Stranica 108 [108]
OCR
AMPIHILL AR up the winding river named in honor of King James, there stands upon the southern bank an old brick house. With flanking outbuildings once used He as ballroom and kitchen, with a garden once ter4 220, raced and a brick-walled graveyard, it is a type of the stately bygones of Virginia’s ancient aristocracy. This is Ampthill, ancestral home of the Cary family, but famed before that as the site of the first iron furnace ever operated in America. Known in colonial days as Falling Creek, The London Company, at a cost of four thousand pounds sterling, in the year 1619 erected on this estate a forge to be used for smelting iron and lead. John Berkeley, son of Sir John Berkeley, was placed in charge of the works, and the iron made here was said to be as good as any in the world. When the crushing year of 1622 came, with its fateful tidings of the Indian massacre, only two of the twenty-four settlers at Falling Creek were spared. For many years the works were abandoned, but, April 20, 1687, William Byrd was granted eighteen hundred acres of land, which included the ill-fated iron furnace. On October 29, 1690, he secured an additional grant of fifty-six hundred and forty-four ' acres, the reason given for the latter being that, "there having been iron works at Falling Creek in the time of the company, and Colonel Byrd having an intention to carry them on, and foreseeing that abundance of wood might be necessary for so great a work, he took up a large tract.”’ In 1733, the second William Byrd, on one of his adventurous rides, bribed an Indian to drop secretly a tomahawk on the spot where the mine was supposed to be. In his “History of the Dividing Line,” Byrd tells the story: ‘‘We sent for an old Indian [65 |
