Originally, I had intended the last note to be the end of present discussion of the homes of the Second Germanna Colony members. Then yesterday, Joy Stearns sent me a copy of the lease from Alexander Spotswood, Esquire, to John Bond, planter. So instead of writing a note, I spent the time in research. This note discusses the conclusions.
What Spotswood meant by "closely joyned" was not known. Does it mean that the houses were very close, perhaps on the order of Fort Germanna where nine houses were on one street in an enclosure of three and a half acres? Or does it mean that the farms (the Second Colony is engaged in farming) were close together? In the first case, we would visualize a village from which the men (and women) would go out to the fields. In the second case, we would visualize farm houses in the midst of fields.
I had been inclined to the view they were very close, the village concept. The information that Joy sent has changed my mind. I believe now we should be thinking in terms of the second concept where each house was in the middle of a field, say about 50 acres. Here are the factors that influenced me.
I plotted the Bond lease on a background of the waterways in the region. It specifically mentions Brook's Run and the Rapidan River. With some small adjustments to the metes and bounds, it is not difficult to get a plot of high confidence. The starting point is on the Rapidan at the lower corner of "Lot 18" (an adjacent lot) and this point is almost four miles above the point where Fleshman's Run flows into the Rapidan. Since Fleshman probably had a patent on Fleshman's Run and since it almost at the eastern boundary of Spotswood's patent, Fleshman's lot number was probably very small, perhaps even Lot 1. There were twenty-odd homes which I assume can be equated to the number of lots. Therefore, there may have been twenty-odd homes in a stretch of about five miles along the Rapidan River.
Some key words or phrases from the lease include, "north side of the Rapidan River", "part of the 40,000 acres tract", "[a part of] the German tenements on the Rapidan River", and "Great Fork". The surveyor, Geo. Home, [or Hume] included a plot of the 110-acre tract on which two homes are shown. Since Spotswood leased his land under long term leases, it would appear that these homes were probably the homes of two of the German families. One home was on the Rapidan and the other home was inland about two-thirds of a mile. The tract actually includes 143 acres. So perhaps the tract size of the Germans was about 50 to 100 acres.
So I now believe we will not find a village but we may find a few individual homes that are separately by perhaps quarter-mile distances. If George Hume accurately showed the locations of homes on his map, it might help to pinpoint the locations. So far I have only maps showing two of the houses but more may be on record in the courthouses.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.