National Park Service 

U.S. Department of the Interior 

Interior Region 1: North Atlantic-Appalachian

New Perspectives on Haberdeventure 

Plantation in Charles County, 

Maryland, 1770–1787

Amy Speckart, PhD

Thomas Stone National Historic Site

Port Tobacco, Maryland
New Perspectives on Haberdeventure Plantation 

in Charles County, Maryland, 1770–1787

A Historic Resource Study of 

Thomas Stone National Historic Site

Port Tobacco, Maryland

By Amy Speckart, PhD

Presented to Interior Region 1: North Atlantic-Appalachian

Prepared under a cooperative agreement between

The Organization of American Historians and The National Park Service

February 2022

Cover: Thomas Stone National Historic Site, Charles County, Maryland. Incamerastock/Alamy Stock 

Photo.

Disclaimer: The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of this author and should not 

be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of the U.S. Government. Mention of trade names or 

commercial products does not constitute their endorsement by the U.S. Government. 
New Perspectives on Haberdeventure 

Plantation in Charles County, 

Maryland, 1770–1787

Thomas Stone National Historic Site

Port Tobacco, Maryland

By Amy Speckart, PhD

Prepared for 

the National Park Service 

in cooperation with 

the Organization of American Historians

National Park Service

U.S. Department of the Interior

February 2022

v

Contents

List of Figures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii

List of Appendices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

CHAPTER ONE

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

CHAPTER TWO

Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79

CHAPTER THREE

African American Life at Haberdeventure 

and in Charles County, Maryland, 1770–1790s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111

CHAPTER FOUR

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .157

CHAPTER FIVE

Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .203

Conclusion with Suggestions for Further Research. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .229

Appendices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .233

Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .317

vii

Figures

1. Thomas Stone National Historic Site, Charles County, Maryland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2. Map of Thomas Stone National Historic Site, National Park Service. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

3. Map of Charles County, Maryland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

4. Smallwood’s Retreat in ruins, Charles County, circa 1930s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26

5. Map of Charles County land owned by Thomas Stone and his heirs, 1770–1806. . . . . . . .29

6. Detail of “The State of Maryland,” showing Port Tobacco-Piscataway Road. 

Philadelphia, 1795. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31

7. Detail of “Map of the State of Maryland.” Baltimore, [1841]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32

8. Detail of “Map of Maryland Showing Principal Buildings, Roads, Cities, and Towns, 

Created or Existing Prior to 1794.” 1933. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33

9. Smallwood’s Retreat, Charles County, circa 1898. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34

10. Marshall Hall, Charles County. North front elevation drawing and 

first floor plan, 1983. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35

11. “Phaeton with a Pair of Cream Ponies and a Stable-Lad,” between 1780 and 1784. . . .38

12. “An English Postilion,” circa 1785. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39

13. “The Preposterous Head Dress, or the Feathered Lady,” London, 1776. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40

14. Topographical map of Habre de Venture, 1985. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43

15. Haberdeventure’s north front, 1936. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46

16. View of the south facade of Haberdeventure, showing the east wing 

from the far right, 1936–1937. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47

17. Earliest known photograph of east wing and hyphen at Haberdeventure, circa 1900. . . 47

18. Maxwell Hall, Charles County, north elevation, 2009. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49

19. Maxwell Hall, Charles County, perspective view from the southeast, 2009. . . . . . . . . . . .49

20. Rose Hill, Charles County, 1937. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50
viii

List of Figures

21. Elevation drawing of the north facade of St. Thomas Manor, Charles County. . . . . . . . .51

22. First floor plan of Haberdeventure, 1985. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55

23. Two views of an installation of Haberdeventure’s east room wooden paneling at the 

Baltimore Museum of Art, 1936. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59

24. West hyphen interior at Haberdeventure, 1936. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61

25. “Res[idence] of Thos. Stone, Port Tobacco, Md.” Engraving on paper. Published in 

William Brotherhead, ed., The Book of the Signers: Containing the Facsimile Letters 

of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence (Philadelphia, 1861). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62

26. Haberdeventure’s east hyphen, constructed in the nineteenth century, 1936–1937. . . .65

27. Stagg Hall (“Gambrel Roof House”), Port Tobacco, Charles County, 1936. . . . . . . . . . . .73

28. “Chimney House,” Port Tobacco, Charles County, 1936–1937. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73

29. Advertisement by Thomas Stone, Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia), 

October 19, 1776. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114

30. Advertisement by Thomas Stone, Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), 

October 14, 1784. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .198
ix

Appendices

1. Timeline of Thomas Stone, His Family, and Others with a Relationship to 

Haberdeventure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

2. Thomas Stone Lineage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .235

3. Thomas Stone’s Will and Codicil, 1787. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .239

4. Probate Inventories of the Estate of Thomas Stone, Charles County, and Annapolis. . .241

5. Partial Transcription of David Stone’s Probate Inventory, 1774, 

Showing Enslaved Individuals’ Names, Ages, and Family Groups. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .251

6. Settlement between Thomas Stone and John Hoskins Stone for 

Michael Jenifer Stone’s Portion of the Estate of David Stone, 

Elizabeth (Jenifer) Stone, and Daniel Jenifer Stone, July 15, 1778. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .253

7. Entries for Thomas Stone in 1782 and 1783 Tax Lists. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .255

8. Runaway Advertisements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .261

9. Enslaved Persons in Thomas Stone’s Probate Inventories, with a Note on Other 

Documented Individuals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .265

10. Known Family Groups among the Enslaved at Thomas Stone’s Properties. . . . . . . . . . .279

11. Family Tree of Betty Mingo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .281

12. Family Tree of Clare (Thomas). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .283

13. Transcription of Violette Thomas’s 1799 Deed of Manumission 

and 1796 Certificate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .285

14. “The Thomas Family” from O Say Can You See: Early Washington, DC, 

Law and Family, http://earlywashingtondc.org/family-guides/Thomas.pdf. . . . . . . . . . . . . .287

15. Transcription of Bill of Sale for Ann, Tom, and Children, 1790. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .291

16. Transcription of Grace Stone’s Account with John and Walter Stone, 

November 23, 1790, to September 30, 1791. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .293

17. Probate Inventory of Grace Stone, 1811. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .295

18. Agreement between Walter Stone and Thomas Ostro (Osston), January 10, 1787. . . . .297
x

List of Appendices

19. Legal History Research Methods and Results

by Amy Speckart, PhD, and Edward A. Bradley, PhD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .299

20. Documentation for the Map of Charles County Land Owned by 

Thomas Stone and His Heirs, 1770–1806. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .313
xi

Acknowledgments

Many individuals made this project possible. First, I want to acknowledge the late 

Aidan J. Smith, who as the Public History Director of the Organization of 

American Historians invited me to submit a proposal for this Historic Resource 

Study (HRS). His faith and good cheer encouraged me in the early months. Aidan’s 

successor, Paul J. Zwirecki, has been phenomenal in his support and direction. I also thank 

the following National Park Service staff who have been generous in sharing their 

knowledge, resources, and insights with me: Amanda Casper, Melissa Cobern, Amy Muraca, 

Scott S. Hill, David Lassman, Deanna Brown, and Deborah Lawton. Others who provided 

guidance and assistance include Jean B. Russo of Historic Annapolis and the Maryland State 

Archives, Owen E. Lourie and Maria A. Day of the Maryland State Archives, Jean B. Lee of 

the University of Wisconsin, Paul D. Halliday of the University of Virginia, Julia A. King and 

Scott Strickland of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Edward C. Papenfuse, Linda 

Baumgarten, and Candace Jackson Gray. Research assistants Derek Litvak, Lisa Robbins, 

Maxwell Sickler, Crystal O’Connor, and Edward A. Bradley provided critical information 

and support. I am especially grateful to Ed for his thorough work with court records at the 

Maryland State Archives. Near the end, Molly Roy of M. Roy Cartography, Donald Zimmer, 

and Scott Strickland wonderfully brought my vision of maps to fruition. 

1

Introduction: 

Reassessing the Who, What, and

Why of Haberdeventure

On New Year’s Day in 1977, a fire gutted the core of an eighteenth-century house 

built by Thomas Stone (1743–87), a signer of the Declaration of Independence for 

Maryland. Sitting on a secluded spot in Charles County, Maryland, near Port 

Tobacco, Haberdeventure, as the house is known, could have become one of the lost 

houses of Tidewater Maryland and Virginia’s so-called Golden Age of the tobacco trade. 

Instead, an act of Congress of 1978 authorized the purchase of the property from private 

hands and turned Haberdeventure over to the National Park Service to commemorate the 

life of Thomas Stone, who, in addition to serving in the Continental Congress, was a state 

senator, lawyer, and planter (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Thomas Stone National Historic Site, Charles County, Maryland. 

Incamerastock/Alamy Stock Photo.
2

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

The purpose of this Historic Resource Study (HRS) of Thomas Stone National 

Historic Site, according to the scope of work issued by the National Park Service and 

Organization of American Historians, is to put the “extant cultural historical resources” of 

the park “within larger historical and geographical contexts.” The scope of work identified 

four priorities: agricultural history; family history; labor history, including “the histories 

and identities of enslaved laborers”; and legal history. A chapter is devoted to each one with 

the exception of labor history, which is incorporated throughout. The HRS also examines 

Haberdeventure’s relationship to social, economic, political, and cultural networks on 

local, state, and national levels. A supplement to an HRS from 1988, this project reflects 

recent developments in scholarship and takes advantage of an expanding body of electronically available primary and secondary sources. 

Despite efforts to incorporate more voices and perspectives into the history, the 

HRS remains heavily weighted toward the Stone family and Thomas Stone, who remains 

the person of greatest national significance associated with the site. The temporal scope of 

this project from the outset was Thomas Stone’s period of ownership of Haberdeventure 

from 1770 until his death in 1787. Inadvertently, this decision privileged the history of the 

Stone family and hampered investigation into the lives of African American residents, for 

which there is more documentation (and surviving tangible cultural resources) after 1790. 

This HRS attempts to broaden the story beyond Thomas Stone to be more inclusive 

of women and African Americans in particular. Despite persistent gaps in the historical 

record about Haberdeventure, new information was brought to light through improved 

accuracy in document transcriptions, inclusion of documents by or about women, and 

searching online databases and electronic publications. This HRS also benefits from the 

last thirty years of scholarship on the colonial and early national Chesapeake, particularly 

with regards to slavery, plantation economies, and material life. 

This introduction is composed of four parts. First, it will offer a brief tour around 

Thomas Stone National Historic Site, pointing out features of the cultural landscape. Next, 

remarks on new findings and approaches to the site’s history pepper a review of prior 

literature on Thomas Stone, Haberdeventure, and enslaved residents of the plantation. 

After identifying several subjects that are not documented in detail by the HRS, chapter 

summaries will conclude the overview of the project. 
3

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

Figure 2. Map of Thomas Stone National Historic Site. 

Source: “Maps,” Thomas Stone National Historic Site, Maryland, www.nps.gov/thst/planyourvisit/maps.htm

New Perspectives on Thomas Stone, Haberdeventure, and 

the Society and Economy of Charles County

The formal layout of the 328-acre Thomas Stone National Historic Site reflects the emphasis in the park’s congressional mandate to commemorate the life of Thomas Stone as “a 

lawyer, planter, politician, and signer of the Declaration of Independence” (Figure 2). The 

principal walking path from the visitor center leads past the Stone family cemetery (where 

Thomas Stone and his wife are buried) before continuing to the main house. Visitors draw 

near the house from its south-facing side, which sits atop three garden terraces etched into 

the land with an intent to magnify the size of the principal residence and thus communicate 

the importance of its owner. The one-and-a-half-story brick house with a gambrel roof, 

erected between 1771 and 1773, is flanked by hyphens and wings at either end and sits on 

relatively high ground.The west wing is a two-story brick building built in the mid-nineteenth century principally to house a kitchen. The east wing is a one-and-one-half-story 

frame building, also with a gambrel roof. Though the current east wing is an eighteenth- or 

early-nineteenth-century building, it is not the original east wing. Archaeology in 1986 

THOMAS STONE

NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

Visitor

Center
4

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

revealed that the current east wing sits on a foundation built after 1864. Underneath this 

later nineteenth-century foundation is an earlier, possibly eighteenth-century brick foundation that supported a building of a different size. The current east wing, which is stripped 

of its original finish, may not have been moved far to replace the earlier structure, perhaps 

from within the grounds of Haberdeventure.1

The material culture showcased at the main house, cemetery, and terraced garden 

reflects Stone family history more than any other group. After the devastating 1977 fire, the 

National Park Service reconstructed the interior of the main house based on Historic 

American Building Survey photographs and the original parlor paneling, which the 

Baltimore Museum of Art purchased in 1927 and removed. Copies of portraits of Thomas 

Stone and Margaret (Brown) Stone by Robert Edge Pine and of Margaret’s parents, Dr. 

Gustavus Brown and Margaret (Black Boyd) Brown, by John Hesselius hang on the walls. 

Objects donated to Thomas Stone National Historic Site by Thomas Stone’s descendants 

and collateral kin that Thomas Stone and his wife Margaret owned, according to family 

tradition, include a desk and bookcase and a Chinese porcelain bowl.2

Information about Haberdeventure’s African American residents in the eighteenth 

century remains heavily weighted towards documentary sources. The eighteenth-century 

kitchen, where enslaved domestic servants would have worked and slept, does not survive, 

1 Briefing statement, Legislative History of the National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978 (Public Law 

95–625), p. 629, reproduced in John M. Wearmouth, “Thomas Stone National Historic Site Historic Resource 

Study,” 1988, Part 4, “Legislative History;” Teresa S. Moyer for the Center for Heritage Resource Studies, 

Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, “Thomas Stone National Historic Site: Archaeological 

Overview and Assessment,” 2007, p. 64. The external dimensions of the primary foundation of the east wing are 

the same as the wing’s secondary foundation running east to west (16.5’) but run somewhat larger north to south 

(18.8’ versus 18.5’, a difference of three and a half inches), indicating a “larger” building (Ronald W. Deiss, 

“Archaeological Excavations at the Thomas Stone NHS, Port Tobacco, Maryland,” National Park Service, US 

Department of the Interior, 1986, pp. 27–28). J. Richard Rivoire conjectures that the current east wing may have 

been one of three outbuildings recorded in the 1798 Direct Tax for Haberdeventure (under Travers Daniel’s 

name) before it was moved to its current location (“Summary Report of Additional Research Findings” for 

Thomas Stone National Historic Site, 1993, p. 66).

2 Carol Petravage, “Historic Furnishings Report, Haberdeventure, Thomas Stone National Historic Site, Port 

Tobacco, Maryland,” National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, 1999. The park lacks detailed 

information about the pre-1787 furnishings in the house listed on page 62 to Petravage’s report, such as maker 

information and place of origin, which makes it difficult to trace their history (author’s correspondence with 

Deanna Brown, Museum Technician, George Washington Birthplace National Monument and Thomas Stone 

National Historic Site, April 26, 2019). The Baltimore Museum of Art, which bought the east room paneling, the 

Hesselius portraits of the Browns, and a Pine portrait of Thomas Stone may not have been the only buyer of 

Haberdeventure’s furnishings in the twentieth century. Harry Wright Newman asserted in a Stone family 

genealogy published in 1937, “it was not uncommon during the past couple of decades to go into an antique shop 

of Maryland or the vicinity and be shown a certified statement that such and such piece of furniture came from 

‘Haber de Venture’” (The Stones of Poynton Manor [Washington, DC: privately printed], 36). Rivoire documents 

the Baltimore Museum of Art’s 1927 purchase in “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 59. See 

Petravage, “Historic Furnishings Report,” 62, for evidence of a furniture sale in 1935. Richard K. Doud includes 

the 1751 portraits of the Browns in “John Hesselius, Maryland Limner,” Winterthur Portfolio 5 (1969): 129–53. 

This study is indebted to historian Jean B. Lee’s search for Stone’s letters in collections around the country (often 

those of autograph collectors). Lee’s finds are reproduced in Kate Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology from 

Select Primary Sources,” National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, 2004, and in the Jean B. Lee 

Collection, Southern Maryland Studies Center, College of Southern Maryland, La Plata, Maryland. 
5

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

and a nineteenth-century building stands in its place, hampering investigation. The 1977 

fire that destroyed the wooden interior of the central block erased clues about life above 

the stairs. Archaeologists found little evidence of domestic activity in the earthen cellar 

floor of the central block before the floor was cemented over. Two efforts in the 1980s and 

1990s to locate slave quarters were inconclusive. Lastly, speculation of burials of African 

Americans in the vicinity of the Stone family cemetery remains untested. Other sites of 

significance on the property from a strictly African American point of view remain to be 

explored.3

From an archaeological point of view, the “greatest potential for new information” 

about Haberdeventure “lies in more remote areas,” away from the main house, which 

heretofore has been the focus of artifact recovery and analysis. On the far side of the main 

house from the visitor center are agricultural buildings and a tenant house that postdate 

Thomas Stone’s tenure at the site. A secondary walking trail headed west from the visitor 

center offers a tour of these spaces before turning east and drawing close to the north 

facade of the main house. This secondary walking trail leads the visitor past pastures and 

formerly cultivated areas to the lower elevation of a creek named Hoghole Run which 

empties into Port Tobacco River, and then up to the tenant house, corn crib, tobacco barn, 

and horse barn—all of which date to the nineteenth century—before reaching the main 

house.4

Haberdeventure’s longevity as a large plantation into the nineteenth century owes 

much to Thomas Stone’s birth into one of Maryland’s native elite families. Thomas was a 

descendent of Maryland governor William Stone (ca. 1603–1659/60), a Protestant and a 

native of England to whom the proprietor of Maryland, Lord Baltimore, granted four 

thousand acres called Poynton Manor in the Nanjemoy area of Charles County in 1653. 

William Stone had arrived in Maryland about five years earlier, at a time of social and 

political instability. Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676 and Coode’s Rebellion in 

Maryland in 1689 ushered in a new phase of political development. A demographic shift to 

a native-born majority among whites and a decline in tobacco prices at the turn of the 

3 Charles D. Cheek, Jeanne A. Ward, and Joseph Balicki for John Milner Associates, “Archaeological Studies of 

the Garden and House at the Thomas Stone National Historic Site (18CH331), Charles County, Maryland,” 1992; 

Moyer, “Archaeological Overview and Assessment,” 33, 67.

4 Moyer, “Archaeological Overview and Assessment,” 51 (quote), 76.
6

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

eighteenth century narrowed economic and political opportunities for small planters. After 

about 1720, large, slave-owning planters dominated politics and society, their power 

buoyed by renewed growth in the regional economy.5

Governor William Stone’s great-grandson David Stone (1709–73) inherited more 

than five hundred acres of Poynton Manor and an unknown number of people held in 

chattel slavery as his father’s principal heir. The planter apparently lacked interest in 

serving in Maryland’s provincial government. Instead, David Stone invested his energy in 

raising a large family and managing its wealth during an unprecedented period of political 

and social stability in Maryland. Despite the low tobacco prices of the previous generation 

(between 1680 and 1713), David’s father Thomas Stone (1677–1727) had the capital and 

social connections to convert his labor force from mostly indentured servants to mostly 

enslaved people, the survivors of the transatlantic slave trade and their offspring. By the 

end of David Stone’s long life, fifty-two enslaved people, half of them children under the 

age of eight, lived at Poynton Manor.6

5 Newman, The Stones of Poynton Manor, 7–10; “William Stone” in Edward C. Papenfuse, A Biographical 

Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635–1789, 2 vols., hereafter BDML (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 

University Press, 1979), 2:788–89. In his account of early Maryland politics, David W. Jordan discusses the 

political implications of a native-born colonist majority in Maryland. The first two decades of the eighteenth 

century formed a “critical period when the new elite of native-born Marylanders was firmly establishing its 

influence” (Foundations of Representative Government in Maryland, 1632–1715 [Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1987], 181). On the emergence of a native-born elite in Maryland and Virginia, see also the 

articles by David W. Jordan and Carole Shammas in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The 

Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). 

Rhys Isaac gives masterful depictions of the Tidewater planter’s “golden age” in The Transformation of Virginia, 

1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) and Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: 

Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 

6 Thomas Stone’s great-grandfather John Stone (ca. 1648–97) held in bondage three indentured servants and 

one enslaved person at the time of his death. His son and principal heir, Thomas Stone (1677–1727), had four 

indentured servants—a “white woman” named Isabella and her three “mulatto” children—and ten enslaved 

“Negro” people. This was a notable expansion of the enslaved labor force at a time of low tobacco prices 

between 1680 to 1713. Presumably the elder Thomas Stone took advantage of, or otherwise benefited from, the 

increased traffic on Maryland’s shores by private slave traders after the end of the Royal African Company 

monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade in 1689 (“John Stone” and “Thomas Stone” in Papenfuse, BDML, 

2:783–84, 786; probate inventory of Thomas Stone Senior, Prerogative Court, Inventories 1727–1729, Liber 13, 

ff. 314–17, Maryland State Archives; Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Chesapeake 

Plantation Management to 1763 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010]). See Chapter 3 for 

reverberations of this history in the eighteenth century. 
7

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

Figure 3. Map of Charles County, Maryland. Data on Native settlements provided by Scott Strickland, 

St. Mary’s College of Maryland. 

Drawn by M. Roy Cartography.
8

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

Thomas Stone, the subject of this HRS, was one of thirteen children of David 

Stone. Born by David’s second wife, Elizabeth Jenifer (d. by 1776), Thomas had one older 

half-brother named Samuel and one elder brother by his mother, Frederick, among other 

siblings. When Frederick died in 1773, Thomas inherited the status of eldest son by 

Elizabeth. Thomas’s position in the birth order contributed to his deep sense of personal 

responsibility to support his younger siblings, especially after their parents died. At least 

two sisters, Grace and Catherine, and one brother, Michael Jenifer, resided at 

Haberdeventure. An important patron of the family was Elizabeth’s brother, Daniel of St. 

Thomas Jenifer (1723–90), a planter and merchant who moved to Anne Arundel County by 

1766 and operated in Maryland’s highest political circles.

Thomas Stone did not inherit land from his father; David Stone’s 583-acre parcel of 

Poynton Manor passed to Samuel Stone, his eldest son by his first marriage, through 

primogeniture. Instead, David Stone’s most valuable legacy to his children by his second 

marriage was wealth in enslaved people. Thomas and his brother John Hoskins Stone 

directed the division of fifty-two people whom David Stone held in bondage at the time of 

this death. As Thomas’s siblings took up residence at Haberdeventure and its vicinity, the 

plantation reconstituted, to some extent, the free and enslaved population at David Stone’s 

plantation at Poynton Manor. The presence of at least one identified enslaved mixed-race 

family at Haberdeventure within the domestic staff, headed by a woman known as Clare, is 

consistent with studies of other large Chesapeake plantations. Because Thomas Stone’s 

family had been in the forefront of the growth of chattel slavery in the region in the late 

seventeenth and early eighteenth century, supplementing but not entirely replacing a 

workforce of European indentured servants with captive Africans and their enslaved 

descendants, this long history of bonded labor proved to be fertile ground for freedom 

suits in the 1790s by persons claiming descent from freeborn white women.

