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13. Virginia Randolph, b. at Tuckahoe, Goochland Co., Va., Jan. 31, 1786. She married at Monticello, Albemarle Co., Va. (Aug. 28, 1805), Wilson Jefferson Cary, of Carysbrooke, Fluvanna Co., Va. He was a great-nephew of Thomas Jefferson, President of United States. They had five children.

"Wilson Jefferson Cary was (with his brother Miles) heir to a fortune reputed large; both were educated at William and Mary; neither followed a profession, though the elder graduated at the law school. Miles was indolent, Wilson devoted to books, perhaps more as a reader than a student . . . hehad . . . the utmost refinement of manner . . . he was one of the purest, most noble-minded men that ever breathed--too sensitive for the peculiar difficulties which were to be encountered in his mature life."
"Being the grandnephew of Jefferson, Mr. Cary was naturally a frequent visitor at Monticello; here, just grown into womanhood, he met the lady who was to be his future wife. The youngest daughter of Col. Thomas Mann Randolph of Tuckahoe was left an orphan in infancy [i. e., motherless]. The marriage of Colonel Randolph to a gay handsome girl of the age of his second son placed the little Virginia in a most neglected position, and she was taken charge of by an elder sister [Mrs. Richard Randolph] . . . At the age of 12 she was adopted by her eldest brother Col. Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. and his wife [Martha, daughter of Thomas Jefferson] and went to live at Edge hill.... The house, being unfinished, was not particularly comfortable, but in the large vaulted public rooms the young people never got near the fire; whatever they suffered from cold, they bore heroically, for in those days children were constrained to silence, and only spoke when spoken to."*
Virginia Randolph's education was carefully directed by Mr. Jefferson, and he laid out courses of history and music for her. The Carysbrook Memoir continues: "She was a gifted woman. Her fine imagination found ready expression in graceful verses, and her facility in conversation was such as is not often excelled; her thoughts clothed themselves in fitting and beautiful language at all times; she
did not merely talk 'for company' but always in her utmost privacy spoke in the same elegant and flowing manner. In person she was very tall and in early life very slender,
with a regular Roman cast of features, and a profusion of light brown curling hair; though not exactly handsome she was fine looking and distinguished. In youth her disposition was very gay and never lost its cheerfulness; she never sank into dullness and quietude, but retained the fresh en- joyment of life and a youthful unweariness of spirit."
*On a recent visit to Edgehill with his sister-in-law Mrs. Fairfax Harrison, herself a Cary, the writer joined her in a search for the "crying tree" on the lawn, to which the children were always sent
by Col. Randolph and told to finish their cry there, and not to come back into the house until they had stopped.
"Wilson Jefferson Cary was married at Monticello to Virginia Randolph, August 20,1805, by the Reverend Matthew Maury, a clergyman of the Episcopal Church. The couple proceeded in Autumn to Williamsburg and became inmates of Col. Wilson Miles Cary's family."
Of their agreeable life in the polite society of Williamburg and of the birth there of their first fourchildren we shall record nothing here. Wilson Jefferson Cary volunteered in the Army during the War of 1812; never robust, he was seriously ill in a Virginia camp. Towards the end of the war hebecame involved, like many another Virginian, in a controversy with his eccentric cousin, John
Raldolph of Roanoke, which led to the insertion by him of a "card' in the Richmond Enquirer of April 1st, 1815, which reads:
"Fluvanna, Dec. 14, 1814" [in regard to a conversation between John Randolph of Roanoke and himself, it concludes] "One word more--a certain Capt. Thomas Miller of Powhatan having thrust himself into this business, and gratuitously undertaken to comment upon my certificate in a late No. of Mr. Davis' paper, in terms equally evincing the delicacy of his taste and the purity of his style, I avail myself of this opportunity to say to that person, that the only feeling which he has excited in my mind is the feeling of utter contempt. If I have injured Mr. Randolph, he may have a claim upon me for redress. But I will not permit any subaltern of his to step into his shoes.
[Certificate of J. B. Banister attached]

WILSON JEFFERSON CARY."

