Late in 1780, the Virginia Legislature passed " An act for recruiting this state's quota of troops to serve in the Continental Army ". This called for each county to supply a specific number of men. Culpeper County, then consisting of present day Culpeper, Madison, and Rappahannock Counties, was assigned to raise 106 men of the statewide total of three thousand men. Assuming the assignments were in proportion to the population of the counties, Culpeper County had 3.5 percent of the state's population.
The act specified that the county Lieutenant, or Commanding Officer, should summon the field officers and the militia, including all the commissioned and noncommissioned officers under the age of fifty years, who were to be divided into as many divisions as the number of men required by the Act to be raised. Each division, later called a Class , was to be numbered. One man was to be drafted by the officers, "by fair and impartial lot", from each division. Each man who was drafted was permitted to hire a substitute.
For Culpeper County, these lists of names have been preserved (except for two classes), and they are in the State Library of Virginia at Richmond.
Why are the lists important? The fourteen or thirteen men in each list are near neighbors. One almost has the impression that the officers of the militia made a new inventory of the men in the county by going around the county. As with the census taker, the names represent a neighborhood survey. By consulting any one list, one finds a number of neighbors. Recently in these notes, I gave the members of some classes living in the Little Fork. From the land records, it is easy to confirm that they were indeed neighbors.
With more than 1400 names it is important to have an index to check whether a given name is in the classes. Then one wants to have the makeup of each class because of the neighborly aspect of the people on the list.
The classes are a good representation of the people who were living in the county. What family had the most members in the classes? There were 25 Browns, 20 Hufmans, 17 Wilhoits, 15 Smiths, and 14 Jones. Of the five most popular names, two were clearly Germanic in origin while the Smith name was a mixture of English and German. The man who wrote down the names (only one man was involved) was careful to spell all similar names in just one way. Thus, it was always Hufman and Wilhoit.
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.