott name through a complex series of marriages, inheritances,
and sales, until in 1910 part of the land containing the plantation house was
sold to someone with no (known) Tapscott relationship. And Judy lost a possible inheritance. The complicated
ownership saga appears in my book, Henry
the Immigrant, but to tell you the truth the drawn-out tale is a little
boring to nonhistorians.
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| Slave entrance. |
The plantation house has quite a
history. It was in that house that Chichester ’s
daughter Alice Martin Tapscott and granddaughter Mary Alice Tapscott were reportedly born. The two Alice’s are the
matriarchs of the Pierce’s of Lancaster County. One of their descendants was Chichester
Tapscott Peirce (“Chit”), a loved and renown Lancaster County
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| Oldest part of the house, eighteenth century. |
A variety of questionable
secondary sources claim that prior to heading off to battle at the opening of
the Civil War, the Lancaster Cavalry (9th
Virginia Cavalry, Company D) assembled at Edgehill for receipt of its company
banner, presented by the girls of St. Mary’s White Chapel
Church Lancaster flag from capture, wrapping it
around his torso and secreting it under his uniform. He returned to Edgehill
with the banner, which was kept by the family until the 1920s when his niece
gave it to the Museum of the Confederacy for safe keeping. Some of this,
however, may be only legend, for Aulbin Delaney Tapscott was reportedly taken
prisoner in May 1863 and could not have been present when his brother was
mortally wounded. It was William Chichester Tapscott’s death at the Battle of
Upperville that led to the eventual loss of Edgehill by the Tapscotts, since
the plantation went to William’s wife, who remarried.
When I visited the Northern Neck
in 2005 I got a tour of the Edgehill plantation house from the present owner.
And I got some photographs, several of which are shown here. Unfortunately, the
manor is no more. Deemed too expensive to renovate, it was demolished.