Nothing further came of this matter, the impetuous Mr. Randolph being, no doubt, too busy with his other quarrels.
Meanwhile, as we have noted, Mr. Cary and his family had moved from Williamsburg up to Fluvanna where for many years his grandfather, Col. Wilson Miles Cary, had maintained a "quarter" with overseers in charge of his large body of slaves.
A description of their new home on the frontier, taken from the Carysbrook memoir, follows: "In the autumn of 1810 my parents bade adieu to the comforts of the ancestral house and the genial loving peo ple of Williamsburg, and went to their new home in the wilds of a county even then a proverb for wildness and solitude. The house at Carysbrook was almost on the banks of the small river (Rivanna) which here forms a bend, on the high ground of which the little cluster of dwellings stood.... The place had no beauty except its summer garb.... In the whole county there were but three fami-
lies who could have any common ground of interest or sympathy.
"The house at Carysbrook was not such as one would expect to find on the estate of a wealthy planter. It had been built for the overseer, and was originally composed of three rooms and a sort of rude verandah. To this had been added an entry and another room, and yet another of the kind called "lean to," and a longer verandah all the length of the house. There were garrets above with steep-sloping side walls and dormer windows; altogether it was an ill-contrived, rude habitation, which no one dreamed could become the permanent abode of the family. Like all wooden houses in this region, it had never been painted and wore a sober grey tint, less to be depreciated as unsightly than because the boards were exposed by want of paint to premature decay. The furniture was of the simplest kind and didn't include an article not absolutely in- dispensable, not a sofa, not an easy chair, and only enough and of the commonest kind then called 'Windsor', painted black and only suited to the slenderest proportions. For carpets, there was in each room a single strip in front of
the fire. Yet my father was to inherit a fortune reputed lar
. . . "How sorrowful it is to reflect on our fathers ill success.... So impressed was he with the idea that the land was worn out and that successful farming was impossible, that his whole thought had been to sell out and go west. It was his dream, a longing for the deep forests and new settlements of the West. It seemed to him an Eldorado. One of his last requests was not to be buried at Carysbrook; the place he said had broken his heart, with its solitude, its worn out lands and the load of debt left by
his grandfather.... A year or two before his death my father's sister, Mrs. Newsum, had removed to Tennessee. Her journal full of enthusiastic description of the grand old forests they traversed, probably caused this desire for change."
The author of the Carysbrook Memoir ascribes the fall of the old aristocracy to the law abolishing entail. She also sagely remarks that no one at that late date could prosper under slavery unless he was a hard master--and that her father never could have been.
On September 5, 1823, in the fortieth year of his age, Wilson Jefferson Cary died. In obedience to his request, his body was not buried, as was the old custom, upon his estate, but in the little grave-yard at Monticello. Mr. Jefferson followed him there less than three years later.
In his will, Wilson Jefferson Cary directed that his landed estate should be sold, and added:
"It is my will and desire that my family continue to live together, my children under the guardianship of their mother . . . when the lands and negroes are sold it is fur- thermore my will that a decent and comfortable tenement be purchased in some small town in the upper country or good country neighborhood as a home for my widow and children
"After his death," writes his daughter in the Carys- brook Memoir, "a new manager was appointed in the place of the two overseers. And now the resources of the place began to develop, large crops of wheat and tobacco began to be the rule."
It is at this period that young Archibald makes his first appearance in our story:
"The spring rains had swollen the river until it was scarcely fordable; when a servant alarmed us by stating that my youngest brother, a boy of ten, could not be found;
he had gone off on a very small pony and it was feared that he had attempted to cross the river. We were all panic struck: My mother went in one direction, my sister and myself in another, and all the house servants followed. . . . We soon met, riding quietly home, the lad who had wit enough to return without attempting to cross the river."
In spite of temporary improvement in the crops from Carysbrook estate, Fluvanna County soon got the better of the gallant young widow. She had the care of seven children, all minors, the management of spoiled and incometent household slaves and the direction of a large landed estate. Of this, only the low grounds along the river were fertile, and from them the crops were occasionally swept away by floods. Moreover, she had to struggle under the burden of debts still surviving from the estate of her husband's grandfather. She rose well to the occasion showing robust character and cheerful courage and she had the benefit of kindly advice from her distinguished neighbor across the river, General John Hartwell Cocke of Bremo. And yet, with all her efforts, Mrs. Virginia Cary could not
make Carysbrook pay.
It was the end of an era of agricultural society in Virginia. Tobacco was no longer the mainstay of the Old Dominion. Wheat, it is true, kept many a farm going for the next few decades, and then went down as the immense production of the new lands across the Mississippi made itself felt. Time and time again, since the Carys left Carysbrook, the estate has passed from hand to hand.
To the casual wayfarer of today, the endless vistas of jack pine and persimmon trees make of most of Fluvanna County a dreary landscape. Attempts to cultivate great reaches of this infertile soil have long since been abandoned.
On November 26, 1826, the old house at Carysbrook burned to the ground. Kind General Cocke at once established the homeless Cary family in one of his houses called "Bremo Recess." The General undertook to plan and supervise the building of a new house for them, which took nearly a year. Even in the Virginia of long ago, a year's visit, though not, it is true, actually in the big house at Bremo, was rather too much of a good thing. There are evidences that meanwhile the quality of mercy became
somewhat strained. The two families of Cocke and Cary rather got on one another's nerves.
The new house at Carysbrook was built much as it ex- ists today. The Carys remained there for three years longer, and then the estate was sold, in part in 1830 and the balance in 1832. This was in accordance with the provisions of the will of Wilson Jefferson Cary.
We find a somewhat depressing description of the "new" house at Carysbrook in an article by the late Mrs. Delia B. Page, entitled "Recollections of Home" and published in 1903. Her father, John Randolph Bryan of Eagle Point, Gloucester County, Virginia, bought the place in 1845, and
this is what she wrote of it:
"My father bought this place after Mr. Archie Harrison's death, who owned it at that time. It had been built for Mrs. Virginia Cary, and although General John Hartwell Cocke superintended the building, it had some fatal mistakes which were made in the structure of the house, had money enough spent on it to have made a most comfortable dwelling. Instead of four large rooms on a floor, there were only two large and two small, and in the parlor a large folding door opening into a small room with no fire place. I remember how the children ran to open the folding door and stood back aghast to see there was
nothing behind it. Then the stair-case was wretched, steep and crooked. Upstairs the rooms were better, divided into four available rooms and a small one over the end of the passage in front of the house. It had a basement dining- room and two damp basement cellar rooms, one intended as a store room, but could not be used as such, because too damp. My mother begged my father to cut an area around the house, but he never would do it, and, as she was delicate, she never stayed in the dining-room any longer than possible.
"The climate was fine though, and the water good, the grass green and some fine shade trees, elms, hack-berries, a beautiful ash and tall old locusts, in which the woodpeckers had their haunts. Porches with white pillars, but no railings, so the children had a fine chance to fall off, which
Joe did the first thing.
"When it was known in Gloucester that Mr. Bryan had bought Carysbrook and that he would take his family up there to spend their summers, they took it as a personal affront.... But papa had his own way. He wanted to look after his tobacco crop and though loth to go, we went."