Earlier studies of Thomas Stone and Haberdeventure have identified Stone as a 

slaveholder and attempted to determine the size and make-up of the enslaved population at 

Haberdeventure during his period of ownership. Without surviving plantation records, 

Thomas Stone’s two probate inventories (one for Charles County and another for 

Annapolis) and incomplete tax lists from 1782 and 1783 supply part of the picture. In a 

1993 report, J. Richard Rivoire surmised, “it is reasonably certain that there were at least 

twenty [enslaved people] in residence at any one time” at Haberdeventure between 1770 

and 1790. Rivoire provides names of people mentioned in documents, but this HRS marks 

the first time that a concerted effort has been made to recover origins, kinship ties, occupations, and other aspects of identity among enslaved people who had some tie to 
9

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

Haberdeventure. This HRS also offers more contextual information about plantations on 

both sides of the Potomac River and about African American life in freedom and slavery in 

Charles County and Southern Maryland.7

The lack of plantation records also means that we have limited knowledge about 

land use and why Stone retained an enslaved labor force. John Wearmouth in the 1988 HRS 

for Thomas Stone National Historic Site raised questions about Stone’s identity as a planter 

and his commitment to planting as a source of income. While this HRS comes to different 

conclusions on these questions, it builds on Wearmouth’s work. For example, Wearmouth 

provided critical information about soil types, noting that “easily worked” lowland soil at 

Stone’s outlying plantation at Chandlers Hills and Welcome was more valuable than the 

thin soil at Haberdeventure. Wearmouth also identified the mid-1780s as a period of stress 

on Thomas Stone’s finances. In a biography of Thomas Stone for Maryland Historical 

Magazine, Jean B. Lee spends little time on the Signer as a planter and slaveholder, focusing 

instead on his life in public office.8

A Cultural Landscape Report for Thomas Stone National Historic Site from 1996 is 

an invaluable resource for documenting the history of Thomas Stone’s land acquisitions, 

mapping the expansion and contraction of the plantation’s boundaries over time, and 

providing a history of local roads and paths in Haberdeventure’s immediate vicinity. Stone 

made an initial purchase in 1770 of 442 acres of land advertised as “better for farming than 

planting.” Over the next fifteen years, Stone acquired additional parcels and in 1787 

obtained a new patent for Haberdeventure with 1,077 acres. Stone also consolidated 

Chandlers Hills and Welcome to create Plenty, 510 acres by patent of more arable farmland 

east of Haberdeventure. Altogether, Stone’s possession of about 2,000 acres in Charles 

County plus a grist mill made him one of the county’s top landholders.9

As would be expected, advances in scholarship and technology reveal oversights 

and omissions in prior studies of Thomas Stone, his family, and African Americans whose 

lives intersected with the Stone family. For instance, John Sanderson’s 1824 depiction of 

7 Rivoire, “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 41. Other discussions of Thomas Stone as a 

slaveholder can be found in Jean B. Lee, “The Problem of Slave Community in the Eighteenth-Century 

Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (July 1986): 333–61, and along with his siblings in Jean B. Lee, 

The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1994). 

Philip D. Morgan cites a reminiscence by Benjamin Rush about Thomas Stone, “I once heard [Stone] say ‘he had 

never known a single instance of a negro being contented in slavery,’” in Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in 

the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 

278. The quote appears in George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 1948), 151. 

8 Wearmouth, 1988 HRS, Part 2, p. 12 (quote); Jean B. Lee, “In Search of Thomas Stone, Essential 

Revolutionary,” Maryland Historical Magazine 92 (Fall 1997): 285–325.

9 John Milner Architects, Land Ethics Inc., and J. Richard Rivoire, “Cultural Landscape Report, National Park 

Service, Thomas Stone National Historic Site,” 1996; advertisement for the sale of Haberdeventure and Hanson’s 

Plains Enlarged, Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), March 9, 1769. Appendix 20 provides references for Thomas 

Stone’s land acquisitions.
10

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

Thomas’s wife, Margaret (Brown) Stone, as chronically ill after her inoculation for smallpox “by mercurial treatment” remained unquestioned more than 150 years later. Feminist 

studies of the wives of the Founding Fathers and their female contemporaries encourage us 

to see the women in the Revolutionary Era as multidimensional, with important duties in 

their roles as wives, mothers, housekeepers, slaveholders, and healers. Margaret Stone, for 

example, came from an educated and propertied family that would have given her the skills 

to be a plantation mistress and hostess. To give another example, this HRS’s chapter on 

African Americans at Haberdeventure and in Charles County would be considerably 

poorer without the website “O Say Can You See: Early Washington, DC, Law & Family 

Project” (www.earlywashingtondc.org), which offers not only transcriptions of legal 

documents from freedom suits but also views of the original documents, search functions, 

and network analysis. O Say Can You See demonstrates the power of digital resources to 

advance African American genealogy and history and recover stories of enslaved people as 

human actors.10

Environmental history, historical archaeology, and material culture studies also 

continue to raise new questions of the documentary and material record. Numerous 

National Park Service reports on Haberdeventure are helpful for addressing these fields of 

study. As the upland areas near Port Tobacco were more heavily settled over the course of 

the eighteenth century, how did the loss of wildlands exert new pressures on land use? Was 

Thomas Stone aware that clearing the land for plowing was a major contributing factor to 

the siltation of Port Tobacco’s waterways? Based on the archaeology of comparable properties, what are the most likely areas to find traces of outlying slave quarters, where 

enslaved African Americans had more privacy than at the planter’s house? Does 

Wearmouth’s description of Thomas Stone as “non-cosmopolitan” hold up against more 

recent studies of eighteenth-century material life? These are some questions that this HRS 

addresses.11

Laments about a paucity of documentary sources on Haberdeventure are a common refrain in the National Park Service reports about the property. The absence of 

plantation records is particularly unfortunate. Happily, formerly discovered manuscripts 

10 John B. Sanderson, Biography of the Signers to the Declaration of Independence, 9 vols. (Philadelphia: R. W. 

Pomeroy, 1824), 9:329–33, esp. 322; William G. Thomas III et al., eds., O Say Can You See: Early Washington, 

DC, Law and Family, http://earlywashingtondc.org, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Another useful electronic 

resource for researching enslaved people’s histories is Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and 

Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties (www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us/), which provides partial transcriptions of 

land and probate records. Online newspaper repositories, including Newspapers.com and PDFs of the Maryland 

Gazette available through the Maryland State Archives website, yielded runaway advertisements and other 

information for this HRS. 

11 In addition to reports for the National Park Service already cited above, this HRS is indebted to James Thomas 

Wollon’s “Historic Structure Report” for Habre de Venture (1987) and the “Geological Resources Inventory 

Report” for George Washington Birthplace National Monument and Thomas Stone National Historic Site by the 

Geological Resources Division, US Department of the Interior, National Park Service (2009). Wearmouth 

describes Thomas Stone as a “non-cosmopolitan type of country gentleman” in 1988 HRS, Part 1, page 15. 
11

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

dating to the 1770s to 1790s, cited in previous reports, bore more fruit with the help of 

transcription verification, name identification, secondary source research, or simply by 

asking new questions. The day book of Thomas’s brother Michael Jenifer Stone, part of the 

Kremer Collection at the Southern Maryland Studies Center in La Plata, Maryland, stands 

out as an underutilized resource. Rivoire used the informal account book to find clues 

about agricultural production at Haberdeventure. Going deeper, the day book identifies 

people who occupied Haberdeventure’s orbit, such as an elderly enslaved man from 

Poynton Manor known as Robin who exchanged chickens for cash, and Jesse, a boy born 

into slavery at Poynton Manor who became a blacksmith at Michael Jenifer Stone’s blacksmith shop at Port Tobacco. Another underutilized resource is Thomas Stone’s most 

well-known composition, a letter written from Philadelphia on May 20, 1776, that uses the 

common phrase “The dye is cast”; this letter threads together the chapters of this HRS, as 

will be explained shortly.

Limitations of this HRS

Land use patterns prior to colonization and during the seventeenth century fell outside the 

scope of this HRS, but they had an influence on Haberdeventure’s eighteenth-century 

appearance. Port Tobacco’s brief history as a Jesuit mission in the 1630s and 1640s is well 

known. Also of note is an area of relatively dense Algonquian Indian settlement in the latter 

half of the seventeenth century between Mattawoman Creek and Piscataway, just north of 

Haberdeventure (Figure 3). Native American knowledge and cultural practices may have 

been passed down to Haberdeventure’s residents. Another topic to be explored is how the 

history of Native American and English interaction in Maryland, and specifically in and 

around Charles County, shaped Thomas Stone’s attitudes toward Native American foreign 

policy.12

Many questions remain too about the experience of the American Revolutionary 

War at Haberdeventure plantation and the impact that the war had on its residents. This is 

due in part to a lack of surviving correspondence among the Stone family siblings from the 

1770s; caches of Stone family letters, accounts, and other manuscripts from the 1780s at the 

Library of Congress, Maryland Historical Society, and Duke University (much of it correspondence collected by Thomas’s brothers Michael Jenifer Stone and Walter Stone) weight 

the evidence toward the immediate postwar period. Did the war heighten the importance 

12 Julia A. King, Mary Kate Mansius, and Scott M. Strickland, “‘What Towne Belong You To?’ Landscape, 

Colonialism, and Mobility in the Potomac River Valley,” Historical Archaeology 50, no. 1 (2016): 7–26; James 

D. Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (Baltimore: 

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); James Axtell, “White Legend: The Jesuit Missions in Maryland,” 

Maryland Historical Magazine 81, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 1–7; James H. Merrell, “Cultural Continuity among the 

Piscataway Indians of Colonial Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 36, no. 4 (October 1979): 

548–70.
12

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

of Haberdeventure as a source of emotional and financial support for Stone’s siblings? Was 

the financial stress that Thomas Stone was under in the mid-1780s an aberration or a 

long-running concern? How did enslaved residents respond to opportunities to take flight 

to British forces during the war? 

While this HRS attempts to document “the histories and identities of 

Haberdeventure’s enslaved” people as directed by the project’s scope of work, difficult 

decisions were made to limit the search for evidence in terms of temporal scope and 

intimacy with the Stone family. For instance, Clare (Thomas), whose family is mentioned in 

Stone’s letters, received closer treatment than Harry and his wife Nan, whom Stone sold to 

a neighbor, Charles Goodrick, in 1779. This author could not determine how Harry and 

Nan came into Stone’s possession, but something about their lives might be revealed in 

Goodrick family records. A comprehensive approach to capture the histories of all the 

enslaved people at Haberdeventure between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries 

(akin to what has been done for the Stone family in the 1988 Historic Resource Study and 

1996 Cultural Landscape Report) would require substantially more time and resources.

The HRS also does not offer a definitive answer to how much wealth Thomas Stone 

derived from his various income streams. Stone’s investments included real estate, agriculture, a lease and then ownership of a grist mill, and part of a share in the Baltimore Iron 

Works. His law business appears to have been his most reliable source of income; this 

remains more speculation than established fact.

Examination into Charles County court records of the 1770s undoubtedly would 

offer some clues to Stone’s money lending and other ways that the planter and lawyer was 

part of the local community, but this was not done for the HRS. As Appendix 19, “Legal 

History Research Methods and Results,” explains, Maryland’s higher courts were the focus 

of legal history research. Charles County court records from the 1780s are missing. 

Lastly, some readers might be disappointed at the lack of new information about 

Thomas Stone’s political activity at the local, state, and congressional level. What were the 

causes that Stone cared about as a legislator? With whom did he bond over government-related issues? What precisely was his role in the drafting of the Articles of Confederation, 

and what lured him back to Congress in 1784 after a hiatus of six years? How did his 

training and experience as a lawyer inform his approach to law making? This HRS hews 

closely to Haberdeventure’s history, but it does try to make connections between Stone’s 

high political standing and his corner of Charles County.
13

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

Chapter Summaries with Major Findings

Thomas Stone’s most well-known composition, his letter from Philadelphia to an 

unknown recipient of May 20, 1776, in which Stone uses the phrase “The dye is cast,” will 

be a common reference point for each of the chapters of this Historic Resource Study. 

Given Stone’s historical significance as a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the 

declaration’s reverberations in American and global history, the letter amply rewards a 

close reading. This structural device for the HRS—returning repeatedly to the “dye is cast” 

letter at the beginning of each chapter—will provide a measure of discipline to the HRS, as 

it broadens Haberdeventure’s history without staying too far from the legislative purpose 

for the park, Thomas Stone’s political career.13

To briefly summarize the long letter, Stone alludes to the major political tensions 

playing out across British North America in May 1776: a disappointing American military 

expedition to Canada; a report that tens of thousands of British-led forces, including 

mercenaries, were to be sent to America; and differences in the Continental Congress 

between “discordant members of the Empire.” The thirty-three-year-old lawyer, planter, 

husband, and father of three children gives various reasons for his personal unease in his 

situation as a delegate to Congress. He acknowledged that the illness of his wife, who likely 

underwent inoculation for smallpox as a protective measure upon arriving in Philadelphia, 

“preys most severely on my spirits.” With the time afforded by an afternoon’s “intermission” in his wife’s “disorder,” Stone wrote in dramatic terms about his fears of America 

becoming a “vanquished” country because of the rash actions of a “few men” advocating 

independence. With “exceeding Pain,” Stone contemplated the choice put before the 

Maryland Convention by the Congressional Preamble and Resolve of 15 May. The 

Maryland delegation to Congress did what it could to postpone Congress’s call for the 

colonies to form their own governments, Stone related. To “cut the only Bond which held 

the discordant Members of the Empire together,” Stone wrote, “appears to me the most 

weak and ill judged Measure I ever met with in a State which had the least pretention to 

wisdom or Knowledge in the Affairs of Men.” Personally in favor of reconciliation with 

Britain, Stone acknowledged that the tide in Congress had swung in favor of independence. 

Stone’s discomfort with the “agitation” and “destructive Tendencies” of that body 

prompted him to ask the Maryland Convention to recall him to Maryland.

Chapter 1, on landscape, will open with Stone’s personal declaration in the May 20, 

1776, letter of his adherence to his “Principles of Morality, in which I will ever attain the 

absolute Dominion.” The chapter will examine the relationship between architecture and 

13 The letter by Thomas Stone to (James Hollyday?) of May 20, 1776, published in Letters of Delegates to 

Congress, 1775–1789, eds. Paul Hubert Smith, et al., 24 vols. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1976–

2000), 4:47–54, is also available online through the Library of Congress’s website, A Century of Lawmaking for 

a New Nation: US Congressional Documents and Debates. The URL for the letter is https://memory.loc.gov/

cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/hlaw:@field(DOCID+@lit(dg00437)).
14

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

Stone’s belief in his authority to govern in the public trust, with an emphasis on the performative aspects of the landscape for Stone’s peer group in the greater Port Tobacco neighborhood. The Stone family expressed their gentility and refinement through learned 

behavior that only people of leisure could cultivate, such as how to serve and drink tea with 

specialized equipment. Material culture historians have identified specialized spaces, like 

parlors and pleasure gardens, that functioned as theaters for genteel performances in 

eighteenth-century America.

Chapter 2 will introduce the concept of Haberdeventure as a family enterprise. 

Building on evidence provided in the 1988 Historic Resource Study and 1996 Cultural 

Landscape Report, the chapter will argue more forcefully for kinship-based financial 

networks among Stone’s siblings and his brother-in-law Gustavus Richard Brown. Thomas 

Stone shared the risks of his plantation business among multiple stakeholders in his family. 

A substantial amount of his father’s human capital—not only in enslaved labor but also in 

legitimate heirs—moved to Haberdeventure or played a role in its development, sustaining 

the accumulation of wealth and influence and power over generations that undergirded 

Stone’s authority in this society. In a new analysis of the residence of Stone’s siblings at 

Haberdeventure and their contributions to the household and to the profits of the estate, 

this study argues that Stone weighed financial concerns against familial duty when supporting his brothers and sisters.

Chapter 3, like Chapters 1 and 2, will address material life and social networks, but 

with a focus on African Americans who had ties to Thomas Stone’s residences and properties. On the eve of Stone’s departure from Philadelphia in October 1776 to return to 

Maryland, an enslaved woman known as Bet emancipated herself from Stone’s 

Philadelphia household. Bet’s flight occurred on the cusp of greater opportunity for 

African Americans to obtain legal freedom in the British Atlantic world in the last quarter 

of the eighteenth century. But Bet’s action is more typical for pursuing freedom by extralegal means. A handful of tangible cultural resources at a distance from the mansion house at 

Thomas Stone National Historic Site provide a pretext for discussing personal freedoms 

that enslaved people exercised in and around Charles County. Drawing upon a growing 

literature on freedom suits in Maryland, Chapter 3 documents generations of resistance to 

enslavement in the family of Clare (Thomas) and illustrates the importance of family 

networks in navigating the legal line between slavery and freedom. 

Chapter 4 shifts the focus to agriculture. In September 1776, while Thomas Stone 

was still in Philadelphia, Charles County resident Henry Smith placed an ad in a newspaper for the sale of land within a mile of Port Tobacco with a leased water mill. Having 

privileged information about the market for flour and other provisions in wartime because 

of his position in government, Stone moved quickly on the opportunity. Within three 

months, Stone rented the site along with two enslaved women, Rachel and Luce, who were 

part of a family there. As the war was winding down, in 1782, Stone purchased the Smith 
15

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

family’s Chandlers Hills and Welcome tracts and the remainder of the lease of the mill 

(along with Rachel and Luce) at great expense. Chandlers Hills and Welcome were his most 

valuable tracts of arable land, and Stone’s possession of a mill placed him in the top strata 

of county society. 

In addition to contextualizing Stone’s interest in grain and livestock farming and 

tobacco cultivation, Chapter 4 will advance our understanding of Haberdeventure’s management structure and domestic production. Though a measure of self-sufficiency was a 

goal, especially during the war, the assertion in the 1988 HRS and 1996 CLR that 

Haberdeventure achieved little more than subsistence agriculture diminishes Stone’s 

investment in enslaved labor and blinds us to Stone’s commercial interests and 

connections. 

With multiple members of his family invested in Haberdeventure’s profitability by 

1783–84, Stone was at greater liberty to move to Annapolis, where he could devote more 

time in public office and attend to the high volume of legal business in Maryland’s higher 

courts after the war. In his writings, though, as early as the May 1776 “dye is cast” letter, 

Stone expressed concern about time away from his family and his profession. The tension 

between public and private life, which is evident in the architecture of Haberdeventure 

itself, will be a theme of Chapter 5, on Stone’s legal career. Within several years of qualifying as an attorney in Maryland’s courts, Stone was entrusted with estate management for 

members of his own family, acquired a high-profile position as trustee to the Londonbased firm of Barnes and Ridgate, and had the Lord Proprietor and proprietary appointees 

among his clients. By the 1780s, Stone was a lawyer in demand with a reputation for having 

“considerable abilities mental.” His ownership of a large law library indicates a wide 

knowledge of the law and an intellectual interest in his chosen profession. But Stone’s 

dueling obligations to his legal clients with “property at stake” and to public service took a 

toll on him personally.14

An alternative title for this HRS could be “Managing a Revolution.” In his “dye is 

cast” letter of May 20, 1776, Stone expressed fear of impending deprivations and loss of 

self-governance if America declared independence and became a “vanquished country.” 

How could the American colonies show strength against a world military power? And 

within the union of colonies, how would Maryland be able to protect its interests? The 

increased risk of smallpox infection during the war put families on edge, as did the presence of British ships on Chesapeake waters. Stone faced decisions on how to make his 

investments profitable and how to balance public and private demands on his time and 

energy. Meanwhile, enslaved African Americans weighed opportunities to escape bondage 

14 Quotes from Hugh Williamson to William Blount, November 28, 1783, in Letters of Delegates to Congress,

1774–1789, eds. Smith et al., 21:165, and Thomas Stone to William Paca, March 10, 1784, erroneously dated 

May 10, 1786, in a transcription (Haverford College), both in Jefferson’s “Thomas Stone: A Chronology from 

Select Primary Sources.” 
16

Introduction: Reassessing the Who, What, and Why of Haberdeventure 

that the war presented. Some negotiated with slaveholders and deferred their liberty. From 

the mid-1780s to the late 1790s, a brief flourishing of freedom suits by African Americans 

in liberalized Maryland courts expanded access to legal freedom. The repercussions of a 

changing social, economic, and legal landscape in Maryland and Virginia for African 

Americans with ties to Haberdeventure in the last quarter of the eighteenth century is one 

of the most important findings of this HRS.

A Note on Sources 

Spelling and capitalization of original documents have been retained. 

Given the complexity of the history of money in Maryland in the 1770s and 1780s, 

money values have not been adjusted for inflation, nor have values been converted into a 

single form of currency.
17

CHAPTER ONE

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape

and Its Contexts

I am principled against quitting any Post where my Countrymen think I may be 

usefull however disagreeable it may be to myself or whatever my own Opinion 

may be on the Subject provided it be not against my Principles of Morality, in 

which I will ever retain the absolute Dominion.

Thomas Stone to (James Hollyday?), Philadelphia, May 20, 17761

                                                                                      

I

n his most well-known letter, Thomas Stone, writing from Philadelphia in May 1776, 

expressed a belief in his moral sense—that is, his ability to make the decisions that 

underpinned his social and political authority. The built landscape at Haberdeventure 

naturalized this authority by placing the planter’s house on a rise in the land, an elevated 

position accentuated by a terraced garden. The mansion house, pleasure garden, and 

complex of outbuildings, constructed circa 1770–73, signaled Thomas Stone’s and his 

wife’s readiness to assume the duties and responsibilities of Charles County gentry, 

including providing political leadership. Maryland’s political culture in the eighteenth 

century favored landed gentry to hold positions in government. Stone counted himself 

among the “virtuous few” equipped to make decisions for the public’s welfare because of 

his high rank in Maryland society, defined in large part by his birth, property ownership, 

and education. During what would be the last chapter of his political career, Maryland’s 

paper money debate of 1786–87, Stone struggled with perceived threats to the 

independence of the state senate, of which he was a member, in legislative affairs. 

Even though the Stone family had been prominent members of Charles County 

society for over a century when Haberdeventure was built, Thomas Stone and his wife 

Margaret improved upon local customs. The main house at Haberdeventure combines 

locally familiar features for houses of the well-to-do, such as the one-and-half-story height 

with gambrel roof and full wood paneling in the principal entertaining room, with metropolitan influences, like the placement of the hyphens and wings along an arc and the 

1 Published in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, eds. Smith et al., 4:47–54, and reproduced in Kate 

Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources,” National Park Service, 2004.
18

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

combination of a well-ventilated shaded porch or piazza with a central passage. Stone and 

his wife were selective consumers of designs that reflected their knowledge and taste. Port 

Tobacco’s commercial growth in the 1760s and 1770s was an important backdrop to 

Haberdeventure during its construction. 

Background

Thomas Stone wrote his May 20 “dye is cast” letter while awaiting instructions from the 

Maryland Convention, the colony’s provisional government. On May 10, the Continental 

Congress had passed a resolution recommending that the colonies form their own governments. On May 15, John Adams supplied a preamble that opened the door to independence. But Stone and the other Maryland delegates continued to honor the Maryland 

Convention’s instructions from January to hold out for reconciliation with Great Britain. 

On May 21, the Maryland Convention agreed to form a provincial government but maintained that its “deputies in the Congress must not vote for independence.” Pennsylvania 

and New York also barred its delegates from voting for independence.2

Stone’s uncle, Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, head of the Council of Safety, 

Maryland’s executive body, was one of the major forces behind Maryland’s opposition to 

independence. In a letter to former governor Horatio Sharpe of June 22, 1776 (by which 

time Pennsylvania reversed course), Jenifer distanced himself from the social upheaval and 

lawlessness that he predicted would occur if Maryland joined the independence movement: “So many, I fear, will be scrambling for power that it is at this time impossible to say 

how or in what manner the government will be established. I confess that should there be a 

departure from the old system of laws in the province I shall be totally unfit to have anything to say as to public matters, and upon that event’s happening I shall retire and lament 

what was not in my power to prevent.”

Despite Jenifer’s trepidation about possible upheavals, on June 28 the Maryland 

Convention withdrew its opposition to declaring the colonies free and independent states. 

