A History of the Valley of Virginia by Samuel Kercheval (1833; 3rd ed. 1902)

160

FAULKNER'S REPORT.

only daughter, who is now the wife of Rev. Thomas Hennerly. Col. Martin directed by his will the sale of all the residue of his estate, and the money arising from the sale to be remitted and paid to his two maiden sisters in England.* Shortly after his death an attempt was made to escheat the landed estate, and the suit was depending some sixteen or eighteen years before its final decision. The court of Appeals at length decided the question in favor of Martin's legatees.

It is proper, before the subject of Lord Fairfax's immense grant is dismissed, to inform the reader, that a few years after the War of the Revolution, an attempt was made to confiscate all that part of his landed estate devised by his nephew Denny Martin (afterwards Denny Lord Fairfax). But Messrs. Marshall, Colston and Lee, having purchased the estate, a compromise took place between them and the state government, for the particulars of which the reader is referred to the first volume of the Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia, pp. 352, 353.

The sale of the estate of Lord Fairfax by his legatees in England, and the devise and sale of the late Col. T. B. Martin, is the last chapter in the history of the Fairfax interest in the Northern Neck, a territory comprising about one fourth of the whole of the present limits of Virginia.

The State of Maryland has lately set up a claim to a considerable tract of territory on the northwest border of Virginia, including a part of the Northern Neck. As the claim was pushed with much earnestness, the executive of our State appointed Charles James Faulkner, Esq., of Martinsburg, a commissioner, to collect and embody the necessary testimony, on behalf of Virginia, on this interesting question. Mr. Faulkner's able report the author deems of sufficient interest to his readers generally to insert in this work. It follows:

REPORT OF CHARLES JAMES FAULKNER, RELATIVE TO THE BOUNDARY LINE BETWEEN VIRGINIA AND MARYLAND.

MARTINSBURG, VA., November 6th, 1832.

SIR:—In execution of a commission addressed to me by your Excellency, and made out in pursuance of a joint resolution of the General Assembly of this State, of the 20th of March last, I have directed my attention to the collecting of such testimony as the lapse of time and the nature of the enquiry have enabled me to procure touching the settlement and adjustment of the western boundary of Maryland. The division line which now separates the two States on the west, and which has heretofore been considered as fixed by positive adjudication and long acquiescence, commences at a point where the fairfax stone is planted, at the head spring of the Potomac