The nearest competitors to Charles Town in this respect are Westmoreland
County, Virginia, and the town of Kankakee, Illinois, where resides the
Spottswood Augustine Washington family, said to be the only Washington
group to have taken the Union side in the Civil War. It is rumored also
that all the Washingtons are Democrats, although that fact is hard to
reconcile, at the present time, with the statement that, among the five
thousand of them, there is but a single Federal officeholder.
The settling of the Washingtons in Jefferson County, West Virginia, came
about through the fact that George Washington, when a youth of sixteen
or seventeen, became acquainted with that part of what was then
Virginia, through having gone to survey for Lord Fairfax, who had
acquired an enormous tract of land in the neighboring county of Clarke,
which is still in the mother State. To this estate, called Greenaway
Court, his lordship, it is recorded, came from England to isolate
himself because a woman with whom he was in love refused to marry him.
In this general neighborhood George Washington lived for three years,
and local enthusiasts affirm that to his having drunk the
lime-impregnated waters of this valley was due his great stature. The
man who informed me of this theory had lived there aways.
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