Edgehill

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.

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.

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 physician. That story is particularly complex since “Chit” was descended from Chichester Tapscott by two different routes, a case of cousins marrying.

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. Among the Confederate troops were the two sons of Samuel Chichester Tapscott, William Chichester, company bugler and standard bearer, and Aulbin Delaney, also a standard bearer. When William was killed in action, his surviving brother saved the 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.

Birthdates

I received an email concerning a Tapscott birthdate from a death record, which disagreed with dates from censuses and a cemetery marker. I replied with the following (slightly modified).

Ages and dates of birth on death records are always suspect and are often incorrect. The person who best knew the age or birthdate is dead. The record is often filled out by a busy county clerk who does not know the deceased at all using information provided by a physician, coroner, or acquaintance who does not know the deceased well. Even when a family member provides the information, it is often a child or, worse, a grandchild, taking on the job to avoid bothering a grieving (or doddering) widow or widower. When I was a young man I had no idea of my mother’s age, and certainly not my grandmother’s. And I could have easily been off by a decade were I to have provided the age of our next door neighbor. You would be shocked to see the number of outlandish ages (and other “facts”) provided on death records by children, grandchildren, acquaintances, and professionals. And county clerks, physicians, and coroners, are always in a hurry to take care of a death record so they can get on to their next (and for physicians, primary) task. With the possible exception of marriage records, where outright lying often occurs for a variety of reasons, death records seem to be the most likely of any record type to be mistaken on age or birthdate, though, of course, they are the most likely to be correct on date of death..

Samuel Chichester Tapscott's error-filled marker.

 Cemetery markers are usually much more reliable than death records for birthdates since inscriptions are often the combined efforts of several family members who can consult one another and who are not rushed to provide information. Grave markers are not usually erected immediately and no one wants to make a mistake carved in inerasable stone. Undertakers and cemetery monument salespeople do their best to calm grieving family members (after all, they are trying to please customers) and to allow time to make decisions about personal data for inscriptions, obituaries, memorials, etc. By no means are grave markers always correct, particularly when erected years after a death or in the absence of living family members, but they are relatively trustworthy.  [One example of an egregiously wrong marker is Samuel Chichester Tapscott’s stone in St. Mary’s White Chapel Church Cemetery, Lancaster County, Virginia, a marker off by ten years or so in the birth year and by a year or so in the death date (Henry the Immigrant, Ed. 2, pp. 245 – 247). Was the stone erected years after the death? Was the stonemason drunk? Who knows.]

 The reliabilities of Census ages probably lie somewhere between the reliabilities from death certificates and those from cemetery markers. People for whom ages are provided are normally living, but they are not always the ones giving the information. It is often provided by other household members and sometimes even neighbors. Even when providing census information for themselves, people accidentally give the wrong age (an error increasing with increasing age). And a surprising number of individuals lie or at least fudge the truth. But consistency between several censuses greatly increases credibility.

Best of all, of course, are official birth records, though these are very often unavailable and can also be wrong. My mother's official birth record misspelled her name, and my father's did the same for his name. But at least the dates appear to be correct.