Thus released, Maryland’s delegates Thomas Stone, William Paca, and John Rogers voted 

in favor of independence at pivotal votes in Congress on July 1, 2, and 4. Meanwhile, Jenifer 

2 Herbert E. Klingelhofer, “The Cautious Revolution: Maryland and the Movement toward Independence: 

1774–1776,” Maryland Historical Magazine 60 (September 1965): 261–313 (quote 291); John Ferling, A Leap in 

the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 163–71.
19

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

maintained hopes for reconciliation. On July 17, Jenifer wrote, “I am still of opinion that it 

is to our interest to be united with Britain and that our province instructed its delegates to 

agree to unite with the other colonies on declaring independence too soon.”3

Historians of revolutionary Maryland paint a picture of a conservative elite and 

count Thomas Stone among its numbers. During the colonial period, Maryland’s proprietary government rewarded loyalty with land and offices. Popular politics had an uneasy 

place in Maryland society; men of property and education like Thomas Stone wanted to 

uphold the liberties of the English constitution but feared social unrest and “anarchy” in a 

republic. Thomas Johnson, a prominent lawyer based in Frederick County, Maryland, 

opined in 1775, “The people at large are not a body fit for deliberation. They are greatly 

carried away with a warmth of zeal that ever leaps sedate and wise policy.” Johnson wanted 

Americans “to establish our liberty” and reunite with Great Britain, “so we may preserve 

the entire empire and the constitutional liberty, founded in whiggish principles, handed 

down to us by our ancestors.” The state’s constitution of 1776 sustained deference to a 

propertied elite with its property qualifications for seats in the state’s legislature and 

indirect election of senators and governor. Men of property and education like Thomas 

Stone were considered the best qualified to lead the new state government.4

The passage from Thomas Stone’s May 20, 1776, letter at the head of this chapter 

reflects two aspects of Maryland’s political culture at the time. Stone’s statement, “I am 

principled against quitting any Post where my Countrymen think I may be usefull however 

disagreeable it may be to myself,” conveys the sense of duty that men of property and 

leisure—the gentry—held about serving public office. Stone expressed a sense of discomfort and self-sacrifice while serving in office away from home; he wrote in the May 20 letter 

that he had asked to be recalled from Congress, feeling at odds with the delegates around 

3 Klingelhofer, “The Cautious Revolution,” 297 (quote), 305 (quote), 306. Stone was in Congress during the 

votes of July 1, 2, and 4, 1776, as well as on August 2 when members of Congress signed the Declaration of 

Independence. It is a common misconception that the signing took place on July 4. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, 

another signer from Maryland, missed the early July proceedings altogether (Edmund C. Burnett, ed., Letters of 

Members of the Continental Congress, 8 vols. [Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1921–36], 

1:xlvi, 2:l; and Herbert Friedenwald, The Declaration of Independence: An Interpretation and an Analysis [New 

York: Macmillan Co., 1904], 121–51, esp. 143; Ronald Hoffman in collaboration with Sally D. Mason, Princes 

of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500–1782 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 

2000], 301).

Thomas Stone did not oppose severing political ties with Great Britain so much as he was concerned about 

the speed with which the decision was reached. Stone again expressed his preference for slow and thoughtful 

deliberation by “prudent sober men” during the paper money debate of 1786–87. For examples, see the Senate’s 

message to the House of Delegates, delivered by Thomas Stone, January 20, 1787, Votes and Proceedings of the 

Senate of the State of Maryland, November Session, 1786, in Archives of Maryland v. 185; and Thomas Stone to 

Michael Jenifer Stone, undated [ca. 1786–87], The Rosenbach, Philadelphia, PA. 

4 Letters of Thomas Johnson Jr., of January and August 1775, cited in Klingelhofer, “The Cautious Revolution,” 

265–66. Ronald Hoffman analyzes the leadership of Maryland’s “conservative elite” during the American 

Revolution and characterizes Thomas Stone as “a pronounced conservative” in A Spirit of Dissension: 

Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) (quotes 

1, 141). 
20

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

him who display “happy Indifference” to “agitation” or “view with Apathy the destructive 

Tendencies of Measures...I can’t prevent.” But, Stone added, these things would not 

“weigh” on him “if I had any Prospect of my being serviceable” to Maryland’s government. 

The second part of the passage quoted above—“provided it be not against my 

Principles of Morality, in which I will ever retain the absolute Dominion”—was a strong 

assertion of Stone’s moral authority and independence of judgment. Stone drew on a 

complex blend of political philosophies that came out of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and Scotland and circulated in British America. For example, John Locke 

articulated a contract theory of government in which property owners freely give their 

consent to be governed; governance was based on property ownership, not heredity or 

divine right. In another shift from premodern belief systems, Scottish moral sense philosophers espoused that “moral authority” lies in “the common judgements of an informed 

citizenry rather than in established authorities in church or state.” Though the philosophies had radical implications, here the emphasis will be on the notion of a virtuous few. 

Sustaining Maryland’s “highly deferential” mode of politics, the Maryland state constitution of 1776 “made the possession of extensive property the fundamental basis of government.” Members of the Upper House or Senate had to own property, real or personal, 

valued at £1,000 current money or above. Senators would be voted in indirectly, by electors 

chosen at the county level who were entrusted to choose “men of the most wisdom, experience and virtue.” The property requirement for a seat in the House of Delegates was real or 

personal property valued at a minimum of £500. Statewide, little more than 10 percent of 

free white males met the property qualifications for a seat in the lower house, and fewer 

than 10 percent qualified for the fifteen seats in the upper house. Senators held their seats 

for five years, delegates for one year. A defeated effort to remove property qualifications for 

suffrage meant that voters (males only) had to own fifty acres or moveable property worth 
21

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

at least £30. A 1783 law, which passed while Stone sat in the Senate, restricted political 

participation further by barring manumitted men and their “issue” (descendants) from 

voting and holding office.5

Historian Jean B. Lee characterized Charles County’s elite before the Revolutionary 

War as “secure” and “self-confident” in its authority. But deference was a two-way street. 

The gentry and whites of lower rank were bound to each other by reciprocal obligations. 

The gentry were expected to be generous in their hospitality and hand out patronage, for 

example, in exchange for political support. Lee argues that Thomas Stone learned the hard 

way to listen to the “Vox Populi” (a phrase Stone uses in his May 20, 1776, letter) when 

people refused to pay, or sheriffs refused to collect, his law fees after he defended an 

unpopular proprietary appointee in a high profile case in Charles County court; that same 

year, 1774, he lost his one and only popular election.6

Stone identified himself as belonging to a rank of men for whom popularity bore no 

relationship to high political standing (though his lack of popular appeal was not unproblematic, as became clear in Maryland’s 1786–87 paper currency debate). The mansion 

house and landscape at Haberdeventure were a statement about his political fitness. Like 

other members of the gentry, Stone intended his house and landscape to communicate his 

“taste and knowledge” as well as his “wealth and power.” The arc created by the central 

block of the main house in relationship to its wings reflected the refinement of the owner. 

The terraced garden also beautified the scene, offering a view off the south porch. These 

were visual markers of Stone’s membership in “a natural social and intellectual elite” for 

5 Ned C. Landsman, “Introduction: The Context and Functions of Scottish Involvement in the Americas,” in 

Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and America, 1600–1800 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell 

University Press, 2001), 26; Melvin Yazawa, Representative Government and the Revolution: The Maryland 

Constitutional Crisis of 1787 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 4 (quote), 6; Hoffman, A Spirit 

of Dissension, 179 (quote), 180; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New 

York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1972), 214; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 131; “An act to prohibit the bringing slaves 

into this state,” Session Laws of April–June 1783, chapter 23, section 3, Archives of Maryland 203:350. Stone 

did not participate in the writing of the state constitution of 1776 (Jean B. Lee, “In Search of Thomas Stone, 

Essential Revolutionary,” Maryland Historical Magazine 92 [Fall 1997]: 304).

Stone attended the session during which the Senate voted to pass the 1783 law that denied suffrage and 

officeholding to manumitted men (Votes and Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Maryland, April Session,

1783, May 29, 1783). This measure was part of broader efforts in the post-Revolutionary South to deny citizenship to blacks. “The great distinguishing characteristic between a freeman and a slave, is the right of voting for 

delegates to make laws affecting liberty and life,” declared the House of Delegates in a message to the Senate in 

January 1785, a year and a half after the passage of the 1783 act (Votes and Proceedings of the Senate of the State 

of Maryland, November Session, 1784, January 16, 1785). The 1783 law denied manumitted men this privilege 

of a “freeman.” William G. Thomas III’s recent book, A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged 

Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020) offers a perspective on race and citizenship in post-revolutionary Maryland.

6 Lee, Price of Nationhood, 7, 104, 131. On deference, see Richard R. Beeman, “Deference, Republicanism, 

and the Emergence of Popular Politics in Eighteenth-Century America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 

49 (1992): 401–30) and, more recently, in a legal context, Turk McClesky and James C. Squire, “Knowing When 

To Fold: Litigation on a Writ of Debt in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 76 (July 

2019): 509–44, esp. 543. The seminal work on the genesis of shared political interests among whites in the 

colonial Chesapeake is Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Virginia (New 

York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1975). 
22

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

which Stone qualified on the basis of his lineage (family history) in Maryland, education, 

and property ownership. According to eighteenth-century English political thought, 

independence of wealth through ownership of land gave the elite the ability to rise above 

self-interest in governance and thus put them in a worthy position to make decisions for the 

good of the majority.7

Haberdeventure also represented Stone’s local interests. Stone’s land ownership in 

Charles County rooted his social and political authority in this place. The design of the 

mansion house blends metropolitan influences with regional preferences. From the exterior, the one-and-a-half story form with gambrel roof resembled other high-status houses 

of the area. A piazza on the public-facing north side provided a sheltered space for visitors, 

expressing hospitality while maintaining limited access to the house’s interior. In language 

that evoked the local obligations of a large landowner, Stone apologized to the governor of 

Maryland in March 1784 for a delay in his appearance in Annapolis, citing “those...

incidents which generally attend to country gentlemen when suddenly called from home.” 

Planters’ houses were the “administrative centers” of their plantations, where people of all 

ranks from the surrounding area would come to ask for work, solicit aid, or seek resolution 

for a dispute.8

As one of Maryland’s “country gentlemen,” Stone distinguished himself from 

“plain Country people.” Gentility studies tell us that a “cultural and social gulf” developed 

between “gentry and commoner” between 1720 and 1760 in colonial British America. As 

historian Cary Carson explains, over the course of the later seventeenth and eighteenth 

centuries, “English society...imbued the leisured squirearchy with certain cultural attributes that set them apart from the working classes below them. Known to contemporaries 

as ‘genteel taste,’ today’s modern scholars call this code of conduct by various names: 

civility, sociability, politeness. It was something men and women had to take time to learn, 

time that working people could not spare. It required the mastery of prescribed social 

skills, which, when practiced, transformed the activities of everyday life into the arts of 

genteel living.” Gentility was “theater,” Carson continues. “It needed settings, costumes, 

props, and not least of all, audiences.” Traditionally, large landowning families like the 

7 Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 206–14 (209 quote); Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: 

Gardens & Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Phoenix Mill, U.K.: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1995), 16 

(quote).

8 Thomas Stone to Governor William Paca, March 18, 1784, Haverford College (transcription erroneously 

dated May 10, 1786, in Kate Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology from Select Primary Sources,” National 

Park Service, 2004) (quote); Clare Priest, “Creating an American Property Law: Alienability and Its Limits in 

American History,” Harvard Law Review 120, no. 2 (December 2006): 399; Dell Upton, “White and Black 

Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” 1985, republished in Material Life in America, 1600–1860, ed. 

Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 362 (quote). George Washington, a 

Virginia planter who held over 300 people in bondage in 1799, believed it to be his obligation to hear appeals 

from the enslaved about their treatment by overseers, permission to marry persons who lived off the plantation, 

requests for new jobs, and other matters (Mary V. Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret”: 

George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community At Mount Vernon [Charlottesville: University of 

Virginia Press, 2019], 3, 51–7). 
23

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Stones had exclusive possession of the leisure to cultivate gentility. But Thomas Stone 

interacted extensively, both personally and professionally, with men of commercial 

wealth—merchants—who also could be genteel in their appearance, manners, and domestic environments. Stone’s investment in land was both a practical decision and a cultural 

choice that maintained his family’s social distinction.9

“Disinterested men may possibly err, but having no motive to do wrong, and being 

bound to do right, the probability is that they will not err,” Stone penned in 1783. 

“Interested men,” on the other hand, “have a motive to induce a departure from right.” 

Landed wealth, according to eighteenth-century English political thought, conferred upon 

a man the ability to govern without self-interest. Information about Stone’s wealth is the 

subject of the next section.10

Thomas Stone’s Comparative Wealth

How did Thomas Stone’s wealth measure up to others in Charles County and in Maryland 

as a whole? Setting aside for the moment various markers of his high standing—such as his 

birth family, his gentility, and his officeholding—Stone qualified as “elite” on the basis of 

property ownership alone. At the time of his death, Stone possessed about two thousand 

acres in Charles County and, according to his probate inventories, held in bondage a total 

of twenty-five enslaved people at the end of his life. Stone was a “large planter” by the 

standards of Charles County in the Revolutionary Era, defined by Jean B. Lee as ownership 

of at least five hundred acres and slaveholdings of above twenty enslaved people. If we 

zoom out to Maryland as a whole, Stone still qualified as “elite” on the basis of his property 

ownership alone but was less of a stand-out. Historian Trevor Burnard’s benchmark for a 

“large estate” in Maryland prior to 1776 was possession of personal property worth over 

£2,500 current money (adjusted for inflation). Stone’s personal property was valued at 

9 Thomas Stone’s statement, December 21, 1781, in Pardon Papers for Negro Nan, Box 1, Folder 82, Governor 

and Council Papers 1781, MSA; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New 

York: Vintage Books, 1992), 26–27 (quotes); Cary Carson, Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the 

Colonizing of America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 33; Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling 

Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 

1996), 208; Williamson, Polite Landscapes, 112–13. “In eighteenth-century society, gentility was the visible 

expression of gentry status” (Bushman, Refinement of America, xv).

10 Thomas Stone’s answer to Charles Carroll of Carrollton’s protest to the bill entitled, “An act concerning the 

admission and qualification of attornies and solicitors,” submitted by Stone to the Maryland Senate on December 

25, 1783, and read in the Senate chamber on January 15, 1785 (Votes and Proceedings of the Senate of the State 

of Maryland, November Sessions, 1783 and 1784). Other men in politics recognized Stone as “honest and 

disinterested” (Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, May 8, 1784, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, eds. 

Smith et al., 21:601, and reproduced in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Primary Sources”). New 

views about interests and minority rights in republican government came to the fore in the constitutional debates 

of 1787 (Gordon, Creation of the American Republic).
24

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

£2,666 current money in early 1788 (unadjusted for inflation). By Burnard’s analysis, 

Thomas Stone fell within the average for landholding and slaveholding among elite decedents between 1760 and 1776.11

Thomas Stone was also typical among Maryland’s elite for diversifying his financial 

portfolio beyond planting, though by his own admission he avoided risk. Aided by his legal 

expertise, Stone managed to accumulate a considerable amount of land in an early colonized region. Though geography exerted negative pressures on plantation size in Maryland 

(the province was bounded by water and lacked a western frontier, unlike Virginia), a 

number of factors encouraged the creation of large estates in the later eighteenth century. 

Soil depletion and population pressures on older settled land (including in Charles 

County) put limits on the number of people and domestic animals the land could support, 

fostering more extensive estates. Also, tobacco had a low profit margin of 5 to 6 percent, 

and wheat crops were low yield. Maryland’s elite supplemented their plantation income 

through trade and professions, money lending, and capital investments, such as iron 

manufacturing. Stone held one-fourth of one-tenth of a share in the Baltimore Iron Works 

Company. Stone also put some of his cash into real estate, including a mill near 

Haberdeventure and a townhouse in Annapolis, and silver, accumulating 168 ounces of the 

durable good that kept its value. The scope of Stone’s moneylending as a revenue stream, 

unfortunately, is unknown.12

Notably, Thomas Stone never held an office of profit in Maryland’s proprietary 

revenue system, which was another way that men of elite standing, before the Revolution, 

supplemented their income. Four generations earlier, Lord Baltimore, the proprietor of 

Maryland, had made Stone’s great-great-grandfather, William Stone (ca. 1603–1659/60), 

governor of the fledgling colony and rewarded his service with a manor of four thousand 

acres in Charles County. While this award of a manor established the Stone family as 

prominent members of Charles County society for generations, Thomas Stone’s father, 

David, held less than one thousand acres of the original parcel. Arguably, it was Thomas 

Stone’s kinship connection to Charles County native Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer (1723–

90), his maternal uncle, that elevated Stone to higher circles in 1774–76. Jenifer held the 

proprietary revenue system’s highest office, Agent and Receiver General, in 1768–69 and 

again after 1771. Jenifer also acquired a seat in the upper house of Maryland’s government 

11 Jean B. Lee, The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County (New York: W. W. Norton 

and Company, 1994), 23, 45; Jean B. Lee, “The Problem of Slave Community in the Eighteenth-Century 

Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 43 (July 1986): 333–61; Trevor Burnard, Creole Gentlemen: 

The Maryland Elite, 1691–1776 (New York: Routledge, 2002) 9, 35, 38, table 2.5. According to the research for 

this HRS, Thomas Stone owned 1,981 acres in Charles County at the end of his life, in addition to real estate in 

Annapolis.

12 Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial 

Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 372; Paul G. E. Clemens, “The 

Operation of an Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Tobacco Plantation,” Agricultural History 49 (July 1975): 519. 
25

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

by proprietary appointment in 1771 and headed the Council of Safety at the beginning of 

the Revolutionary War. Historian Jean B. Lee contends that it was through Daniel of St. 

Thomas Jenifer’s patronage that Thomas Stone won election to the Continental Congress 

in 1775 without prior legislative experience.13

Certainly there were men of larger fortunes than Stone in Maryland in the 1770s 

and 1780s, and proprietary patronage more often than not played a role in the making of 

those fortunes. Despite the presence of a handful of very large family fortunes, like the 

Carrolls, Lloyds, and Jenifers, in Maryland, and a trend toward engrossment of estates, the 

colony, in Trevor Burnard’s view, had an open elite. Its ranks were porous. Over the course 

of the eighteenth century, Burnard found, a greater quantity of men, and a higher proportion of the population as a whole, qualified as elite (defined by Burnard as having estates 

worth over £650). Economic diversification and the growth of the enslaved population by 

natural increase were two reasons for the growth in wealth in the colony as a whole. At the 

same time, the average wealth of a member of the elite declined. One factor was change in 

the land market; as land was subdivided over the generations, it became more difficult to 

accumulate large landholdings in older settled areas such as Charles County. Meanwhile, 

men of more modest means (whose fathers held estates worth between £225–650) pushed 

their way into the higher ranks as prosperity (among free white colonists) grew overall.14

The dynamic nature of Maryland’s upper ranks (both upward and downward 

before a bankruptcy law passed in 1787 provided some support to those falling out of the 

ranks) is helpful to keep in mind as we study Thomas Stone’s style of life at 

Haberdeventure, on his travels, and in Annapolis. Maryland’s “elite” in the 1760s and 

1770s were men of modest fortunes, compared to elite planters in Virginia, South Carolina, 

and sugar colonies like Jamaica. Stone was able to distinguish himself through his inherited 

advantages, such as his family’s wealth, prominence, and connections in the Potomac 

Valley region, as well as through his education, talents, pursuit of higher office, and 

self-discipline. However, he also faced challenges, such as competition from other ambitious lawyers eager to attract business. A reluctance to engage in popular politics made his 

reliance on building his credit and reputation with peers all that more important to gain 

office. Time away from his profession to serve in government and recurring bouts of ill 

health, he believed, threatened his ability to provide his family with what Burnard calls a 

13 Donnell MacClure Owings, His Lordship’s Patronage: Offices of Profit in Colonial Maryland (Baltimore: 

Maryland Historical Society, 1953); Lee, “In Search of Thomas Stone,” 295, 297–98; “William Stone” and 

“Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer,” in Papenfuse, BDML, 2:485, 788. The children of David Stone’s principal heir, 

Samuel Stone, paid taxes on 583 acres of Poynton Manor for the 1783 tax assessment. David Stone’s plantation 

may have been as large as 967 acres, though, because Samuel’s two sons divided this amount between them 

(Charles County Land Records D#4:310, MSA).

14 Burnard, Creole Gentlemen, 9–12.
26

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

“comfortable sufficiency.” Moreover, the imperial crisis between the colonies and Great 

Britain made Maryland’s future uncertain. We can look to the material culture of 

Haberdeventure as evidence of Stone’s responses to these challenges.15

The Built Landscape at Haberdeventure: 

Stone Family Dwelling House and Garden

This section discusses the processional landscape at Haberdeventure and draws comparisons with peer properties within a ten-mile radius before moving the focus of discussion to 

the town of Port Tobacco. Haberdeventure is one of “forty or so” eighteenth-century 

dwellings that survive in Charles County today. Architectural histories of the colonial 

Chesapeake have identified a number of ways in which the landscape reflected the social 

order. Planters’ families expressed their elevated social position, for instance, by locating 

the mansion house on high ground, using brick as construction material, limiting access to 

interior spaces at the planter’s house, cultivating formal gardens, and providing scant 

resources for slave housing.16

Figure 4. Smallwood’s Retreat in ruins, Charles County, circa 1930s. Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South.

15 Burnard, Creole Gentlemen, 27 (quote). Thomas Stone did not attend the 1787 legislative session that passed 

the bankruptcy act (Session Laws of April-May 1787, Chapter 34, “An Act Respecting Insolvent Debtors”). 

16 J. Richard Rivoire, Homeplaces: Traditional Domestic Architecture of Charles County, Maryland (La Plata, 

MD: Southern Maryland Studies Center, Charles County Community College, 1990), 6.
27

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

What clues does Haberdeventure provide to the Stone family’s group identity? 

What do the specific features of Haberdeventure’s architecture and landscape tell us about 

how Thomas Stone and his family saw themselves in relationship to others in Charles 

County and beyond? In what ways did the property promote ties between Thomas Stone, 

his wife, and other residents and the community around it? What was the conversation 

between Haberdeventure and similar properties within a ten-mile radius?

Relative Acreage 

Land ownership had a number of social and political meanings attached to it and was the 

sine qua non of political authority in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. But 

Marylanders up and down the social scale (except the very poor, including the enslaved) 

rented land and buildings on town lots. Tenants could live quite well. Because inhabitants, 

including Thomas Stone, rented as well as purchased land, some allowance should be made 

for including rented parcels in assessing how much land any one person or household 

controlled.17

Thomas Stone’s initial purchase of 442 acres of Haberdeventure and Hanson’s 

Plains Enlarged in 1770 immediately jettisoned him within striking distance of the 500 

acres that distinguished a “large” planter in Stone’s home county at the time. Other “seats” 

of similar acreage documented in the 1782 and 1783 tax assessments include Rose Hill next 

door, which sat on a parcel of 412 acres, Strawberry Hill (now La Grange), which was made 

up of three parcels totaling 495 acres, Goodrick’s Rest (later the Hermitage) with 350 acres, 

and Rich Hill, the dwelling plantation of Stone’s father-in-law, which had 566 acres. 

Samuel Stone’s plantation—the plantation that Thomas Stone grew up on and his eldest 

half-brother inherited—was a minimum of 583 acres.18

Many owners of these large estates owned or rented additional land in the county 

as well. Charles Goodrick, for example, a planter with a 350-acre home plantation, owned 

another 900 acres in Charles County in 1782. With a total of 1,268 acres, Goodrick had 

more than enough land to employ the thirteen enslaved people in his possession and may 

17 More than half of the free population in the colonial Chesapeake on the eve of the American Revolution were 

tenants. Though standards of living rose during the eighteenth century for all wealth levels, except among the 

enslaved who “legally owned no property,” the prospect of owning virgin land in the west fueled white outmigration from Southern Maryland after the war (Philip D. Morgan, “The Poor: Slaves in Early America,” in Slavery 

in the Development of the Americas, eds. David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth Lee Solokoff (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 2004), 288–323 (quote 288); Steven Sarson, “Landlessness and Tenancy in Early 

National Prince George’s County, Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 57, no. 3 (July 2000): 

569–98; Lee, Price of Nationhood). On tenants, see also Chapter 4.

