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.