The part of Virginia where my father was born is called the Northern Neck. It is situated on the Chesapeake Bay, at the corner where the Potomac River begins and borders it on one side. The other side is bordered by the Rappahannock River.
As everyone knows Captain John Smith established Jamestown in 1607. In 1619 the first ship carrying African slaves, the White Lion, arrived in Virginia. Smith traveled along the Northern Neck on many occasions, but it was not until about 1640 any Europeans actually settled there. The first that we know about was a man named John Mottrom. When Mottrom arrived, the area was called Chicacoan. Mottrom had probably been a trader, working out of St. Mary’s across the river in Maryland, but settled in Chicacoan to begin farming and, likely to grow and sell tobacco, which was become popular in England. The house that he built there was called Coan Hall.
We know that one of our ancestors, William Presley arrived not long after Mottrom. He was one of Mottrom’s neighbors and, appears to have been a frequent visitor to Coan Hall according to records that record him as the godfather of one of Mottrom’s children and various presents that he gave to the Mottrom children. While there do not appear to have been any African slaves in the Northern Neck at this point, according to Miriam Haynie in The Stronghold: A Story of Historic Northern Neck of Virginia and its People, Presley “employed” Indians to take care of his stock. Haynie reports that it was common practice in those days to “take Indian children as apprentices to learn a trade and to teach them to read and write…The relationship between the Indian boy and his master was about the same as that of the English servant.”
John Mottrom became the first person to represent the area in the Virginia House of Burgesses and in 1658, the area’s name was officially designated “The Plantation of Northumberland.” (Northumberland is now the name of the country in which my father was born.)
While Mottrom has no actual blood relationship to our family, there is something of a family connection. As mentioned in a previous post, the first of our relatives to arrive in North America was Richard Thompson. Thomson’s second wife was a woman named Ursula Bysshe. When Thomson was kicked out of Kent Island in Maryland, he ended up as a neighbor of John Mottrom. Less than a decade later, Thompson died and Ursula married Mottrom, who at about the same time, became a widow himself. As Haynie remarks, Ursula probably brought up her children in Mottrom’s house.
If you see Reedville, you can locate Wicomoco Church where my father was both and the Wicomico River where his family caught crabs and his mother drowned. Coan Hall would have been on the Potomac River.
Northen History 