18 Maryland tax assessments of 1782 and 1783, MSA. In her study of Charles County, Jean B. Lee determined 

that “as of 1774,” fifty acres was the minimum required for a “viable plantation.” Plantations of 100 acres or less 

would be considered small, and plantations of 101 to 500 acres would be “middling.” Most landholders (75 

percent) had more than 100 acres. Lee points out that the biggest landholders in Charles County were the Jesuits 

at St. Thomas Manor with 5,200 acres (Price of Nationhood, 23–24). 
28

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

have rented some out. (Goodrick had sold 120 acres called Addition to May Day to Thomas 

Stone during the war.) Thomas’s father, David Stone, in contrast, may have rented land to 

support the fifty-two enslaved people he held in bondage in 1774. Based on records from 

after his death, David Stone held about six hundred acres of Poynton Manor, which was 

not sufficient to support all fifty-two bondspeople plus his own large family. By one estimation, a plantation in the Chesapeake needed to be two thousand acres to support thirty 

bondspeople. Virginia tobacco growers by mid-century generally observed a ratio of 

sixty-five acres to one laborer. Planters had to be wary of overcropping their land. 

According to a study of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where mixed tobacco and grain farming 

was widely practiced by mid-century, “a land to labor ratio of forty to one still allowed a 

planter to grow both grains and tobacco but...careful planning was required” to keep a 

portion of the land in fallow.19

By the end of his life, Thomas Stone owned enough land to create a 510-acre parcel 

apart from Haberdeventure, named Plenty, which would have been enough to support an 

heir if needed. (As it happened, Stone’s daughter Margaret inherited the land.) The advantages of accumulating one thousand acres for a home plantation, as Stone did, for longterm estate management are discussed in Chapter 4. In Charles County, ownership of one 

thousand acres put him in the top 10 percent of landholders.20

19 On land-to-labor ratios, see Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 372, 613–14. See Appendix 5 for a 

list of names and ages of the enslaved in David Stone’s 1774 probate inventory, Prerogative Court, Inventories, 

Liber 117, ff. 91–9, MSA. Research in colonial land records may yield a more accurate picture of David Stone’s 

landholdings. David’s oldest son, Samuel Stone, inherited David’s home plantation at Poynton Manor in 1773 

and died five years later. Samuel’s heirs paid a state tax assessment on 583 acres in 1783. By 1788, a deed for the 

division of the plantation’s land between two of Samuel’s sons recorded a slightly larger size of 645 acres (Walter 

Hanson Stone to David Stone, 1788, Charles County Land Records, D#4:310, MSA). See Chapter 2 for more 

discussion about inheritance in the Stone family.

20 Lee, Price of Nationhood, 23. In 1787 Stone obtained a patent for Plenty as well as a patent for 1,077 acres he 

called Haberdeventure.
29

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

1 Haberdeventure (1077 acres, patented in 1787), made up of the following tracts:

a. Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains Enlarged

b. Hanson’s Plains 

c. Part of Hansonton 

d. Bridget’s Delight 

e. Simpson’s Delight 

f. Part of St. Nicholas 

g. Part of Betty’s Delight and Prior’s Beginning

2 Plenty (510 acres, patented 1787), made up of the following tracts:

h. Part of Chandlers Hills

i. Welcome

3 Land purchased from Thomas Hopewell (1784)

j. Mobberly

k. Hopewell’s Discovery

l. Shaw’s Trouble

m. Shaw’s Barrons

4 Part of St. Nicholas, exchanged by Thomas Stone in 1783 for a part of St. Nicholas lying on the west side 

of Port Tobacco-Piscataway Road

5 Port Tobacco Great Mill (20 acres with mill seat, leased 1777, purchased 1782)

6 Mobberly Enlarged (285 acres, patented by Thomas Stone’s heirs in 1806)

7 Addition to May Day Enlarged (196 acres, patented by Thomas Stone’s heirs in 1794)

n. Addition to May Day

8 Distrest Corrected (60 acres, patented by Thomas Stone’s heirs in 1794)

o. Distrest 

9 Rose Hill, Gustavus Richard Brown’s residence (447 acres, patented 1789)

Figure 5. Map of Charles County land owned by Thomas Stone and his heirs, 1770–1806. 

Data supplied by Donald E. Zimmer. Drawn by M. Roy Cartography. See Appendix 20 for documentation.
30

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Location

Missing from the historical record are any explanations for the choice by Thomas Stone 

and his family to establish a home plantation just north of Port Tobacco on upland soil. 

Among the disadvantages of the site on which Thomas Stone erected his home plantation 

were the inferior quality of the soil for raising tobacco and the gullies and ravines that 

made the land prone to erosion. The soil’s high water table also posed a problem for use of 

the mansion house; archaeologists found evidence of repeated flooding in the cellar of the 

main block. Thomas Stone solved the problem of poor-quality soil by acquiring more 

arable land just half a mile further east, on the east side of Port Tobacco Creek (see Figure 

5). Notably, Thomas Stone chose not to establish his home plantation along the Potomac 

River, where land was highly prized for its level surface (which eased plowing) and access 

to water transportation. Stone had other priorities.21

Previous studies of Haberdeventure highlight the plantation’s access to existing 

road networks and its proximity to Port Tobacco, where the county courthouse stood. Two 

miles from town, the plantation sat at the intersection of two principal roads. Port 

Tobacco-Piscataway Road, now Rose Hill Road, survives to the present day and runs 

north-south along Haberdeventure’s eastern boundary. “Among the most heavily trafficked of all of Charles County’s public thoroughfares” when Thomas Stone built his home, 

the road led to points north, including Annapolis, Baltimore, and Philadelphia (see Figure 

6). Port Tobacco-Mattawoman Road (later called Glymont Road before falling into disuse) 

had a northeast-southwest course across Haberdeventure’s northern reaches.

21 Charles D. Cheek, Jeanne A. Ward, and Joseph Balicki for John Milner Assoc., “Archaeological Studies of the 

Garden and House at the Thomas Stone National Historic Site (18CH331), Charles County, Maryland,” 1992; 

and Teresa S. Moyer, Center for Heritage Resource Studies, University of Maryland, “Thomas Stone National 

Historic Site: Archaeological Overview and Assessment” (2007), 17. See Chapter 4 for a longer discussion of the 

soil and geography. John Hoskins Stone concentrated his landownership in Durham Parish (1783 tax list, MSA). 
31

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Figure 6. Detail of “The State of Maryland,” showing Port Tobacco-Piscataway Road. Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1795. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
32

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Figure 7. Detail, “Map of the State of Maryland,” by Fielding Lucas Jr. and John Warr. Baltimore, 1841. 

Arrow indicates the approximate location of Haberdeventure, at the intersection of Port Tobacco-Piscataway Road, 

which ran north-south, and Port Tobacco-Mattawoman Road, which ran northeast-southwest. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
33

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Figure 8. Detail of “Map of Maryland Showing Principal Buildings, Roads, Cities, and Towns, Created or Existing 

Prior to 1794...,” by H. Brooks Price, 1933. This map is helpful for showing the locations of major ferry crossings and 

properties, including Mount Vernon and Gunston Hall in Virginia, Marshall Hall (opposite Mount Vernon), 

and Araby (south and east of Gunston Hall). 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Of the two roads that intersect at Haberdeventure’s northeast section, the significance of Port Tobacco-Mattawoman Road for Haberdeventure is the more difficult to 

determine. Its terminus was Mattawoman Creek, which formed the southern boundary of 

the Piscataway Indian Reservation created by the Maryland provincial government in the 

mid-seventeenth century. By 1700 the Piscataway moved further up the Potomac River, and 

the area formally opened for European settlement. Two prominent planters who lived on 

Mattawoman Creek during Thomas Stone’s lifetime included William Eilbeck (d. 1765), 

builder of a house now known as Araby and whose daughter Ann married George Mason 

IV of Virginia, and William Smallwood (d. 1792), a Revolutionary War general and governor of Maryland, who lived at the site presently called Smallwood’s Retreat. Both men built 

one-and-a-half-story brick houses by the 1760s. Eilbeck’s house had a gambrel roof and 
34

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

was similar to Haberdeventure in its outward appearance (prior to expansion in the nineteenth century). Inside, the house had a four-room plan, with direct access into a large 

front room with floor-to-ceiling paneling and a rear stair hall. Smallwood’s house was in 

very poor condition prior to being restored in the 1950s, but its highly decorated exterior 

remains evident with glazed bricks, segmental arches over window and door openings, a 

double molded water table, and a visible stone foundation.22

Figure 9. Smallwood’s Retreat, Charles County, circa 1898. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Building Survey, National Park Service. 

Photo date supplied from Maryland Historical Trust Inventory Form for State Historic Sites Survey for Smallwood’s Retreat, CH-12.

North of Mattawoman Creek along the Potomac River lay Marshall Hall, where a 

ferry ran to Mount Vernon Neck in Fairfax County, Virginia. Advertised in a Maryland 

newspaper as a convenience for “travelers going from the lower parts of Maryland to the 

upper parts,” this ferry also served local traffic between Virginia and Charles County, 

Maryland. George Washington, for instance, used the ferry to travel to eastern Virginia. 

Washington in his diaries recorded stopping in Port Tobacco four times—and at Araby 

once—in the 1760s and 1770s while traveling between Mount Vernon and Virginia’s 

colonial capital, Williamsburg. 

22 Wearmouth 1988 HRS; 1996 CLR (quote, 11); Pamela M. Klinger, “Architecture of Araby, Charles County, 

Maryland,” Architecture in Virginia series, No. 127, School of Architecture, University of Virginia; National 

Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form for Araby, CH-11, National Park Service, 1973; 

Maryland Historical Trust Inventory Form for State Historic Sites Survey, Smallwood’s Retreat, CH-12, 2003. 

Both Eilbeck and Smallwood referred to their plantations as “Mattawoman” in their lifetimes (Klinger, 

“Architecture of Araby,” 1; MHT inventory form for Smallwood’s Retreat). The website Probing the Past: 

Virginia and Maryland Probate Inventories, 1740–1810, provides a transcription of William Eilbeck’s probate 

inventory (https://chnm.gmu.edu/probateinventory/).
35

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Figure 10. Marshall Hall, Charles County. Northwest elevation drawing and first floor plan, drawn by Paul D. Dolinsky 

and William Neudorfer, respectively, 1983. Around 1760, the Marshall family enlarged a circa-1725 five-bay, 

one-and-a-half-story brick house by adding an attached kitchen with living quarters upstairs (at left in top drawing). 

The original house had direct entry into the largest room and a rear stair hall. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Building Survey, National Park Service. 
36

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

The diaries’ editors explain, Washington “could cut across Charles County, past 

Port Tobacco, and recross the Potomac [at Lower Cedar Point], entering Virginia in the 

Chotank area of King George County. In this way he saved himself from traveling the lower 

‘Potomac path’ on the Virginia side of the Potomac, which crossed a number of swamps 

and small streams” that swelled after “hard rains.” Though we don’t know which particular 

roads Washington favored between Marshall Hall and Port Tobacco, Haberdeventure, at 

the intersection of two roads, was well-situated to intercept Virginians—and their legal 

business—as they went through Charles County between river crossings.23

Thomas Stone must have relished attracting clients from Virginia, the wealthiest 

colony in British North America. Marylanders provided the bulk of his legal business, 

though, and the location of Stone’s house north of Port Tobacco hints at his aspirations to 

expand his business northward. Stone had important clients with property in Prince 

George’s County. Merchant-planter Stephen West, for instance, engaged Thomas Stone’s 

services as a lawyer and even witnessed Stone sign his will. Also, horse races and plays in 

Prince George’s county seat, Upper Marlborough, drew residents from Charles County. As 

Prince George’s population grew, road networks grew denser. To get to Annapolis, 

23 Edith Moore Sprouse, Along the Potomac River: Extracts from the Maryland Gazette, 1728–1799 

(Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2001), 31–32 (quote), 52. George Washington recorded his stops in Port 

Tobacco in his diaries (The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, Diaries [Charlottesville: University of 

Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008], Vols. 1:269 [April 19, 1760], 3:29 [May 30, 1771], 3:165 [March 2, 1773], 3:166 

[March 16, 1773]). Quotation from ibid, 1:269n. One spring day in 1760, Washington had an unexpected delay in 

his journey: after leaving Mount Vernon at 9 o’clock and taking the ferry to Marshall Hall, at “abt. 11 [o’clock] I 

broke my [riding] Chair and had to Walk to Port Tobo. where I was detained the whole day getting my Chair 

mended—no Smith being with[in] 6 Miles” (1:269).
37

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Maryland’s legal and political center, from Haberdeventure, Stone on at least some occasions traveled over land through Piscataway, a mid-eighteenth-century tobacco-trading 

town, and Upper Marlborough.24

In testament to the importance of overland travel for the Stone family, Thomas 

Stone owned three costly riding vehicles at the time of his death, according to his probate 

inventory. The best vehicle was a chariot, “a light four-wheeled carriage with only back 

seats,” with or without a box upon which a coachman sat, valued at £100 with its harness. A 

chariot was large enough to carry a family, whereas the riding chair worth £45 and a phaeton with harness appraised at £40 were smaller vehicles for one or two passengers. The 

riding chair was likely a sulky, a two-wheeled carriage built for one rider and one horse, 

that Thomas asked his brother Walter to obtain in Philadelphia in 1782. A phaeton was a 

“light four-wheeled open carriage, usually drawn by a pair of horses, and having one or 

two seats facing forward.” A painting by George Stubbs from 1784 shows a phaeton and 

two horses (Figure 11). The only other objects at Haberdeventure that approached the 

values of these mobile status symbols were Thomas and Margaret Stone’s clothing, each 

assemblage worth £80 each, the best bed with its furniture, appraised at £30, and a clock 

rated at £25.25

24 Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 211–14 (including Map 13), 227 (Map 15), 341; 

William Craik to Walter Stone, May 12, 1783, Stone Family Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter LC), in 

which Craik mentioned meeting “most of my Port Tobacco” friends in Upper Marlborough who were attending 

“race & plays”; National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for Piscataway Village Historic District, 

PG84–023, 2011; “Stephen West” in Papenfuse, BDML, 2:878. Out of the 460 cases in which Thomas Stone was 

counsel that were recorded in the sampling of higher court records for this study, 100 cases were for clients from 

Prince George’s County, with the bulk of these being debt cases in 1786 (Appendix 19). Charles County clients 

were the second most numerous, comprising 68 cases. Richard K. Macmaster offers a short biography of Stephen 

West in “Georgetown and the Tobacco Trade, 1751–1783,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society,

Washington, DC, 66/68 (1966/1968): 10–12. English traveler Nicholas Cresswell in 1774 sought to go by water 

from Nanjemoy to Alexandria, but he was stuck for over a week waiting for favorable weather. Growing 

impatient, he decided to abandon his plans and travel overland to Annapolis via Port Tobacco, Piscataway, and 

Marlboro. Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown and others accompanied him on his way to Annapolis (Harold B. Gill Jr. 

and George M. Curtis III, eds., A Man Apart: The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1781 [Lanham, MD: 

Lexington Books, 2009], entries for May 19 through June 4, 1774). For evidence of traveling between 

Haberdeventure and Annapolis by road, see Thomas Stone’s letters to William Smallwood of January 29, 1782 

(in Thomas Balch, ed., Papers Relating Chiefly to the Maryland Line during the Revolution (Philadelphia, 1857), 

168–70, reproduced in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources”), and to Walter 

Stone on December 3 and 9, 1783 (The Rosenbach, Philadelphia, and Columbia University Rare Book and 

Manuscript Library, New York, respectively). Writing to Gov. William Paca on March 18, 1784, Stone shared his 

plans to stop at Upper Marlborough, where he had legal cases pending with “a great amount of...property at 

stake,” on his way to Annapolis (Haverford College Library, misdated May 10, 1786, in Jefferson, “Thomas 

Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources”). Comments about traveling by water seem to be absent in 

Thomas Stone’s surviving letters, though he must have taken passage on water vessels to get to some destinations, such as George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Maryland’s General Court of the Eastern Shore at Easton, 

and Philadelphia. 

25 Appendix 4, Thomas Stone’s probate inventories; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, July 16, 1782, Stone Family 

Papers, LC; “chariot,” “sulky,” and “phaeton,” Oxford English Dictionary Online. The carriages would have 

stood out as valuable objects in Annapolis as well. Objects at the Stones’ Annapolis house valued at £25 or above 

were a dozen “new mahogany chairs” (£24.10.0), two portrait pictures (£45), silver (£51), and a pipe of Madeira 

wine (£90). The library at the Annapolis house eclipsed them all with a value of £569.
38

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Figure 11. George Stubbs, “Phaeton with a Pair of Cream Ponies and a Stable-Lad,” between 1780 and 1784. 

Beeswax and oil on panel. 

Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Thomas Stone appears to have purchased at least two of the three carriages that he 

owned at the end of his life from a well-known coach-making family in Philadelphia. Stone 

commissioned both a chariot in 1783 and a phaeton at an earlier date from a man he 

referred to as “Bringhirst.” This was either John Bringhurst, coachmaker of Germantown 

on the outskirts of Philadelphia, from whom George Washington in 1780 had ordered “a 

genteel plain Chariot with neat Harness for four horses to go with two postilions,” or his 

son George Bringhurst, a carriagemaker in Philadelphia. Stone, in instructions sent to his 

brother Walter to convey to Bringhurst, asked for a chariot that was moderately fashionable. “I don’t want it very high or very large,” adding, “You know Mrs Stone is not very tall 

even with a high headdress & therefore don’t require such a lofty top to her Carriage but I 

would incline it should not be quite so high as they are now made & yet rather higher than 

the former fashion.” Initially Stone asked for the chariot to be painted “nearly the Color of 

my Phaeton if [Bringhurst] can [remember it,] a kind of light green with a small mixture of 

blue.” In a subsequent letter, Stone relinquished this specific color request in favor of 

“whatever Colour is most fashionable and looks the best,” though the finished product was 

not to be a “gaudy shewy thing that will be stared at as a proof of the Owner’s Vanity & 

folly.” In a more practical vein, Stone expressed his desire for a harness for postilions, “for 

tho Boxes may be the Taste yet a Man who has no Driver that he chuses to trust on a Box 
39

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

must be content to adopt the other Mode which is more safe.” A postilion rode alongside a 

carriage whereas a coachman sat on a box—a precarious position on rough roads outside 

of cities.26

Figure 12. Thomas Rowlandson, “An English Postilion,” circa 1785. 

Watercolor, with pen, in brown ink, and graphite on paper. 

Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

26 George Washington to John Mitchell, March 20, 1780, The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, 

Revolutionary War Series (University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008), 25:103; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, 

April 8, 1783, Stone Family Papers, LC, transcription in Kate Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology From 

Select Primary Sources,” National Park Service, 2004; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 26, 1783, Gratz 

Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, transcription in ibid. John Mitchell was prepared to pay John 

Bringhurst £210.0.6 in 1780 for George Washington’s chariot (Mitchell to George Washington, May 19, 1780, 

Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, Revolutionary War Series, 26:93). In further evidence of John 

Bringhurst’s reputation as a “trusty” coachmaker, Abigail and John Adams of Massachusetts purchased a carriage 

from the maker in 1792, and Abigail called it “excellent” (Abigail Adams to John Adams, January 5, 1794, and 

Abigail Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, [December] 13, 1800, The Adams Papers Digital Edition, ed. Sara 

Martin [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008–21], 10:8, 14:479 [quote]). The younger 

Bringhurst, George, was active as a coachmaker in Philadelphia by 1782 (Pennsylvania Gazette [Philadelphia], 

April 17, 1782). On the relative safety of postilions over a coachman on a box, see Thomas Jefferson to George 

Washington, March 27, 1791, 19:625, and George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, April 1, 1791, 20:93, Papers 

of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, eds. James P. McClure and J. Jefferson Looney (Charlottesville: University 

of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008–20). 
40

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Figure 13. Matthew Darly, “The Preposterous Head Dress, or the Feathered Lady,” London, 1776. Engraved print. 

Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

John Bringhurst of Germantown in particular was a trusted source of quality and 

fashion, but Stone had concerns about getting the moral tone just right. For his principal 

carriage, the chariot, Stone did not want a “gaudy shewy thing,” shunning the appearance 

of luxury. Furthermore, after bequeathing the chariot to his elder daughter, Margaret, 

Stone misgave his choice. In a codicil, Stone granted his executors the choice to delay 
41

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Margaret’s taking possession of the carriage or to sell the carriage and horses for cash. 

Stone, or someone close to him, must have expressed concern about the impropriety of his 

elder daughter, who was sixteen at the time, being seen in the company of others. Among 

middle-class circles, a woman’s chastity was often equated with her virtue. Apparently 

traveling in a riding chair, alone, did not pose a problem for unmarried or single women, as 

Stone did not qualify his bequest of the riding chair and a “good chair horse” to his 

younger daughter, Mildred. Stone’s wife and daughters shared with Thomas the use of the 

vehicles for travel, to visit neighbors and kin, and to reach towns, cities, and spas.27

Establishing a residence near Port Tobacco gave Thomas Stone and his wife access 

to critical transportation and communication networks in Charles County by both land 

and water. Port Tobacco’s prominence as a commercial center along the Potomac River in 

the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s encouraged other professionals to establish homes here. 

Physicians based in Port Tobacco, for example, visited patients on both sides of the 

Potomac River. The development of plantations along Mattawoman Creek, on land formerly reserved for the Piscataway Indians, and the presence of wealthy clients in Prince 

George’s County may have also influenced the Stones’ choice to establish a seat just to the 

north of Port Tobacco.28

The Approach

Stone’s dwelling house at Haberdeventure sits on relatively high ground, at 150 feet above 

sea level. The house is set back from the main thoroughfare, Port Tobacco-Piscataway Road 

(now Rose Hill Road), by over one thousand feet in such a way as to surveil the approach of 

visitors from the northeast and southeast. The remnants of a path leading from the intersection of Port Tobacco-Piscataway Road and Port Tobacco-Mattawoman Road (later 

Glymont Road) toward the house suggest the existence, in the later eighteenth century, of a 

formal approach from this direction that led across Hanson’s Plains to the north side of the 

main block, where it intersected with the surviving path in the southerly direction leading 

27 Will of Thomas Stone, Appendix 3; Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family 

in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 92–94; Ruth H. Bloch, “The Gendered 

Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13 (Autumn 1987): 37–58; Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s 

Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 

235.

28 Examples of Port Tobacco-based physicians crossing the Potomac include Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown’s 

smallpox inoculation hospital on the Virginia side of the Potomac in 1776, and Dr. James Craik’s inoculation of 

George Mason, enslaved people held in bondage by George Washington, and others in the Fredericksburg, 

Virginia, area in 1777 (J. M. Toner, “A Sketch of the Life of Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown,” Sons of the 

Revolution in State of Virginia Quarterly Magazine 2, no. 1 [January 1923]: 18–19, citing an advertisement in the 

Virginia Gazette [Williamsburg], June 28, 1776; James Craik to George Washington, May 13, 1777, Papers of 

George Washington Digital Edition, Revolutionary War Series, 9:409). Craik, whose most famous patient was 

George Washington, moved to Alexandria, Virginia, in 1786 (Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, 

Diaries, 5:65).
42

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

to Port Tobacco-Piscataway Road. Verification of the drive on the north side of the house, 

including its precise shape, awaits archaeology. Likely the interior of the arc or triangle that 

the formal drive formed on the north side of the house was at least partially cleared for 

planting and for visibility.29

On the more private south-facing side of the house, a formal, terraced garden takes 

advantage of the sloping terrain where a ravine leads down to Hoghole Run. Another 

ravine lies five hundred feet west of the house, forming a natural barrier between the Stone 

family residence and a mid-nineteenth- and twentieth-century tenant house that may or 

may not be in the vicinity of former enslaved housing. The 1783 tax list recorded the 

presence of nine outbuildings at Haberdeventure, in addition to the kitchen, but did not 

name their function. While the appearance and arrangement of these outbuildings on the 

landscape remain unknown, the sheer quantity of dependent buildings communicated 

wealth and high social status.

29 CLR (1996), pp. 64–70, esp. Figure 49 and the discussion of “drive D.” John Wearmouth describes Hanson’s 

Plains as the “productive agricultural heart” of Haberdeventure, which meant that the formal drive ran through a 

showcase feature of the plantation (1988 HRS, part 2, p. 20). See the map of Thomas Stone’s landholdings in 

Figure 5 for the location of Hanson’s Plains.
43

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Figure 14. Topographical map of Habre de Venture, 1985. Some of the structures shown here have since been removed. 

US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Land Resources Division, Drawing 477. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Despite a lack of information on the spatial arrangement of the nine outbuildings 

relative to the main house, we can assume that the Stone family residence occupied the 

most prominent position on the landscape. The main house stands on the highest ground 

in its immediate vicinity, drawing on a centuries-old Western tradition of erecting power 

houses above other residences to assert authority and to take command of the view. “The 
44

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

great planter intended that his landscape be hierarchical, leading to himself at the center.” 

Communication between the house and roads drew the surrounding community into its 

sphere of influence.30

High-status eighteenth-century houses in the vicinity of Haberdeventure sit on 

higher ground in a variety of settings. An example of a house in an agricultural setting is 

Locust Grove (formerly Beech Neck), a little over a mile northeast of Haberdeventure; 

“facing directly south from an elevated situation, the house commands a fine view of the 

Port Tobacco Valley and surrounding farmlands.” Rose Hill and La Grange (formerly 

Strawberry Hill) occupy prominent locations closer to Port Tobacco, overlooking major 

road arteries. Other houses were oriented toward waterways. Maxwell Hall, built by a 

merchant at Benedict, overlooks the Patuxent River. Glazed brick headers in the walls of 

Wicomico Fields, a house on the Potomac River, glisten in the sun to catch the eye of ship 

passengers.31

Besides convention, another reason to situate Haberdeventure’s mansion house on 

higher ground was to take advantage of the hillside on the south side of the house for 

creating a terraced garden, a popular feature of eighteenth-century Chesapeake gentry 

houses. Today at Haberdeventure, three “falls” or terraces are visible. Through a trick of 

the eye, the terraces magnify the size of the mansion house, creating a visual cue to the 

owner’s elevated station. Terraces also had the benefit of mitigating erosion. “On uneven 

hillsides, terraces created flat areas for planting and helped control erosion,” observes 

garden historian Barbara Wells Sarudy. The earthworks made practical use of construction 

debris, too. “Pragmatic Chesapeake landowners often constructed their terraces when the 

dwelling house was newly built, so that the earth, clay, and rubbish that came out of the 

cellars and foundations could be used to shape the falls.” The cost of labor to create the 

series of falls, and then adorn them with ornamental and useful plants, put this garden 

30 Upton, “Black and White Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” 362. “Refinement held out the hope of 

elevation from ordinary existence into an exalted society of superior beings” (Bushman, Refinement of America, 

xix). 

31 National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form for Locust Grove, CH-185, National Park 

Service, by J. Richard Rivoire, 1977 (quote, 2). On Maxwell Hall and Wicomico Fields see Rivoire, Homeplaces,

68, 86. Variations on the planter-house-on-a-hilltop ideal can be found throughout the greater Port Tobacco area. 

The view from St. Thomas’s manor house overlooking Port Tobacco Creek has elicited rapture for centuries, and 

Chandler’s Hope, a home of the Neale family in the eighteenth century, offers a fantastic view of the shipping 

lane in and out of Port Tobacco.
45

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

feature out of reach of most local residents. Likely created and maintained with enslaved 

labor, the terraced garden was thus a way to communicate the owning family’s ability to 

summon nonessential resources. 32

Brick as Construction Material

By building a brick house, Thomas Stone and his family put themselves in exclusive company in Charles County. Figures for the frequency of all-brick houses in later-eighteenth-century Charles County are not available, but a study of the 1798 Direct Tax list for 

neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland, determined that only ten percent of 

houses in that area were built of brick. Throughout the eighteenth-century Chesapeake, 

most domestic structures were wooden and had brick or wooden chimneys. In 1759, an 

English Jesuit who had been based in St. Mary’s County for two years observed, “The 

buildings in this country are very poor and insignificant, all only one storey, commonly all 

the building made of wood plastered within,—a brick chimney in the better houses. You 

may find a brick house here and there.... The poorer people have nothing but a few boards 

nailed together, without plastering, or any brick about it. Very few houses have glass 

windows.”

Tobacco planters with limited access to labor preferred to invest their time and 

resources in planting than improved housing. As consumer goods became cheaper and 

more available in the mid- to late-eighteenth century, households with even scant wealth 

purchased comforts for their modest houses, such as a feather bed. Meanwhile, the fabric 

32 Barbara Wells Sarudy, Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700–1805 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 

University Press, 1998) 24–32, 51 (quote). Neighboring Rose Hill also has a terraced garden with three falls (J. 

M. Toner, “Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown,” Sons of the Revolution in the State of Virginia Quarterly Magazine, 

2:1 [January 1923]: 21–22). Jack Gary and Eric Proebsting discuss how enslaved laborers in Bedford County, 

Virginia, shaped an ornamental landscape according to a slaveholder’s aesthetic vision in “The Multiple 

Landscapes of Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest,” Historical Archaeology 50, no. 1 (2016): 61–79. Photographs 

of Haberdeventure from the first half of the twentieth century show evidence of a kitchen garden off the east 

wing, such as a paled fence to keep out animals and plants in the ground protected by smaller fencing; see 

Figures 16 and 17.
46

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

of the houses they occupied might remain unimproved. An example is the “old and yet 

unfinished” brick house that stood at Chandlers Hills when Thomas Stone purchased the 

property.33

Figure 15. Haberdeventure’s north front, 1936. Photo by E. H. Pickering. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Building Survey, National Park Service.

33 Carl R. Lounsbury, “Brickwork” in The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial 

Williamsburg, eds. Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 

256; letter by Joseph Mosley, Newtown, St. Mary’s County, to “his sister,” September 1, 1759, in Edward Davitt, 

S.J., ed., “Letter of Father Joseph Mosley, S.J., 1757–1806,” Woodstock Letters, 35:1 (1906): 42 (quote); Edward 

A. Chappell, “Housing a Nation: The Transformation of Living Standards in Early America,” and Lois G. Carr 

and Lorena S. Walsh, “Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake,” both in Of 

Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter 

J. Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 59–232, esp. 117; 1783 tax assessment for 

Chandlers Hills (Appendix 7). See also Lindsay Bloch and Anna S. Agbe-Davies, “‘With Sundry Other Sorts of 

Small Ware Too Tedious to Mention’: Petty Consumerism on US Plantations,” in Material Worlds: Archaeology,

Consumption, and the Road to Modernity, ed. Barbara Heath (New York: Routledge, 2017), 119–40. Brick 

became a more common construction material in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia in the nineteenth century 

(Lounsbury, “Brickwork,” 258). 
47

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Figure 16. View of the south facade of Haberdeventure, showing the east wing at the far right, 1936–37. 

Photo by Frances Benjamin Johnston. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South. 

Figure 17. Earliest known photograph of the east wing and hyphen at Haberdeventure, circa 1900, 

by William Alexander Miller. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, call number Lot 10451.
48

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

The current east wing of Haberdeventure, which does not match the dimensions of 

the eighteenth-century foundation beneath it, happens to be a good example of a frame 

structure that could have been used as a residence by persons of as high a rank as the 

Stones. It is also a good candidate for a late-eighteenth-century tenant house. Physical 

evidence suggests that this east wing may have been constructed as early as the eighteenth 

century but the building stood in a different location (perhaps in close proximity) before 

being moved to its current position. The east wing is one-and-a-half stories with a gambrel 

roof. Among its better finishes are the external brick chimney, sawn weatherboards (as 

opposed to riven clapboards or logs), and glazed windows. Little of the original building 

fabric survives except in the upper story and roof. Nonetheless, architectural historian J. 

Richard Rivoire found the structure comparable to the mid-eighteenth-century core of 

Locust Grove (formerly Beech Neck) in terms of size and exterior appearance, lending 

support to the hypothesis that the east wing was built for a high-status occupant. 

Haberdeventure’s current east wing has roughly 255 square feet of space on its first floor 

with additional living space above stairs; Locust Grove, in its first phase, had 225 square 

feet of space on its principal floor, plus a cellar below and a room above. (Haberdeventure’s 

main block is four times this size, with 1080 square feet of space on its first floor.) Both the 

east wing building and Locust Grove’s core sported gambrel roofs and external chimneys.34

Brick was an expensive construction material because of the time and labor 

involved in making and laying it. In Charles County, some wealthier households, instead of 

building entirely in brick, erected large and sophisticated brick chimneys. Maxwell Hall 

near Benedict on the Patuxent River, for example, has two “massive” brick chimneys 

flanking a one-and-a-half-story frame house with a gambrel roof (Figures 18 and 19). 

Erected around the same time as Haberdeventure (on land purchased in 1768), the house 

served as a center of Western Shore operations for the native-born merchant-planter 

George Maxwell. The intended audience may have included the tobacco growers and 

buyers who came to Benedict’s tobacco inspection warehouse, which sat on Maxwell’s 

land. Upon his death in 1777, Maxwell’s wealth in personal property exceeded Thomas 

Stone’s. The merchant-planter held seventeen people in chattel slavery in Charles County 

plus another thirty-five enslaved individuals on the Eastern Shore. Port Tobacco merchant 

Thomas How Ridgate, in a display of postwar commercial confidence, constructed a frame 

34 J. Richard Rivoire, “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings” (1993), 61; James Thomas Wollon, 

“Historic Structures Report,” 1987; Chappell, “Housing a Nation,” 180–82; National Register of Historic Places 

Inventory Nomination Form for Locust Grove. As noted in the Introduction, archaeology in 1986 found three 

phases of construction of the east wing’s foundation. An original brick foundation likely dates to the eighteenth 

century. It lies underneath the secondary foundation that supports the current building. Archaeologists postulated 

that the secondary foundation was built between 1864 and 1901 and modified in the early twentieth century. 

Margaret Graham Stone’s ownership of Haberdeventure from 1873 to 1913 falls within these last two phases; her 

interest in erecting a replacement building is worth investigating. The absence of an east wing in an engraving 

published in 1861 (Figure 25) might be explained by the disappearance of the original eighteenth-century east 

wing or its poor repair by that date.
49

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

house-and-store known as “Chimney House,” with an impressive double chimney at one 

end (Figure 28). An archway over the cellar entrance and four windows punctuate the mass 

and highlight its scale.35

Figures 18 and 19. Two views of Maxwell Hall, Charles County. (top) North elevation. 

(bottom) Perspective view from the southeast. Photos by Renee Beiretz, 2009. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Building Survey, National Park Service. 

35 Lounsbury, “Brickwork”; Rivoire, Homeplaces; “George Maxwell (1725–77),” Early Colonial Settlers of 

Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us; Archives of 

Maryland, 50:318 and 58:449; National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form for Maxwell 

Hall, CH-176, 1973. Because of the expense of brick making, brick that was not uniform in appearance (called 

wasters) would have been used around the property, for instance to pave floors and paths, form terraces, and 

build garden walls (Lounsbury, “Brickwork,” 243; Sarudy, Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 51). 
50

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Brick gable ends on a frame house provided another alternative to all-brick construction at high-status houses. Haberdeventure’s neighbor Rose Hill, built by Margaret 

Stone’s brother Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown, exhibits this local variation on brickwork 

display (Figure 20). So too does another neighboring house, La Grange (formerly 

Strawberry Hill). According to a recent architectural analysis, the brick gable ends at La 

Grange are likely not original to Dr. James Craik’s construction but instead date to a 

remodeling in the nineteenth century.36

Figure 20. Rose Hill, Charles County, 1937. Photo by Thomas T. Waterman. 

Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown built the main block sometime after 1783. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Building Survey, National Park Service. 

By building a house entirely of brick, the Stone family made a claim to being as 

much a part of the established order as Anglican parish churches and courthouses, for 

which brick, which could withstand fire, was the preferred building material. But in colonial Maryland, some privately built structures outshined publicly built ones. Compare, for 

instance, the manor house at St. Thomas with the mid-century statehouse in Annapolis. 

The Jesuits at St. Thomas Manor occupied one of the most ambitious brick structures in 

Charles County, a two-story, seven-bay, double-pile Georgian edifice raised in 1741 (Figure 

21). The manor house rises a full two stories with a cellar service area beneath. Both 

36 Appendix I by William J. Graham in R. J. Webster, A. J. Flick, J. A. King, and S. M. Strickland, “In Search of 

Josiah Henson’s Birthplace: Archaeological Investigations at La Grange Near Port Tobacco, Maryland” (St. 

Mary’s City, MD: St. Mary’s College of Maryland, 2017), 119–26.
51

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

principal facades have projecting pedimented pavilions and a brick belt course between 

the first and second floors. Brick quoins at the corners and keystoned arches above the 

windows add to the building’s impressive appearance. Exterior woodwork was lost in a 

fire, but a pedimented architrave above the north door would have been consistent with the 

Georgian design. The manor house’s transatlantic design and impressive size were wellsuited to communicating the global scope of the Jesuit order. Meanwhile, Maryland’s 

Assembly sat in an aging brick courthouse in Annapolis that dated to the 1690s, when the 

colony’s population was smaller. In 1766, Thomas Jefferson opined that the courthouse, 

“judging from its form and appearance, was built in the year one.” Another traveler called 

Maryland’s statehouse “an emblem of public poverty” shortly before it was torn down in 

1769. In a society with weak public institutions, a substantial brick house asserted the 

authority of the owner and long-term investment in the community.37

Figure 21. Elevation drawing of the north facade of St. Thomas Manor, Charles County. “This rendering, 

not drawn to scale, shows the house as it is thought to have appeared” before a fire in 1866.

Courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, CH-6, National Park Service, 1988.

37 National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for St. Thomas Manor and St. Ignatius Roman 

Catholic Church, CH-6, National Park Service, 1988; Morris L. Radoff, The County Courthouses and Records of 

Maryland, Part One: The Courthouses (Annapolis, MD: The Hall of Records Commission, State of Maryland, 

1960), 13 (quote), 15 (quote), 69. Construction of the extant statehouse in Annapolis began in 1772. Family 

history and the history of slavery often highlight the relatively weak authority of church and state in the colonial 

Chesapeake, where structures of power favored private property owners and white male heads of household. See 

for example Carole Shammas, “Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective,” William 

and Mary Quarterly, 52, no. 1 (January 1995): 104–44, and Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture 

in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
52

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Brick was the material of choice for well-appointed buildings. In contrast to the 

Jesuit residence at St. Thomas Manor, however, Haberdeventure was a hybrid of local and 

metropolitan influences. As was often the case among high-status dwellings in Charles 

County in the mid-eighteenth century, Haberdeventure was one-and-one-half stories, not 

two, and a gambrel roof provided space in the upper story. (La Grange, built by Dr. James 

Craik about three miles east of Haberdeventure, shares with the St. Thomas manor house 

the rare distinction in Charles County of being conceived as a two-story house before the 

American Revolution.) Other examples of one-and-a-half-story houses with gambrel roofs 

include Maxwell Hall (as seen in Figures 18 and 19), Araby (formerly Mattawoman), and 

Stagg Hall, which will be discussed in the following section. All-brick construction lent 

Haberdeventure a distinctive appearance, but the main block’s overall shape gave the 

building a measure of resonance in the community. Other elements of the house, including 

its formal circulation plan, offer clues to how Thomas Stone and his wife positioned themselves in Charles County society.38

Formal Circulation Plan

Emulation of the British country gentry led the Chesapeake eighteenth-century gentry to 

construct houses and gardens that asserted their landed wealth and power. Chesapeake 

builders filtered imported designs, though, through regional building practices and preferences. Provincials overlooked variants from pattern books and paintings so long as the 

results added beauty to the scene and suited the client’s tastes and needs.39

Haberdeventure’s five-part plan and “naive” execution of curving hyphens, for 

example, echo pattern-book Palladian design but fall short of complete symmetry. Two 

wings, connected by hyphens, flank the center block of the mansion house at 

Haberdeventure, and these sit “on the arc of a large imaginary circle” (Figure 22). The arc is 

an original feature. The two hyphens are of approximately equal lengths, and probably the 

same height when first constructed, but were made of different materials. The west hyphen 

was constructed entirely in brick. The east hyphen, it has been suggested, was originally a 

wooden shed-like structure above the cellar entrance. The west wing was a kitchen in the 

eighteenth century and does not survive. Neoclassical design’s emphasis on symmetry, and 

the discovery in 1986 of a brick foundation beneath the east wing that might date to the 

38 Rivoire, Homeplaces, 11; Graham, Appendix I in Webster et al., “In Search of Josiah Henson’s Birthplace,” 

124.

39 Carl R. Lounsbury, “The Design Practice,” in The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial 

Williamsburg, eds. Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 

64–85. On the mediation of British fashions in eighteenth-century America, see also Kevin M. Sweeney, “High 

Style Vernacular: Lifestyles of the Colonial Elite” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth 

Century, eds. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 

1994), 1–58. 
53

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

eighteenth century, support the hypothesis that an east wing stood in Thomas Stone’s 

lifetime. According to architectural historian Henry Chandlee Forman, Haberdeventure’s 

multipart arrangement along an arc is “unique among the old houses of Maryland.” 

However, curving hyphens can be found on at least two Virginia properties, Col. John 

Tayloe’s Mount Airy in Richmond County (ca. 1760) and George Washington’s Mount 

Vernon in Fairfax County. At Mount Airy the hyphens, built in brick, are executed in such a 

way as to allow the two wings to be in parallel to one another. Mount Vernon’s curving 

colonnades, made of wood, also lead to two outbuildings that face each other. The arc at 

Haberdeventure is shallower; the wings are nestled closer to the center block. Nonetheless, 

the use of an arc at Haberdeventure can be interpreted as an effort to beautify and improve 

upon the more common arrangement of center block and wings along the same line as seen 

next door at Rose Hill (Figure 20).40

There is no evidence that Thomas Stone consulted a pattern book for the design of 

Haberdeventure. British architectural books circulated in the colonies, though, and one 

popular English guide to country estate planning, Isaac Ware’s A Complete Body of 

Architecture (London, 1768), offers some insight into the Stone family’s intention to impose 

order on the landscape and achieve harmony in the relationship of offices (outbuildings) to 

the main structure. In one imaginary scenario, Ware conjures up an image of a gentleman 

who, upon retiring from his work in London, wants to build a country seat. A professional, 

such as a lawyer, would fit Ware’s profile of a man whose “family is moderate,” meaning 

that his wealth is limited and not aristocratic. In Ware’s vision, the gentleman “intends to 

build for convenience more than magnificence, but he will have the house handsome 

though not pompous.” After deciding to build a house of modest proportions, the gentleman considers where to put the offices. “Beauty and use may be consulted together” with 

respect to the placement of outbuildings. “With a little more expence,” wings and passages 

off the center block would make “the whole regular and uniform.” Ware acknowledges the 

difficulty of designing a connection to the wings that is pleasing to the eye; the arc of a 

circle is preferred to right angles, but this is, Ware admits, difficult to put into practice.41

Besides being both beautiful and practical in its design, why did the arrangement of 

house and wings along an arc appeal to the Stone family? As a student of Haberdeventure’s 

architecture observed, the arc embraces the people who are on the south-facing, private 

side of the house. The shape reinforces socially exclusive access between the public-facing 

north side of the house and the more-private south side of the house. As noted previously, 

the formal approach to the house started from one of two roads, either Port 

40 Rivoire, “Summary of Additional Research Findings,” 72n19; Wollon, “Historic Structures Report,” 1 (quote), 

54; Henry Chandlee Forman, Early Manor and Plantation Houses of Maryland (Baltimore: Bodine & Associates, 

1982), 77 (quote). 

41 Lounsbury, “The Design Process,” 81; Isaac Ware, A Complete Body of Architecture (London, 1768, republished by Gregg International Publishers Ltd., 1971), book 3, chapter 22, pp. 405–6, and chapter 25, p. 409.
54

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Tobacco-Piscataway Road (now Rose Hill Road) or Port Tobacco-Mattawoman Road. 

Visitors who came by horse and carriage would dismount in front of the north side of the 

house, and the horses and carriages would be led to a stable area.42

Some number of visitors to the house would never progress further than the piazza, 

a covered porch on ground level running the length of the north side of the main block. 

Paved in brick with a roof above offering shade and shelter, the piazza at Haberdeventure 

functioned as a quasi-outdoor meeting space and would have been widely recognized as 

such. At regional courthouses, piazzas served as anterooms “in which clients and their 

counsel reviewed their cases and mapped out last-minute strategies.” In front of the courthouse doors, “a constantly changing crowd of people assembled upon the paving stones or 

brick tiles to await their business in court or to catch up on the latest news of neighbors and 

acquaintances and converse with local artisans seeking work.” Piazzas could also be found 

at taverns in this period. “Stretching across the front of buildings, these open porches were 

used as a sitting area, a place to gather and converse.” Merchant stores had piazzas to 

display goods and do business with customers. Haberdeventure’s piazza drew upon these 

regional conventions to function as a semipublic space where the planter and his wife 

dispensed hospitality.43

42 Wollon, “Historic Structures Report,” 2; “Cultural Landscape Report (1996),” 64–68.

43 Wollon, “Historic Structures Report,” 18; Carl R. Lounsbury, The Courthouses of Early Virginia: An 

Architectural History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 119–22 (quote 122), 288 (quote). 

Thomas Stone’s brother John Hoskins Stone put up for sale in 1795 a house in Port Tobacco “completely fitted 

for a retail store,” including “a piazza the length of the house” (Maryland Gazette [Annapolis], July 30). In his 

book Architecture and Empire in Jamaica, Louis P. Nelson analyzes piazzas as spaces for informal meetings 

between whites in the presence of enslaved servants at the houses of native-born Jamaican planters in the 

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), chapter 7. 
55

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Figure 22. First floor plan of Haberdeventure, 1985. The east wing is on the right; the west wing is on the left. 

Drawn by Scott Duenow, Lori McGuire, and Margot P. Stephenson, 1985. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Building Survey, National Park Service.

The integration of a piazza into the design of Haberdeventure in the early 1770s 

appears to be an early adoption of the form in a domestic context in the Potomac River 

Valley, a fashionable improvement intended to promote the comfort and health of the 

Stone family. Scholars have identified the increasing popularity of these well-ventilated, 

shaded porches running the length of one or more sides of elite houses in Jamaica and 

Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1760s and 1770s. George Washington built a “piazza” at 

Mount Vernon in the later 1770s, and piazzas became more common in Virginia after the 

Revolutionary War. Some have argued that an association that English people made 

between fever and the “constitution of the air” motivated British Atlantic elites in tropical 

and subtropical climates to adopt piazzas into their houses. In the eighteenth century, 

malaria was not yet understood to be a mosquito-borne parasitic disease. The English, 

informed by centuries-old Galenic medicine (which defined health as a balance of the four 

humors), believed that “miasma,” or bad air rising from warm, swampy ground and produced by daily fluctuations in temperature, contributed to ill health. A popular mid-eighteenth-century English treatise, William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, advised residents of 
56

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

“low marshy” places to inhabit “the dryest situations they can find” on higher ground. 

Buchan recommended that fresh air be circulated through a house in the daytime, when 

the sun weakened the morbidity of the air.44

Thomas and Margaret Stone almost certainly considered the piazza as one of a 

number of the house’s improvements intended to promote the health and well-being of its 

inhabitants. The house had opposing windows and a central passage to promote air circulation, for example. Even so, Thomas Stone may have had lingering concerns about the 

healthiness of Haberdeventure. In response to a letter from his brother Michael Jenifer 

Stone about Michael’s “plans for life,” written from Annapolis in 1786, Thomas wrote, “it 

would give me Pain to see you settled on [living at] Portobacco, which I fear would prove 

very injurious to your health.” Thomas advised Michael to consider a “more healthfull 

situation.”45

To return to the subject of the circulation of people through the house, the piazza 

on the public-facing side of Haberdeventure offered one level of access to the planter and 

his family. Visitors allowed to process from the piazza would be ushered into a central 

passage that extends through the house. The central passage limited access to the interior 

of the house; visitors underwent a “sorting process” before being allowed to progress 

further into the formal east room, the less formal west room, or to ascend the stair which 

rises from the far (south) end of the passage. In warm weather, the central passage became 

a living space, with hopes of a breeze coming through the open doors on either end.46

Central passages, like piazzas, are believed to have been rare in Charles County 

when Haberdeventure was built circa 1770, based on surviving buildings. More common 

was a mid-century floor plan in which visitors entered immediately into a large receiving 

room and accessed rooms above stairs by a rear stair hall. Marshall Hall, Araby, and Rich 

44 Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica, chapter 7; John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: 

Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 

Press, 2001), chapter 8; Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom, chapter 6 (quote 106); Mark R. Wenger, “Town 

House & Country House: Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Chesapeake House: Architectural 

Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg, eds. Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury (Charlottesville: University of 

Virginia Press, 2013), 154; William Buchan, Domestic Medicine: Or, a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of 

Diseases, 2nd ed. (London, 1772), quotes on pp. 39, 98. Malaria was a persistent and debilitating disease in the 

colonial Chesapeake (Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman “On Agues and Fevers: Malaria in the Early 

Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 33 [January 1976]: 31–60). 

45 Thomas Stone to Michael Jenifer Stone, undated (circa 1786), The Rosenbach, Philadelphia. Buchan advocated for the daily ventilation of a house “by opening opposite windows” (Domestic Medicine, 95). 

Contemporaries also advised placing the “best rooms” at some distance from the ground for better air quality 

(Crowley, The Invention of Comfort, 236–37, 241). Haberdeventure’s basement floor would have served this 

purpose.

46 Wenger, “Town House & Country House,” 125–28 (quote 125). J. Richard Rivoire in his study of Charles 

County domestic architecture determined that porches, piazzas, and central passages were rare in the eighteenth 

century and more common in the nineteenth century (Homeplaces, 25–8). Wenger makes a conceptual connection between the porch and the central passage; both spaces served to limit access to the interior of the house and 

enhanced privacy. Rivoire and Wollon, writing over twenty years ago, conveyed some hesitation that the piazza 

at Haberdeventure is original, mostly because of its rarity (“Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 

56, 72n18; “Historic Structures Report,” 18–19). 
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Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Hill offer examples of this spatial arrangement that would have been familiar to Thomas 

and Margaret Stone during their upbringing. Araby is a particularly notable example. In its 

outward appearance, Araby originally resembled Haberdeventure as a five-bay, one-and-ahalf-story brick house with a gambrel roof. Built by merchant-planter William Eilbeck on 

Mattawoman Creek before his death in 1765, the house, like Haberdeventure, has full 

paneling along the walls of its principal entertaining room. But the circulation plans of the 

two houses differ. Whereas a central passage at Haberdeventure limited access to the best 

room, Araby’s older floor plan offered direct entry into the largest and best-appointed 

room. Generational differences alone do not account for the contrast between Araby’s and 

Haberdeventure’s floor plans. Margaret Stone’s elder half-brother Rev. Richard Brown 

constructed a house with direct entry into the principal room and a rear stair hall at Rich 

Hill as late as 1783.47

Two houses in the Port Tobacco area with central passages, built a few years before 

Haberdeventure, are Stagg Hall in Port Tobacco, constructed in 1767, and La Grange 

(formerly Strawberry Hill), which also dates to the later 1760s. The identity of the builder 

of Stagg Hall remains elusive, but the house quickly became a favored residence for merchants of Port Tobacco. Stagg Hall is one-room deep, like Haberdeventure, with a room on 

either side of the center passage. Interior woodwork contributed to the refinement of the 

larger of the first-floor rooms, with full paneling on the chimney wall. The framed, oneand-a-half-story house has a gambrel roof. La Grange, which lies along a road leading from 

Port Tobacco to Zekiah Swamp, was considerably altered in the nineteenth century, but its 

eighteenth-century core still has the power to impress. La Grange originally was two rooms 

deep and two stories high, and its interior woodwork, particularly its staircase, has drawn 

comparisons with Annapolis houses of the period for its cabinet-grade joinery. 

Architectural historian Willie J. Graham comments that the house falls somewhat outside 

the traditions of Southern Maryland: “Marylanders were generally averse to laying out 

two-story, double-pile houses with center-passage plans in the colonial era, especially ones 

with their staircase placed prominently in the main path of the passageway.” It is worth 

noting that La Grange’s first owners were not Maryland-born; James Craik, a surgeon and 

close friend to George Washington since their service together in the Seven Years War, was 

47 Rivoire, Homeplaces 11, figure 8B (drawing of Rich Hill’s first floor plan); Klinger, “Architecture of Araby”; 

National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form for Araby. William Eilbeck held forty-one 

people in bondage in Charles County at the time of his death. Indicative of his and his wife’s high social position, 

their daughter Ann married George Mason IV of Virginia, and George Washington visited William’s widow on 

his travels through Charles County (transcription of William Eilbeck’s probate inventory in Probing the Past: 

Virginia and Maryland Probate Inventories, 1740–1810, https://chnm.gmu.edu/probateinventory; Papers of 

George Washington Digital Edition, Diaries 3:29 (May 30, 1771). Eilbeck called the property Mattawoman; 

Araby is a nineteenth-century name. A nineteenth-century owner raised the height of Araby to two stories, 

altering its original appearance (Klinger, “Architecture of Araby”).
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Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

from Scotland, and his wife, Marianne Ewell, was born to Charles Ewell of Prince William 

County, Virginia, an investor in ironmaking. The unusual two-story height and distinctive 

interior of La Grange reflected the Craiks’ origins outside of Charles County.48

Given the small number of surviving houses with central passages that date to 

before 1774 in Charles County (and these clustered in and around Port Tobacco), the 

central passage at Haberdeventure is one example of a careful selection of outside influences by Thomas and Margaret Stone. Other variations on local norms, such as the 

arrangement of the house, hyphens, and wings along an arc (an interpretation of Palladian 

design) and the integration of a piazza as a family and reception space, which was gaining 

fashion around the South, may have delighted and surprised some visitors. The design 

choices also conveyed the refinement of Thomas Stone and his wife, whose taste and 

knowledge put them in socially exclusive company.

Further inside the house, visitors encountered spaces that required them to be 

familiar with the “modes of speech, dress, body carriage, and manners” that defined 

“polite society.” On the far side of the central passage from the drive and piazza, a single 

door led to the best entertaining room, the east room. Though the 1977 fire destroyed the 

interior finish of the main block, ample evidence survives to show that the east room was 

first in the hierarchy of spaces inside the house. First, the east room has the largest dimensions (measuring about 378 square feet). Second, in a display of wealth by the owner, the 

east room had floor-to-ceiling paneling with built-in corner cupboards to display ceramics 

and glassware. (In 1928, decades before the fire, the Baltimore Museum of Art removed the 

original paneling after its purchase. The paneling on display now at Haberdeventure is a 

reproduction of the original.) Wooden paneling, like brick construction, was time- and 

labor-intensive, requiring skilled workmen. By the 1770s, high-style house owners in 

Virginia favored wallpaper over full paneling, but the custom held on longer in Maryland.49

48 “La Grange” and “Stagg Hall,” in “A Shared Heritage: Urban and Rural Experience on the Banks of the 

Potomac: A Field Guide for the Western Shore of Maryland,” 39th Annual Vernacular Architecture Forum 

Conference, (Crownsville: Maryland Historical Trust, 2018), 71–74, 77; National Register of Historic Places 

Registration Form for Stagg Hall, CH-13, National Park Service, 1988; Graham, Appendix 1, in Webster, et al., 

“In Search of Josiah Henson’s Birthplace,” 124 (quote); “Dr. James Craik (1730–1814)” and “Charles Ewell (ca. 

1712–by 1749)” in Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.

colonial-settlers-md-va.us; Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, Revolutionary War Series, 1:28n2 (at 

November 25, 1757).

49 Bushman, Refinement of America, xii (quote); Wollon, “Historic Structures Report,”s 2; Willie Graham, 

“Interior Finishes,” in The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg, eds. Cary 

Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 320.
59

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Figure 23. Two views of an installation of Haberdeventure’s east room wooden paneling at the Baltimore Museum of 

Art, 1936. Photos by E. H. Pickering. The museum purchased the paneling as well as three portraits, including one of 

Thomas Stone by Robert Edge Pine shown above the fireplace, in 1927. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Building Survey, National Park Service.
60

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

As the largest room in the house with the highest architectural finish, the east room 

provided an intimate theater for the performance of gentility. Formal dining with guests (as 

opposed to informal dining with family) likely occurred here. Use of specialized equipment 

required specialized knowledge, for instance how to sit in a chair with the correct posture 

and how to manipulate knives, forks, and imported tableware. “Gentility sought to improve 

or beautify many aspects of human existence and to exclude all that was coarse and vulgar, 

whether things or people.” The room could be sealed off from the rest of the house by 

closing the single door to the central passage, reflecting “a growing tendency” at mid-century “to entertain guests away from daily chores of housework.” In a refined setting that 

included “built-in buffets in which to display costly ceramics and glass,” the Stone family 

and their guests played games, dined, and conversed. William Craik, son of Dr. James Craik 

of nearby Strawberry Hill (now La Grange), in a letter to Walter Stone of May 1783 

described the following scene at his home, likely from a parlor: “Mr. Moore and Jimmy are 

on one side of me playing Backgammon[,] Sally on the other side prating with the 

Children,” and Craik’s mind was on the time he “most agreeably spent at your Brother 

Toms” earlier that day. The emphasis in this letter is on leisure; Craik mentions that on 

another recent visit to Haberdeventure, Walter’s brother “Tom” was “just setting out for 

Annapolis” to attend the General Court. The reference to work stands out in a composition 

otherwise devoted to talk of social visits.50

If, as is currently believed, the west room of the main block was Mrs. Stone’s 

bedchamber, the division of the house into a formal east side and a less formal west side 

bears resemblance to other high-status domestic living arrangements in the region. 

Gunston Hall, for example, as built in the 1750s by George Mason IV, had a hall, dining 

room, and passage on one side of the house, and private rooms on the other. One of these 

private rooms was Mrs. Mason’s chamber, which opened into a corridor that led outside to 

the service yard and garden. At Haberdeventure, a doorway in the west wall of Mrs. Stone’s 

chamber leads to a stair descending into the west hyphen; this hyphen then, as now, offered 

direct access to a kitchen building. Typically a planter’s wife in her personal chamber 

“managed the day-to-day operation of her household,” kept valuable possessions “under 

lock and key,” and hosted small groups. Women sewed in the company of others, as mentioned in the following description of Martha Washington’s daily routine at Mount Vernon 

as a great planter’s wife:

50 Lounsbury, Courthouses of Early Virginia, 285 (quote), 286 (quote); Bushman, Refinement of America, 74–8, 

120–1; William Craik to Walter Stone, May 12, 1783, in Stone Family Papers, LC. Writing in general terms, 

Bushman remarks, “The single most telling indicator of a household’s commitment to genteel values was the 

presence of a parlor with no apparent function but to sustain visiting, conversation, and genteel rituals” 

(Refinement of America, 121). In the case of Haberdeventure, it is a challenge to identify another room in the 

house where Thomas Stone could have kept his legal papers and consulted with clients at times of inclement 

weather (when he could not use the porch or piazza), unless he used the west room as an office or had an office 

outbuilding. 
61

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

She rose at dawn, going first to the kitchen to oversee the preparation of breakfast and then stopping by the laundry and other buildings related to her tasks, 

such as the dairy and smokehouse. Sometime after breakfast, probably about 8 

o’clock, she met with the cooks to decide the menu for the main meal of the day, 

dinner, which was eaten in midafternoon. In the late morning or early afternoon, she often gathered a group of young female slaves in her bedroom and 

taught them to sew or supervised older enslaved women as they knitted, sewed, 

or cut out clothing. She was back in the kitchen again before bedtime to supervise the mixing and kneading of bread.

Martha Washington delegated tasks to female relatives, hired housekeepers, the wives of 

hired men, and other free and enslaved women to keep Mount Vernon functioning in an 

orderly manner.51

Figure 24. West hyphen interior at Haberdeventure, 1936. Photo by E. H. Pickering. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Building Survey, National Park Service.

The west hyphen facilitated communication between Mrs. Stone’s chamber and the 

kitchen and provided flexible living space outside the formal areas of the house (Figure 24). 

A heated room measuring nearly 250 square feet, the space originally had three points of 

51 Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 38–43 (quote 39); Wenger, “Town House & Country 

House,” 123, 138–40, 145.
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Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

access: through a doorway from the west room of the main block (currently interpreted as 

Mrs. Stone’s chamber), from the kitchen in the west wing, and through an opening along 

the south wall that gave direct access to the terraced garden and possibly a service yard off 

the kitchen. Built so closely after the construction of the main block as to be considered an 

original feature, the space may have been intended to provide additional living space for 

Thomas Stone’s family as his siblings turned to him for support. Family use of the west 

hyphen would have been consistent with the division of the house into a formal east side 

and less formal west side.52

Figure 25. “Res[idence] of Thos. Stone, Port Tobacco, Md.” Engraving on paper. 

Published in William Brotherhead, ed., The Book of the Signers: Containing the Facsimile Letters of the 

Signers of the Declaration of Independence (Philadelphia, 1861). This is the earliest known depiction of 

Haberdeventure and suggests decline as nature takes over the house. 

Courtesy of the Collection of the Maryland State Archives. 

52 Wollen, “Historic Structure Report,” 39–52. The west hyphen is not a freestanding structure; it “has neither a 

west nor an east wall of its own; the West Wing and the Central Block serve those functions.” Wollon also 

concluded that the doorway through the west wall of the main block is original to the house (ibid., 39).
63

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

A picturesque nineteenth-century engraving of Haberdeventure, created to ornament a book of biographies of signers of the Declaration of Independence, includes the 

west hyphen but omits the east hyphen (Figure 25). The picture suggests that the south 

door of the west hyphen was so integral to the domestic life of the house as to merit inclusion in a rendering meant to tell us something about the life of Thomas Stone. 

Furthermore, the shading of the doorway hints at a door kept constantly open in warm 

weather; ample foliage conveys summer heat. The artist may have omitted the east hyphen, 

east wing, and west wing because the structures as they existed at the time postdated 

Thomas Stone.53

The nineteenth-century engraving highlights another feature of the house, the 

south-facing porch. Part of the formal circulation of the house, the south porch not only 

extended the living space of the house by providing a sheltered space to take outdoor air. It 

also served as an elevated platform from which to view the terraced garden. 

Haberdeventure’s south porch, like the piazza, is an original feature, its wooden flooring 

supported by brick piers. Garden overlooks, such as a porch or a second-story window, 

became an increasingly common feature of houses among the upper ranks in Chesapeake 

society in the later eighteenth century. The mansion house was intended to communicate 

with the garden as part of a harmonious whole; the garden lent beauty and refinement to 

the scene, “improved” the landscape, offered subjects for genteel conversation, and, if rare 

and difficult-to-obtain specimens were on view, displayed the connections of the owner 

through the purchase and exchange of seeds and plants.54

Notable gardens in the Port Tobacco area recorded in the 1783 tax list included La 

Grange (formerly Strawberry Hill) and St. Thomas Manor. The occupants of both of these 

households—Dr. James Craik and Jesuit priests, who also visited the sick—used plants for 

medical purposes more often than the ordinary household. According to a much later 

account, Margaret Stone’s brother, Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown, reportedly had an 

53 The extant east hyphen, built in brick, dates to the early- to mid-nineteenth century. It may have replaced a 

framed cover over the cellar entrance (Rivoire, “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 56).

54 CLR (1996), 37; Sarudy, Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 11, chapter 7; Bushman, Refinement of 

America, 86–87. A photo of Haberdeventure from 1936–1937 (Figure 16) displays a kitchen garden to the east of 

the house and terraces. Aerial photographs of 1937 “show remnants of orchards...in two locations: one group in 

the field to the north of the house, and the second group in the field to the east of the house” (CLR [1996], 

36–37). 
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Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

“extensive” garden at Rose Hill. It is tempting to speculate that Margaret, too, had more 

than an average housewife’s knowledge about medicinal plants, having been born into a 

physician’s household.55

In summary, Haberdeventure’s formal design had a north-facing public side, facing 

road entrances, and a south-facing garden side with more privacy. The piazza provided a 

holding space for some visitors who came to speak with the plantation mistress, Margaret 

Stone, or one of the county’s leading citizens, Thomas Stone. Planters’ houses were the 

“administrative centers” of their plantations, drawing people of all ranks to report for 

work, make a delivery, solicit aid, or seek resolution for a dispute. Thomas Stone would 

have conducted the bulk of his face-to-face legal business in courthouses and taverns but 

may have held private conferences on matters of law and government at home. The central 

passage in the main block acted as a social filter, limiting access to the principal entertaining room (the east room), where the Stones met with their peers (in the presence of 

enslaved servants). An example of the “more complex house planning strategies adopted 

by elites and aspiring elites” in the British Atlantic world, the central passage was a departure from more common floor plans in high-status houses in Charles County at mid-century, in which guests stepped directly into the best room. The central passage also allowed 

the principal entertaining room to be closed off without hindering circulation through the 

rest of the house. The west side of the house, namely the west room and west hyphen, were 

for family use.56

Service Areas and Circulation Patterns

Various construction events and the 1977 fire have eroded physical evidence of service 

areas, service circulation patterns, and enslaved living space in and around the main block 

at Haberdeventure. Historically these spaces were subject to deterioration, removal, or 

replacement as living standards improved. To give a few examples, the west wing sits on the 

site of the eighteenth-century kitchen, and the location, size, and appearance of the service 

55 Unfortunately, the various tax assessors for the Charles County 1783 tax list recorded gardens inconsistently. 

The assessor for the Fifth District, where Haberdeventure lay, made no comment on the property’s garden. The 

assessor for the Sixth District was a garden enthusiast, noting the “large and beautiful garden” and twenty apple 

trees at St. Thomas Manor, and the “large and beautiful garden” and hundred apple trees at Dr. Craik’s residence 

(1783 tax list, Maryland State Archives). In 1785, Craik sent to George Washington eight pear trees of different 

varieties and “Chinese seeds” (The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, Diaries 4:89, 160). J. M. Toner 

discusses the reputation of Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown’s garden at Rose Hill in “Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown,” 

Sons of the Revolution in the State of Virginia Quarterly Magazine, 2:1 (January 1923), 21–22.

Elaine Breslaw comments on the connection between spiritualism and healing in Lotions, Potions, Pills, and 

Magic: Health Care in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 2012), chapter 3. An English 

Jesuit priest named Joseph Mosley, in a circa 1760 letter to his brother, also a cleric, in England, asked for “your 

gally-pot of pills against the flux; it would be of great service to our patients” (in Edward Davitt, S.J., ed., 

“Letters of Father Joseph Mosley, S.J., 1757–1806,” Woodstock Letters, 35:1 [1906]: 45.

56 Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica, 196 (quote). The garden at George Mason’s Gunston Hall was 

also designed to be enjoyed privately (Wenger, “Town House & Country House,” 138). 
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Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

yard in Thomas Stone’s lifetime is unknown. More recently, in the twentieth century, 

service areas were not regarded as a high priority for documentation and preservation. The 

lost woodwork in the main block, including in the upper stories, may have offered clues to 

the lives of people who lived and worked in the house. 

Compounding the difficulties of understanding how enslaved people moved 

through and occupied space at Haberdeventure, enslaved African Americans “were not 

intentionally a part of the audience” of the processional or formal landscape. Through 

gates, doorways, and passages, “Blacks could pass almost at will, while whites from outside 

had to observe the formalities.” This relative freedom of movement was, in practice, 

dehumanizing and demeaning, as it reinforced the enslaved person’s lack of standing. 

White slaveholders knew that blacks held in bondage resisted enslavement and that their 

authority rested on violence. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and antislavery 

advocate, wrote that he “once heard [Thomas Stone] say, ‘he [i.e., Stone] had never known 

a single instance of a negro being contented in slavery.’” While we cannot confirm the truth 

of Rush’s recollection, we can find some clues in the architecture of Haberdeventure to the 

hierarchy of space that enforced social divisions.57

Figure 26. (Left) Haberdeventure’s east hyphen, constructed in the nineteenth century. The hyphen sits between the 

main block and east wing (right). Photos by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1936–1937. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South.

57 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 244–45; Upton, “White and Black Landscapes,” in Material Life in America, ed. 

St. George, 365 (quote); George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His “Travels through 

Life” Together with His Commonplace Book for 1789–1813 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), 

151 (quote). Philip D. Morgan uses this same passage from Benjamin Rush’s text to make the point that eighteenth-century “patriarchs did not expect their slaves to be content or submissive; the myth of the happy and 

docile slave was not an eighteenth-century invention” (Slave Counterpoint, 278). 
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Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

One dedicated service area from the eighteenth century that survives at 

Haberdeventure is the cellar of the main block. The cellar had no direct access to the floor 

above; ingress and egress was through an opening in the east side of the house. In the early 

to mid-nineteenth century, bricks replaced the original frame enclosure over the cellar 

entrance (Figure 26).58

Archaeology in the cellar in the 1980s determined that this basement space lacked 

the finish of the rooms above stairs, having a dirt floor and no plaster on its walls. The 

presence of two fireboxes suggests the cellar was intended as a living and work space. 

Archaeologists did not find evidence of household activity, though. Moreover, finding 

proof of repeated flooding in the cellar, the archaeologists posited that long-term food 

storage in the basement was untenable. Presumably, problems with water control would 

also have deterred enslaved domestic servants or other residents of low status from residing in the cellar year-round. It remains unclear, then, why a nineteenth-century owner 

made the expense to improve the cellar entrance by constructing (or replacing) the east 

hyphen in brick, unless a desire for balance and proportion between the east and west sides 

of the main block drove the decision. It is also possible that the cellar was usable space for 

the residents of Haberdeventure in ways that have not yet been identified.59

Another dedicated service area at Haberdeventure in the later eighteenth century 

was the semi-detached kitchen, which is believed to have been located where the west wing 

now stands. Though Mrs. Stone as the planter’s wife, or a hired housekeeper, formally 

supervised the kitchen, “kitchens, like quarters, were black zones, not white and black 

ones.” More likely than not, Haberdeventure’s eighteenth-century kitchen was frame, not 

brick, reflecting the low status of the labor of cooking, considered “dirtier” than some 

other domestic work like dairying. “Kitchens” as a building type “in the Chesapeake were 

lowly regarded, reflected in the inferiority of their construction and maintenance.” Also, 

they were “crowded” places, doubling as living spaces for enslaved people. “In most cases, 

people were packed into rooms of less than 300 square feet. Eighteenth-century owners 

showed little concern about having many people congregating day and night in the space in 

which cooking took place.” In the vicinity of the kitchen would have been other support 

buildings, such as a meat house, dairy, and hen house.60

The construction of Haberdeventure announced Thomas Stone and his wife’s 

arrival in Charles County society. An 1807 letter between two men of high standing in the 

Virginia Piedmont expresses the public nature and personal significance of such a 

58 Rivoire, “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 56. Wollon determined that the east hyphen is 

“original” to the main block “in concept if not in construction” (“Historic Structure Report,” 55). 

59 Cheek, Ward, and Balicki, “Archeological Studies,” 1992; Moyer, “Archaeological Overview and 

Assessment,” 17, 62. 

60 Edward A. Chappell, “Housing Slavery,” in The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial 

Williamsburg, eds. Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013),

164–65 (quote 165); Rivoire, Homeplaces, 17–18.
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Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

construction project. One man advised the other, “It is now fit that you should have a home 

and that you should be the master of it—not a mere Guest among your friends and a 

stranger in your native state. Until you do this you can have no real weight or influence in 

society.” After spending several years in Annapolis to train in law, Thomas Stone came back 

to Charles County to marry, to establish his law practice, and arguably to launch his political career. Nearly three years passed between Thomas Stone’s signature on the deed for the 

land on which the brick house sits, in December 1770, and Stone’s order to Baltimore 

merchant Robert Christie for the finishing touches of lead paint and stone steps in 

September 1773. Between the brickwork and interior woodwork (plus the earthwork 

needed to create the terraced garden), the Stone family made considerable expense to 

convey the high status of the household.61

The house and complex of outbuildings at Haberdeventure raised Thomas Stone’s 

visibility in Charles County’s social and political circles at a time when Port Tobacco was 

prospering. In his vision for Haberdeventure, Thomas Stone may have been influenced by 

what he witnessed as a law student in Annapolis during that city’s “Age of Affluence” 

between 1763 and 1774. Lawyers erected a considerable proportion of the sophisticated 

townhouses that adorned the city at this time. Builders spent lavishly on rich interior 

woodwork, pleasure gardens, Venetian windows, and other refinements in order to win 

political influence.62

Arguably Thomas Stone invested in making a similar pitch to propertied members 

of the community in his home county, erecting a modest showplace that combined local 

and metropolitan influences. Among its local features are the one-and-a-half-story height, 

gambrel roof, and (by Virginia standards) retardataire full paneling in the best room. A 

sheltered porch or piazza on the north side of the house, which faced one of the busiest 

roads in the county, was a modish space for dispensing hospitality. At the same time, the arc 

formed by the main block, hyphens, and wings, likely inspired by Palladian designs, curves 

away from the public-facing side, forming a retreat on the south side of the house. A central 

passage, which appears to have been rare among first floor plans in Charles County circa 

1770, and a privately enjoyed terraced garden provided Thomas Stone and his wife a means 

of distancing themselves and their selected company away from the noise and hubbub of 

61 Isaac Coles to Joseph C. Cabell, December 31, 1807, Cabell Family Papers, University of Virginia, cited in 

Marlene Elizabeth Heck, “Building Status: Pavilioned Dwellings in Virginia,” Perspectives in Vernacular 

Architecture 6 (1997): 46. Thomas Stone’s letter to Robert Christie of September 17, 1773, requesting “150 lbs of 

white lead ground in oil” and stone steps, was printed in the Historical Magazine (November 1868): 239–40, 

reproduced in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources” (2004). Rivoire asserts that 

Stone intended to use these supplies for the finishing touches of Haberdeventure (“Summary Report of 

Additional Research Findings,” 53). 

62 Edward C. Papenfuse uses the phrase “Age of Affluence” to describe the level of luxury spending to attract 

proprietary patronage in Maryland’s capital, 1763–74, in his book, In Pursuit of Profit: The Annapolis Merchants 

in the Era of the American Revolution, 1763–1805 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). Out of 

twelve persons or entities listed as builders of the best townhouses between 1764 and 1774 in a summary table, 

half were lawyers (ibid., table 1–2). 
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Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

the road and the busy kitchen and family side of the house. The domestic architecture of 

the house helps us understand one curiosity of Thomas Stone’s political life: he stood for 

popular election only once (in 1774) and lost. Stone was not comfortable leading a crowd, 

and he was not a popular leader like the lawyer whom he often saw in the courtroom, 

Samuel Chase. Instead, Stone advanced politically through patronage (both given and 

received), the strength of his reputation for legal knowledge, and the deference that 

Maryland gentry’s commanded. The house gave visual cues to the Stone family’s possession of intergenerational wealth, leisure, and education that set his family apart.63

Enslaved domestic servants moved in the most intimate spaces of the Stone family, 

but they were not the intended audience for the formal functions of the house. 

Unfortunately, other places of work and relaxation for enslaved domestic servants at 

Haberdeventure, such as the eighteenth-century kitchen, no longer survive. It would be a 

mistake, though, to assume that the lives of enslaved cooks, housemaids, seamstresses, 

manservants, and waiters, and any number of other domestic staff, were limited to this 

small area. Some people whom Thomas Stone held in bondage traveled back and forth 

between Haberdeventure and Stone’s townhouse in Annapolis, or ran errands inside and 

outside Charles County. The county seat, Port Tobacco, was only two miles away. The 

prosperity of this town in the 1760s and 1770s is an important backdrop to 

Haberdeventure.

Overcoming Haberdeventure’s Apparent Isolation Today: 

The Implications of Proximity to Port Tobacco

Port Tobacco was a boomtown in the 1760s and early 1770s, when the economy was relatively strong and credit flowed from Britain. The 1747 Maryland tobacco inspection act 

had improved the Oronoco tobacco market, raising prices for growers whose tobacco 

passed inspection. Beginning in the 1750s and accelerating after the close of the Seven 

Years War in 1763, Scottish tobacco merchants moved aggressively into the Potomac River 

Valley, offering goods on generous credit terms. Planters who consistently raised “trash” 

tobacco that did not pass inspection sought other means of income, diversifying the economy. Wealthier planters who were able to afford grain and livestock farming in addition to 

tobacco cultivation found profit in the demand for foodstuffs in the West Indies and 

Southern Europe. Ships also carried timber and iron to English markets. Meanwhile, 

63 Jefferson’s “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources” (2004) has a number of examples of 

Thomas Stone giving patronage or at least exerting his influence to advance others. See, for example, Thomas 

Stone to Mathew Tilghman, October 11, 1776, recommending a Mr. Hopkins for an officer position, and Thomas 

Stone to Gov. Thomas Sim Lee, April 23, 1781, asking for a commission for a Col. Ware of Charles County. 

Thomas Stone and Samuel Chase both were busy lawyers in the General Court of the Western Shore in 1779 and 

1786, as shown in Appendix 19.
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Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

within Southern Maryland, more “crafts and home industries...led to denser and denser 

networks of local exchange.” A credit contraction in late 1772 and 1773 left tobacco merchants with more goods than they could sell but kept Maryland lawyers busy. The Port 

Tobacco- and London-based firm of Barnes and Ridgate, which slipped into bankruptcy in 

1773, became one of Thomas Stone’s most high-profile clients before the Revolutionary 

War.64

A number of American-born, English-born, and Scottish-born merchants made 

Port Tobacco their regional headquarters in the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s. Barnes and 

Ridgate was a partnership between John Barnes, a St. Mary’s County native and second-generation merchant in the region, and Thomas How Ridgate of England. Frederick 

Stone, elder brother of Thomas Stone, did business in Port Tobacco and Annapolis in 

partnership with Robert Townshend Hooe and Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, who were also 

natives of Charles County. One of the largest Glasgow-based firms, John Glassford and 

Company, had a store in Port Tobacco, as did smaller Scottish-based outfits such as John 

Semple’s firm with his brother-in-law Robert Lawson.65

John Semple (d. 1773) deserves particular mention because of overlap with 

Haberdeventure’s history. Semple came to Port Tobacco as a merchant in the 1750s and 

acquired a parcel of land which Dr. James Craik, another Scot, purchased from Semple in 

1763 and developed into Strawberry Hill (now La Grange). Peg, an enslaved housekeeper 

and cook for Semple, was the mother of Clare (Thomas), whom David Stone and then 

Thomas Stone held in bondage. “Semple’s Peg” was well-known in Port Tobacco, as noted 

in Chapter 3. In addition, the surname of Henry Semple, an enslaved man whom Thomas 

Stone’s daughters manumitted in 1793 along with his wife and daughters, hints as a possible personal tie between Henry Semple and John Semple. Semple was a rare name in 

64 Lee, Price of Nationhood, 33–35; Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension, chapter 1; Walsh, Motives of Honor, 

Pleasure, and Profit, 633; Jacob M. Price, “The Rise of Glasgow in the Chesapeake Tobacco Trade, 1707–1775,” 

William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 11 (April 1954): 179–99; Richard K. MacMaster, “Georgetown and the 

Tobacco Trade, 1751–1783,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, DC, 66/68: 1–33; Lois 

Green Carr and Russell R. Menard, “Wealth and Welfare in Early Maryland: Evidence from St. Mary’s County,” 

William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 56 (January 1999): 102 (quote). Chapter 5 of this HRS discusses Stone’s 

work for Barnes and Ridgate.

65 “John Barnes, 1743–1800,” “Thomas Howe Ridgate, 1734–90,” and “Robert Townshend Hooe (1743–1809),” 

in Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us; 

Lee, Price of Nationhood, 41–42.
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Charles County, and the emancipation of an entire family is remarkable though not 

unheard of. No evidence of a relationship between John Semple and Henry Semple has yet 

been found.66

John Semple has also been credited for laying the seeds of the Potowmack 

Company, which was formed in 1785 after the Mount Vernon Conference in which Thomas 

Stone participated. Semple developed a commercial interest in improving the navigation of 

the Potomac River (and access to the West) after Port Tobacco proved too small for his 

ambitions. In 1763, the year that he sold Moore’s Ditch to Dr. Craik (and the Seven Years 

War ended), Semple moved to Prince William County, Virginia, where he invested in iron 

furnaces and gristmills. Soon thereafter Semple acquired an iron furnace on the upper 

reaches of the Potomac and over six thousand acres of land in Frederick County, 

Maryland. Semple’s business interests brought him into contact with George Washington, 

who shared Semple’s interest in the commercial potential of easier access to the interior. 

When Washington hosted a meeting of commissioners from the states of Virginia and 

Maryland at his home at Mount Vernon to create an interstate commercial agreement in 

March 1785, paving the way for investment in internal improvements, Thomas Stone was 

there, as were his brother Walter Stone, his brother-in-law Gustavus Richard Brown, and 

his uncle Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer. The heavy representation from Port Tobacco speaks 

to the town’s prominence along the Potomac and commercial interests in the west.67

An English traveler, Nicholas Cresswell, characterized Port Tobacco, the seat of 

Charles County, as a “small town.” The town’s anchors were the brick courthouse, erected 

circa 1727–30, and the Anglican parish church, a pairing that could be found in county 

seats across Maryland since the establishment of the Church of England in the colony in 

the 1690s. The tobacco inspection warehouse was also a vital part of the town; the warehouse landing was just south of the village’s core (and by the 1770s was already showing 

66 “John Semple (d. 1773)” and “Dr. James Craik (1730–1814),” in Early Colonial Settlers of Southern 

Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us; Sean Condon, “The Significance of 

Group Manumissions in Post-Revolutionary Rural Maryland,” Slavery and Abolition 32, no. 1 (2011): 75–89. 

Information about John Semple is scattered through Richard K. MacMaster and David C. Skaggs, eds., “The 

Letterbooks of Alexander Hamilton, Piscataway Factor,” Maryland Historical Magazine 61 (June 1966): 146–66, 

61 (December 1966): 305–28, 62 (June 1967): 135–69, 63 (March 1968): 22–54, 65 (Spring 1970): 18–35, and 

the Papers of George Washington Digital Edition. For more discussion of Peg and Henry Semple, see Chapter 3 

and Appendix 9 of this HRS.

67 MacMaster, “Georgetown and the Tobacco Trade,” 24–33; John Semple to George Washington, January 8, 

1770, Colonial Series, 8:291, George Washington to James Madison, November 17, 1788, Presidential Series, 

1:112, and Diaries 4:108 in Papers of George Washington Digital Edition; “The Mount Vernon Compact,” in 

Robert A. Rutland, ed., The Papers of George Mason, 1725–1792, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press), 2:812–14, reproduced in Jefferson’s “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources”; 

Semple’s demand for enslaved labor at the iron furnaces and mills captured the attention of Virginia planter and 

lawyer John Mercer, who lamented the loss of an opportunity to hire out chattel slaves to Semple in 1767–68 for 

cash: “Had I known a little sooner that Semple would give £12 a year for men & £8 for women, besides cloathing 

them, paying their levies & taxes & allowing them 6 lb. of meat a week, it is certain he should have had mine, as 

I should by their hire have made more without care charge or trouble, than I could by any crop they can make” 

(Lois Mulkearn, comp. and ed., George Mercer Papers Relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia [Pittsburgh: 

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1954], 195).
71

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

signs of sedimentation). In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, the town had 

around thirty dwellings and about double the number of additional structures, such as 

stables and shops. The 1782 tax assessment recorded a total population of less than one 

hundred distributed among twenty-nine households. Whites were in the majority, at 60 

percent of the town’s residents. Two decades later, African Americans became the majority 

in town, reflecting trends in Charles County as a whole.68

On court days, the town’s population swelled. Charles County opened its court at 

least three times a year. On the days that the court met, “twelve to fifteen” justices of the 

peace, predominantly men of wealth from English Protestant backgrounds, would process 

to their cushioned seats on a platform at the rear of the courtroom, elevating them above 

the sheriff, clerk, counsels, and jury. County courts served a number of local government 

functions, including taxation, roadwork, licensing, and poor relief. The magistrates heard 

“civil cases involving no more than £100 sterling” or 30,000 pounds tobacco, and “tried all 

criminal cases except those against whites accused of capital crimes.” Enslaved blacks 

accused of capital offenses were tried at the county level, according to a 1737 law. In 

another expansion of the county court’s oversight, a law passed in 1797 required black 

freedom suits to be introduced at the county level instead of at the General Court of the 

Western or Eastern Shores.69

Court days attracted not only potential jurymen, lured by a day’s pay for their 

public service. People came to see the goods that merchants displayed on the piazzas of 

their stores, negotiate with their creditors, visit craftspeople, buy fowl from African 

American chicken merchants, attend public auctions, participate in lotteries, drink and 

gamble in the taverns, or find other ways to combat the loneliness of rural life.70

68 Harold B. Gill Jr. and George M. Curtis III, eds., A Man Apart: The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell (Lanham, 

MD: Lexington Books, 2009, electronic edition), June 3, 1774 (quote); Lee, Price of Nationhood, 34; National 

Register of Historic Places Registration Form for Port Tobacco, CH-372, National Park Service, 1989, Section 8, 

p. 14; Peter C. Quantock, Anne T. Hayward, and Kelley M. Walter, “Port Tobacco: A Shifting Settlement 

Pattern,” Maryland Archeology 45 (March–September 2009): 58–66. The original circa the 1727–30 courthouse 

at Port Tobacco does not survive, but Morris L. Radoff surmises from the cost of its construction that it was 

constructed in brick (The County Courthouses and Records of Maryland, Part One: The Courthouses [Annapolis: 

Hall of Records Commission, State of Maryland, 1960], 69). Port Tobacco served as the county seat from 1727 

until 1895. See Chapter 3 of this HRS for population trends in Charles County. 

69 Alan F. Day, A Social Study of Lawyers in Maryland, 1660–1775 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989) 9, 32; 

A. C. Hanson, Laws of Maryland, 1784, chapter 54, Archives of Maryland, 203:406; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 

53–54 (quote 54), 244–45; Lounsbury, The Courthouses of Early Virginia; Loren Schweninger, “Freedom Suits, 

African American Women, and the Genealogy of Slavery,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 71 (Jan. 2014): 

59–60. Charles County Court met in March, August, and November after June court was abolished in 1770. A 

1784 state law changed the months to April, June, and September.

70 C. A. Ellefson, “The County Courts and the Provincial Court in Maryland, 1733–1763,” PhD dissertation, 

University of Maryland, 1963, 215–16; Lounsbury, Courthouses of Early Virginia, 3–8; Morgan, Slave 

Counterpoint, 359. Juries reflected Maryland’s religious diversity; in the colony, Roman Catholic freemen could 

serve on juries, though they were barred from voting and holding office (William E. Nelson, “The Law of 

Colonial Maryland: Virginia without Its Grandeur,” American Journal of Legal History, 58 [2014]: 191–92). 
72

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Located at the center of Port Tobacco, within steps of where the eighteenth-century 

courthouse, parish church, and taverns formerly stood, are two surviving buildings that 

have received significant attention from scholars, Stagg Hall and Chimney House. Both 

attest to the strength of the town’s commercial interests. Stagg Hall, though a frame building, bears a number of resemblances to Haberdeventure and was raised just a few years 

earlier, in 1767. Like the Stone family residence, Stagg Hall is one-and-a-half stories in 

height with a gambrel roof and has a first-floor plan of three rooms including a central 

passage; as mentioned above, a central passage is thought to be unusual for the Port 

Tobacco area in the 1760s and 1770s. Stagg Hall also features elaborate woodwork in its 

largest room, though full paneling is limited to the chimney wall, whereas at 

Haberdeventure all four walls of the largest room are fully paneled. The identity of the 

builder of Stagg Hall is uncertain, but in the 1770s and 1780s a succession of merchants 

owned the house. A letter from 1774 by Alexander Hamilton, a factor for the Scottish firm 

James Brown and Company, articulated the usefulness of a well-finished room in a house 

like Stagg Hall for conducting business. A year after taking charge of his firm’s store in 

Piscataway, just north of the county line in Prince George’s County, Hamilton built a house 

there and explained the investment to his superiors as follows: “Having found it impossible 

from the Constant interruption I meet with, to do your business as it ought to be done, in 

the Counting room of the Store, It being absolutely necessary in making settlements with 

the people to be private, and the want of which has often prevented me, when it ought to 

have been done, I therefore built a house at my own expence.” Stagg Hall, with the help of a 

central passage, combined privacy with a refined interior to attract business.71

71 MacMaster and Skaggs, eds., “Letterbooks of Alexander Hamilton,” Part II, 319. According to the description 

of Stagg Hall in the field guide for the 39th Annual Vernacular Architecture Conference, 2018, dendrochronology 

provides a construction date of 1767 (“A Shared Heritage: Urban and Rural Experience on the Banks of the 

Potomac: A Field Guide for the Western Shore of Maryland,” Maryland Historical Trust, 77). I am grateful to 

Amanda Casper for providing me with this text. Additional descriptions of Stagg Hall can be found in Rivoire, 

Homeplaces, 62–67, and the National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, CH-13, 1988. For a history 

of Lot 47 on which Stagg Hall sits, see Carol L. Cowherd, “Using Land Records to Look For Port Tobacco in the 

Eighteenth Century,” Maryland Archeology 47 (March 2011): 19.
73

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

Figure 27. Stagg Hall (“Gambrel Roof House,” on the right), with a dependency, 

Port Tobacco, Charles County, 1936. Photo by E. H. Pickering. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Building Survey, National Park Service.

Figure 28. “Chimney House,” Port Tobacco, Charles County, 1936–1937. Photo by Frances Benjamin Johnston. 

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South.

Merchants built to impress. Chimney House, constructed after Thomas How 

Ridgate purchased the land in 1785, is a striking display of ambition at a time of economic 

uncertainty in the region. The most commanding feature of the two-story, frame, 
74

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

combined house-and-store is a double chimney on one end “containing six fireplaces, 

closets at the first and second floor levels, and a large arched doorway at the base” leading 

to a heated cellar. Ridgate clearly intended to make a statement by creating one of the more 

elaborate expressions of an exterior brick chimney “incorporating closets or pents,” a 

distinctive regional architectural form appearing most frequently in the late eighteenth and 

early nineteenth centuries. Ridgate’s optimism, all the more remarkable for having experienced bankruptcy during the economic crisis of 1772–73, must have been fueled by winning a subcontract from Robert Morris of Philadelphia to supply tobacco to the French 

tobacco monopoly in 1785–87. Morris had agreed to ship 60,000 hogsheads from various 

American suppliers over those three years, including 5,000 hogsheads from Maryland, and 

received an advance of £43,750 sterling from a French bank. Unable to fulfill his part of the 

order, Ridgate died indebted in 1790. Morris was his largest creditor.72

Port Tobacco’s competitive, commercial society is a critical part of the context of 

Haberdeventure. Ridgate’s former bankruptcy did not deter him from trying again to 

pursue quick riches. As a merchant, Ridgate also enjoyed power and influence because of 

his access to information through global shipping networks. Ridgate’s commanding combined house-and-store was intended to communicate his standing as a man of credit; the 

architecture suggested he had the financial backing to lend money over an extended 

period. Credit was fundamental to Maryland and Virginia’s economy in the eighteenth 

century. Scottish merchants flourished in tobacco towns along the Potomac River at 

mid-century because of their willingness to give credit to smaller planters. Borrowing 

enabled a planter to make the investments needed to expand production, for instance to 

add acreage, buy livestock, convert marginal land into productive land, or obtain enslaved 

labor. Ridgate and his trading partner John Barnes extended their business during a strong 

tobacco market in the late 1760s, setting themselves up in London in 1771, then got caught 

short during a credit contraction in Britain in 1772 and went bankrupt. Given this history, 

the Chimney House can be read as Ridgate’s competitive bid to be trusted once again as a 

buyer of tobacco, purveyor of goods, and credit lender.73

The word “credit” in the eighteenth century had two meanings, one financial and 

one personal. In the first instance, credit meant having collateral to back a loan. 

Historically in England, land was considered the best security for a loan. Thus, when 

Thomas Stone invested his earnings from the law in real estate, he was building financial 

security for his family. In the second instance, being a “man of credit” meant being 

72 Cowherd, “Using Land Records to Look for Port Tobacco,” 19–21; National Register of Historic Places 

Registration Form for Port Tobacco, CH-372, Section 7, pp. 4–5 (quote); Rivoire, Homeplaces 13; Papenfuse, In 

Pursuit of Profit, 198–99; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 253–54. A transcription of Ridgate’s probate inventory, 

including the store, is available at Probing the Past: Virginia and Maryland Probate Inventories, 1740–1810, 

http://chnm.gmu.edu/probateinventory.

73 Lee, Price of Nationhood, 42; William Watson, A Treatise on the Law of Partnership (London, 1794), 

194–205.
75

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

honorable, reliable, and good to his word. In the view of historian Sarah Pearsall, “Women 

could and did have credit, especially when they entered into trade, but it did not define 

their character in the same way it did for men.” Pearsall continues, “Women’s credit tended 

to rely on men’s: their father’s, their husband’s, or their son’s.” Credit was something that 

had to be closely guarded; once lost, it was difficult to recover.74

Haberdeventure was intended to communicate the owner’s standing as a creditor 

on the most conservative basis, landownership. The house was also fundamentally about 

family. Thomas’s father, David Stone, died with a solvent estate, and this was an important 

legacy for his children. Presumably other community members were aware of David 

Stone’s prudent family estate management and expected his son Thomas to maintain the 

same self-discipline. The house’s solid brick walls conveyed financial stability. As will be 

discussed in the next chapter, Thomas took measures against financial ruin by including 

close family members as stakeholders in Haberdeventure and investing in his kinship 

network. Stone drew upon the resources of his extended family in order to secure his 

financial independence and thus claim a place among disinterested men in government. 

After studying law in Annapolis, qualifying as an attorney in several Maryland 

county courts and the colony’s Provincial Court, and marrying a woman from his home 

county, Thomas Stone and his wife Margaret (Brown) built an impressive home near the 

bustling town of Port Tobacco. In its outward appearance, the center block resembled 

other high-status houses in the area with its one-and-one-half-story height and gambrel 

roof. Fully paneled walls in the principal entertaining room reflected Maryland tastes; 

Virginia’s elite favored wallpaper. The piazza on the north, public-facing side of the house, 

however, signaled something new in the domestic architecture of Chesapeake plantations, 

a fashion that was spreading north from the south and the Caribbean. The piazza and 

central passage of the main block worked together to create a series of increasingly socially 

exclusive spaces. Furthermore, the Palladian-inspired arrangement of the main block, two 

hyphens, and two wings along an arc, while beautifying the scene, provided a measure of 

intimacy and privacy on the garden side of the house. With its mix of local and metropolitan elements, Thomas and Margaret Stone’s house reflected the owners’ deep ties to the 

region and knowledge of the world beyond. Thomas did not rest in his inherited standing 

among Maryland’s native-born elite; to secure his position, Haberdeventure’s house and 

landscape display its owner’s landed wealth and gentility. 

74 Sarah M. S. Pearsall, “Credit in Life and Letters,” in Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later 

Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, www.oxfordscholarship.com, 2018, accessed 

November 12, 2018), 6 (quote); Peter Mathias, “Risk, Credit, and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise,” in The 

Early Modern Atlantic Economy, eds. John K. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2000), 15–35; Claire Priest, “Creating an American Property Law: Alienability and Its Limits in 

American History,” Harvard Law Review 120, no. 2 (December 2006): 385–458. Priest discusses the 1732 act of 

Parliament that removed traditional English protection of land from seizure by unsecured creditors in the 

colonies. Up through Thomas Stone’s lifetime, though, land remained the preferred means of investing wealth 

and claiming political privileges.
76

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

In private and public letters, Thomas Stone made repeated comments about putting 

other peoples’ interests ahead of his own, as befitted a man of his elevated station and 

virtue. Deflecting the popular image of lawyers as men who profit from others’ “distress” 

and who gain personal advantage by writing self-serving laws, Stone reflected that during 

the Revolutionary War, some “risked everything in the cause of the country.” Those who 

suspended their legal practice to serve in government “sacrificed their interests as lawyers 

in performing their duty as citizens.” This is how Stone saw himself.75

Toward the end of his life, Stone was compelled to defend his ability to govern on 

behalf of the people. In what Gordon Wood has called “the most significant constitutional 

debate of the entire Confederation period,” Maryland’s upper and lower houses opposed 

each other in the winter of 1786–87 over a proposed bill to issue paper money for the relief 

of debtors. Higher taxes to pay down war debt, a shortage of circulating coin, and a fall in 

tobacco prices in November 1785 contributed to the political crisis. Stone and his fellow 

state senators were apprehensive about the state emitting paper money. Opponents of the 

paper money bill cited fears of continuing inflation, which would hurt creditors, and 

dismissed reports about a shortage of specie (gold and silver) in the state. The assembly’s 

measure would hurt Maryland’s ability to attract investment and, to use Stone’s words, 

“derange our commerce.”76

Maryland’s lower house ended the 1786 legislative session early in order to allow 

delegates to appeal directly to constituents. Stone considered the move dangerous and 

divisive. Using language reminiscent of his May 20, 1776 “dye is cast” letter, in which Stone 

claimed to have “absolute Dominion” over his moral principles, the seasoned legislator 

argued for the constitutional necessity of the state senate to be “independent” of the House 

of Delegates and insulated from popular opinion. “Large collected bodies of people” were 

too easily swayed by passion “and hurried into measures inconsistent with their real 

welfare,” Stone spoke in a Senate message to the House of Delegates of January 20, 1787. 

Disinterested men (that is, men of independent fortune and landed wealth) who are unaffected by the “acid & fire” of popular appeals must have a dissenting voice in government, 

he argued. Stone’s position made him vulnerable, though, to the charge that the senate’s 

75 Day, Social Study of Lawyers, 125–33 (126 quote); Thomas Stone’s answer to Charles Carroll of Carrollton’s 

protest, December 25, 1783, entered in Senate proceedings in January 1785, Votes and Proceedings of the Senate 

in the State of Maryland, November Session, 1784.

76 Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 252 (quote); Senate message to the House of Delegates and 

“constituents,” delivered by Thomas Stone, January 5, 1787, Votes and Proceedings of the Senate of the State of 

Maryland, November Session 1786 (quote, 21); Melvin Yazawa, Representative Government and the Revolution: 

The Maryland Constitutional Crisis of 1787 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Edward C. 

Papenfuse, “The Legislative Response to a Costly War: Fiscal Policy and Factional Politics in Maryland, 

1777–1789,” in Sovereign States in an Age of Uncertainty, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert 

(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981), 134–56; Woody Holton, “Did Democracy Cause the 

Recession that Led to the Constitution?” Journal of American History 92, no. 2 (September 2005): 442–69. 
77

Haberdeventure’s Domestic Landscape and Its Contexts

independence meant ignoring the popular will. He felt it necessary during this charged 

political moment to explicitly deny in newspapers that he had any “intention of opposing 

the will of the people” as a senator.77

The mix of local and cosmopolitan elements in Haberdeventure’s architecture and 

landscape reflects Stone’s identity as a native of Charles County, Maryland, and his sensitivity to differences in social rank. Stone defended Maryland’s interests at the national, 

regional, and local level, for instance as a member of the Second Continental Congress in 

Philadelphia in 1776, at the Mount Vernon Conference on the navigation of the Potomac 

River in 1785, and during Maryland’s paper currency debate of 1786–87. Stone’s status as 

an educated man of wealth with prominent family ties gave him entrée into high circles, 

and he solidified his social position by accumulating land, but there remained a sense of 

vulnerability in Stone’s writings. He relied on his family, first and foremost, to help him in 

unprecedented times.

77 Senate message to the House of Delegates delivered by Thomas Stone, January 20, 1787, in Votes and 

Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Maryland, November Session 1786 (quote, 38); Thomas Stone to 

Michael J. Stone, undated (circa 1786–87), The Rosenbach, Philadelphia (quote); Thomas Stone to the Printers, 

March 28, 1787, published in the Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), April 5 and Maryland Journal (Baltimore), 

April 6, and reproduced in Yazawa, Representative Government, 80–87 (quote 85). Thomas Stone also penned a 

letter to George Washington to elicit his support for the Senate’s position (Stone to Washington, January 30, 

1787, and Washington’s reply, February 16, 1787, Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, 4:550, 

5:37–39, in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology from Primary Sources”). The paper money debate receded 

in 1787 with the passage of a Maryland bankruptcy act and the creation of the US Constitution, among other 

causes.

79

CHAPTER TWO

Haberdeventure as

a Stone Family Enterprise

While radicals in Congress advocated a break from Britain in the spring of 1776, 

Stone, like other Maryland political leaders, approached independence more 

cautiously. War with Britain threatened the economic and social stability that 

Stone sought to provide for his family, including his siblings, at his recently established 

plantation. Using the language of sensibility, the sensation of being “overcome with feeling” 

or “the surge of strong emotion” that genteel people cultivated, Stone wrote in his May 20, 

1776, “dye is cast” letter of the forces that tugged him to leave Congress and return to 

Maryland: “My feelings are too keen, my Concern for those whose happiness I wish to 

secure too exquisite & my Constitution too stiff to allow of my Continuance” as a delegate 

in Philadelphia “with tolerable Ease to myself.” The persons whose “happiness” Stone 

wished “to secure” included his sisters Grace Stone and Catherine Scott, Scott’s son 

Alexander, and his brothers Michael Jenifer Stone and Walter Stone in addition to his wife 

and three children.1

Haberdeventure was a family enterprise, with multiple stakeholders to diminish the 

financial risk posed by death, weather, market fluctuations, and war. It has been long 

known that Stone shared his residence at Haberdeventure with his full siblings. Less 

attention has been given to the ways in which the siblings, as well as Stone’s brother-in-law 

and neighbor Gustavus Richard Brown, contributed to Haberdeventure, and how their 

own economic fortunes were tied to the profitability of the plantation and to Stone’s legal 

work. The establishment of Haberdeventure helped Stone and his siblings sustain and 

increase their inherited wealth in enslaved people. Stone included his extended family in 

Haberdeventure’s purposes but took measures to protect his gains in wealth and social 

standing to pass on to his heirs.

1 Bushman, Refinement of America, 81–82 (quotes); Thomas Stone to (James Hollyday?), May 20, 1776, in 

Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, eds. Smith et al., 4:47–54, and reproduced in Jefferson, “Thomas 

Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources.” 
Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

80

Birth Order and Inheritance

To understand Thomas Stone’s relationships with his siblings, including his sense of 

obligation to their support—and to understand Haberdeventure as a family enterprise—it 

is helpful to review the birth order in Thomas Stone’s family and its implications for 

Thomas Stone around the time he built a residence at Haberdeventure. When Thomas 

purchased the land in December 1770, his parents, David and Elizabeth (Jenifer) Stone, 

and elder brother of full blood, Frederick, were alive. Thomas, it is believed, was the second 

child born to David and Elizabeth Stone. Thomas’s younger siblings were, in the order of 

their births, Catherine, John Hoskins, Michael Jenifer, Daniel Jenifer, Betty Ann, Walter, 

and Grace. Thomas was about twenty-seven years of age when he purchased the core of 

Haberdeventure plantation in 1770, and his youngest sibling, Grace, was about twelve. 

Thomas had elder half-brothers and half-sisters by his father’s first marriage, but his 

closest bonds were to his full-blooded siblings.2

Thomas likely had no expectation of inheriting land from his father. His grandfather, Thomas Stone (1677–1722), in his will bequeathed his dwelling plantation to David, 

his only son, and “his heirs forever.” Such wording assumed that David’s sons would be 

preferred over daughters, and when David died intestate (that is, without a will), his eldest 

son Samuel inherited all of his father’s land by primogeniture. The inheritance of land by 

the eldest son was one of a number of English inheritance practices that Parliament codified with a Statute of Distributions in 1670 and Maryland enacted into law. The use of the 

phrase “his heirs forever” might be interpreted as entail, which meant that David could not 

sell or bequeath the land and it would descend in perpetuity to “descendants by the rules of 

primogeniture.” By these rules, the eldest son inherits the land, and if he should die without heirs, the next oldest son inherits, and so forth. If there were no sons, “daughters 

inherit jointly, and an estate is divided,” as happened with Thomas Stone’s heirs Margaret 

and Mildred. “Otherwise, only one person inherits.” David’s principal heir, Samuel Stone, 

however, directed in his will of 1778 that the land be divided between two of his three sons, 

demonstrating one of two possible scenarios: either the Poynton Manor estate had not 

been entailed by Samuel’s grandfather, or Samuel sympathized with a legal reform 

2 Most of Thomas Stone’s siblings’ birth years are not recorded. However, assuming a two-year gap in ages 

amongst the siblings, and given Daniel Jenifer Stone’s birth in or around 1752, then Betty Ann was born about 

1754, Walter around 1756, and Grace circa 1758. See Appendix 2, “Thomas Stone Lineage,” for information 

about each of the siblings at a glance. Thomas Stone appears not to have had the close social and emotional ties 

to his half-siblings as he did with his full siblings. He did not name his half-siblings in his will, for example. 
81

Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

movement to loosen the restrictions on entailed estates. (Shortly after the Revolutionary 

War, Maryland passed an entail reform law that made the conveyance of entailed land in 

fee simple possible without expensive legal proceedings.)3

An entail on the Poynton Manor estate may have been one reason why David Stone 

did not draw up a will before he died, despite having a large family, a considerable estate, 

and more than one lawyer among his sons: “Once [landed] property was entailed, no heir 

could sell it or bequeath it in a will.” This meant that “an entail, once made, did not need to 

appear in any subsequent deed or will. It disappeared from the historical record but continued to operate.”4

If, for the sake of argument, we accept that David Stone anticipated that all of his 

landholdings would descend to his eldest son by his first marriage, he may have contributed to the development of a “spin-off” plantation—Haberdeventure—to provide a measure of financial security to his family with his second wife. (Indeed, the well-connected 

Elizabeth, sister of the prominent officeholder Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, may have 

insisted upon this.) A pair of inscriptions on opposite ends of the main block of 

Haberdeventure, on the south (or terraced garden) side, provokes us to explore this possibility. Carved into the bricks are “D. Stone Avg 1772.” One architectural historian posits 

that a master builder in the family with the name “D. Stone” made these marks. But it is just 

3 Admittedly, the claim that Thomas Stone’s will of 1727 created an entail on his dwelling plantation may not 

have stood up in a court of law. Observe the editors of Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book, “The wording of 

wills produced difficult and contentious cases when questions were raised as to whether such wording constituted 

the creation of a fee tail or fee simple. Clarifying the distinction brought many cases to” Thomas Jefferson (D. 

Konig and M. Zuckert, eds. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019], 185n). By the time that David Stone’s 

grandsons, Walter Hanson Stone and David Stone, drew up a deed to divide their grandfather’s estate in 1788, in 

accordance with their father Samuel’s will, Maryland had passed an entail reform law (in 1783) allowing entailed 

estates to be conveyed or sold in fee simple without a common law action of common recovery which bore a 

“heavy expence and great inconvenience” (Walter Hanson Stone to David Stone, 1788, Charles County Land 

Records, D#4:310, MSA; Hanson’s Laws of Maryland, November 1782–January 1783 session, Chapter 23, in 

Archives of Maryland, 203: 341 [quote]). Common recovery is “a conveyance of entailed land to an accomplice 

in fee simple, with a third party paid to provide a false warranty of title” (Priest, “Creating an American Property 

Law,” 408n). Thomas Stone did not attend the legislative session that passed the “Act concerning estates tail” 

(Votes and Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Maryland, November session 1782; Papenfuse, BDML, 

2:787).

The prevalence of entail in the colonial Chesapeake is a matter of debate. Lois Green Carr argued that 

primogeniture became less common among testators between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 

(“Inheritance in the Colonial Chesapeake” in Women in the Age of the American Revolution, eds. Ronald 

Hoffman and Peter J. Albert [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989], 155–208, esp. 155, 163). 

Thereafter Holly Brewer found entailed estates more widespread in eighteenth-century Virginia than previously 

believed (“Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: ‘Ancient Feudal Restraints’ and Revolutionary Reform,” 

William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54 [Apr. 1997]:307–46, quote 314). See also Priest, “Creating an American 

Property Law,” 396n.

On the reform and abolition of entail in the former British American colonies, see Brewer, “Entailing 

Aristocracy” and Claire Priest, “The End of Entail: Information, Institutions, and Slavery in the American 

Revolutionary Period,” Law and History 33, no. 2 (May 2015): 277–320. English law protected entailed estates 

from seizure for debt from unsecured creditors, persons who lent credit without explicitly obtaining collateral in 

land. Priest describes “entailed lands” as “islands of protected wealth” (ibid., 280). 

4 Brewer, “Entailing Aristocracy,” 313 (quote), 315 (quote). Thomas Stone may have been the only one of 

David Stone’s sons who had passed the bar by the time David died in 1773, but John Hoskins Stone and Michael 

Jenifer Stone were also lawyers (Papenfuse, BDML, 2:784–86). 
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Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

as likely that Thomas Stone’s father inscribed his name to assert his association with the 

property. David Stone, as a large slaveholder, had the resources to supply enslaved labor to 

build the house and landscape its grounds. He may have approached the property as an 

investment, knowing Thomas’s abilities in estate management (which are discussed in 

Chapter 5) and the population pressures in the area where Poynton Manor was located, 

which was in its fifth generation of colonial settlement and bounded by water without the 

possibility of westward expansion.5

Thomas Stone came of age at a time when advanced inheritances were becoming 

increasingly common among wealthier households in the Chesapeake. American-born 

Anglo residents married earlier, lived longer, and had larger families than their immigrant 

forebears, resulting in the development of new strategies to provide for children somewhat 

equitably but maintain core holdings intact. The sons of the immensely wealthy Robert 

“King” Carter (1663–1732) of Virginia, for instance, “succumbed to the widespread tendency among elite families after midcentury to escalate the portions parents gave their 

children and to advance such portions earlier in the heirs’ lives.... Most of the Carters felt 

increasingly obligated to set up their sons with plantations and enslaved workforces and 

even with fashionable new brick dwellings, if not as soon as the sons turned twenty-one, at 

least by the time they married.”6

David Stone, with a large family of thirteen children by two wives to provide for, 

may have been eager to see Haberdeventure established to provide a measure of social and 

financial security for nine children by his second wife. Likely anticipating the distribution 

of the people he held in bondage among his heirs, as was the custom in Maryland, land was 

more difficult to come by. On the other hand, David Stone may have already spent a considerable sum on Thomas Stone’s education at a local grammar school and in Annapolis 

5 Carr, “Inheritance in the Colonial Chesapeake,” 169 (quote); Wollon, “Historic Structure Report for Habre De 

Venture,” 3, 20–1. Rivoire, who wrote a book on Charles County domestic architecture, posits that Thomas 

Stone’s father David Stone inscribed the “D. Stone” on the bricks on the south facade of Haberdeventure’s center 

block or that a builder of the same name made the marks (“Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 

p. 62).

6 Carr, “Inheritance in the Colonial Chesapeake;” Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 525 (quote); 

Jean B. Lee, “Land and Labor: Parental Bequest Practices in Charles County, Maryland 1732–1783,” in Colonial 

Chesapeake Society, eds. Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (Chapel Hill: University of 

North Carolina Press, 1988), 306–41.
83

Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

and encouraged Thomas to support himself after his schooling. In this case, any resources 

that Margaret Brown brought to her marriage with Thomas Stone would have been valuable to the aspiring lawyer.7

Whether or not Thomas Stone grew up on an entailed estate, he inherited a set of 

assumptions from English law about the duties and privileges of male heirs. Hinting at his 

own dynastic ambitions, Thomas Stone in his own last will and testament bequeathed the 

entirety of his real estate to his only son Frederick and Frederick’s “heirs forever.” Thomas 

asked his executors to give his two daughters cash— £2,000 in Maryland currency each—

and specific items of personal property, including seven enslaved people (known as Bob, 

Violette “and all her children,” Bett, Charity, Phil, young Clare, and Sall). The remaining 

personal property was to go to Frederick, who thereby inherited the majority of the 

enslaved labor force, made up of eighteen or so enslaved people. Attesting to Stone’s belief 

in the compatibility of slavery and democracy, the Maryland representative voted in 

Congress with other southern delegates to oppose the prohibition of slavery in a proposed 

plan for temporary government in Western territory in 1784.8

Thomas Stone’s ambitions for his legacies to his children were not met in their 

entirety; his executors, citing insufficient funds, did not give the daughters their cash 

portions or pay for the education that Thomas wanted his son to have. But Stone still 

managed to give his son the advantage of a large landed estate, improving upon what his 

own situation had been as a young man. (After Frederick’s premature death in 1793, 

Thomas’s daughters split the land between them and became large landowners.) In late 

seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, “gentry status was...linked to the 

7 Papenfuse, BMDL, 2:787. Marlene Elizabeth Heck offers an example of a well-to-do father “commissioning” 

a house in the Virginia Piedmont for a newly married son in 1785 in “Building Status: Pavilioned Dwellings in 

Virginia,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 6 (1997): 48. Other planters who gave their home plantations 

to their eldest male child nonetheless wanted their younger children to have some means of support. Dr. Gustavus 

Brown (d. 1762), for example, bequeathed his home plantation, Rich Hill, to his eldest male child. Brown’s first 

(and only) son by his second marriage, Gustavus Richard Brown, inherited a secondary plantation called 

Middleton. (See the discussion of Middleton in this chapter.) In 1784, Robert Brent Sr. of Charles County, 

anticipating that his land would descend to his son Robert Jr., set aside for the support of six unmarried daughters 

“a dwelling house, a tobacco house, and kitchen or garden, a quantity of good, arable land not exceeding 30 acres 

for corn, 12 acres for tobacco ground, and 12 acres of good land for small grain...with pasturage for 6 horses, 16 

cattle, 20 sheep, and 20 hogs, and privilege of cutting fire wood” (Charles County Land Records Z#3:47, MSA, 

transcribed in “Robert Brent [1759–1811],” Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s 

Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us). A shortage of desirable land in Charles County may 

have encouraged several of Thomas Stone’s brothers to pursue a living through trade. Frederick Stone entered a 

trading partnership with Robert Townshend Hooe and Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer (Lee, The Price of 

Nationhood, 40–41). Another brother, Walter Stone, partnered with his sibling John Hoskins Stone, a merchant in 

Annapolis, Port Tobacco, and later Baltimore (Papenfuse, BDML, 2: 784–5).

8 Will of Thomas Stone, Appendix 3; Washington C. Ford et al., eds., Journals of the Continental Congress 

1774–1789, 34 vols. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1904–1937), 26: 247 (April 19, 1784); Robert F. 

Berkhofer Jr., “Jefferson, the Ordinance of 1784, and the Origins of the American Territorial System,” William 

and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 29, no. 2 (April 1972): 231–62. For another perspective on the Ordinance of 1784, 

see Julian Boyd, “Plan for Government of the Western Territory,” editorial note in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 

6:581–600. On the vote on the clause to prohibit slavery in the western territory after 1800, see Thomas Jefferson 

to James Madison, April 25, 1784, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 7:118.
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Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

ownership of land sufficient to ensure financial independence for the eldest son of each 

generation,” the phrase “financial independence” meaning here “independence from most 

kinds of work.” To achieve and maintain gentry status, Thomas Stone enlisted his family as 

his parents may have encouraged him to do.9

Stone Family Members at Haberdeventure 

1770 1771 1772 1773 1774 1775 1776 1777 1778 1779 1780 1781 1782 1783 1784 1785 1786 1787

Thomas, Margaret, and Margaret and Mildred Stone

Catherine (Stone) & Alexander Scott

Grace Stone

Michael J. Stone

Chart showing conjectured Stone family residence periods at Haberdeventure

One of the knots in the tangled weave of Haberdeventure’s history is the overlapping 

residences of a number of Thomas Stone’s brothers and sisters at Haberdeventure during 

Thomas and Margaret Stone’s lifetimes (and for several years beyond). Previous reports on 

Haberdeventure have made the house seem crowded with Thomas Stone’s siblings of whole 

blood (the offspring of David Stone and his second wife, Elizabeth Jenifer Stone) sharing 

space with Thomas, Margaret, and their three children in addition to enslaved domestic 

servants. Also, prior reports overlooked the contributions of white women—namely those 

of Margaret and her sisters-in-law—to the household, economic or otherwise.10

9 Michael Jenifer Stone’s answer, December 16, 1807, in Alexander Scott v. Michael Jenifer Stone et al, and 

Thomas Stone’s Estate, 1805, Chancery Court, Chancery Papers, case 4647, MSA; Hunt, The Middling Sort, 209 

(quote).

10 Rivoire’s “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings” offers brief biographies of individual Stone 

family household members. 
85

Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

However, by loosening the knot and examining each strand closely, not only do 

individual stories emerge, but we gain a better understanding of the family dynamic. 

Thomas Stone, as an elder brother, took seriously his obligations to care for and protect his 

younger siblings. At the same time, he expected them to contribute to their own support to 

protect his legacy to his children. In his May 20, 1776, letter in which he wrote, “the dye is 

cast,” in anticipation of armed conflict with Britain, Thomas Stone expressed his “Concern 

for those whose happiness I wish to secure.” Stone had in mind not only the well-being of 

his wife and children, but also that of his siblings of full blood and their dependents. The 

careful piecing together of documentary evidence allows us to see kinship networks at 

work in sustaining the Stone family’s gentry status.

Margaret (Brown) Stone

A discussion of family strategies must include marriage. In late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, “marriage was, for all ranks, the main means of transferring 

property, occupational status, personal contacts, money, tools, livestock, and women 

across generations and kin groups.” In the English colonies, marriage was also a way of 

mitigating risks such as early death, loss of a ship at sea, and/or a debtor’s default in payment. Because of the reliance on kin for trustworthy associates and access to credit in the 

early modern British Atlantic world, “marriage often cemented alliances between families 

with close business interests.”11

What were those business interests for the Stone and Brown families? J. Richard 

Rivoire suggests that Gustavus Richard Brown (1747–1804), Thomas Stone’s brother-inlaw and Margaret (Brown) Stone’s only sibling of full blood, backed Thomas Stone’s real 

estate purchases. Thomas Stone, in turn, provided legal expertise, winning, for instance, a 

1772 land eviction case that freed up property that Brown acquired and renamed Rose 

Hill. The particulars of this case merit review, but no doubt Stone’s legal knowledge (and 

political standing) was useful for property acquisition. Earlier evidence of the men’s 

cooperation is a 1769 Provincial Court deed for recovery of land, by which Brown docked 

the entail on a seven-hundred-acre plantation in Durham Parish, Charles County, called 

Middleton. Thomas Stone and his brother Frederick were parties to the deed. Seven years 

later, Brown sold Middleton and an adjoining property, 1,263 acres in total, for the remarkable sum of £2,368 sterling. (As a point of comparison, Stone paid £400 sterling for 442 

acres of Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains, or less than £1 sterling per acre. The 

enlarged Middleton plantation, and its improvements, sold for twice the value per acre.) In 

Chapter 4, I contend that proceeds from Middleton’s sale were used to support Stone’s 

acquisition of a grist mill. As evidence of continuing cooperation between Brown and 

11 Hunt, The Middling Sort, 151; Mathias, “Risk, Credit, and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise,” 19 (quote).
86

Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

Stone in the real estate market, in August 1787, Port Tobacco merchant Robert Fergusson 

“wrote to the Doctor,” presumably a reference to Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown, about a 

property that Judith Chase reportedly wanted to sell to Thomas Stone. At the time, Chase 

held part of Beech Neck where her former home (a house known today as Locust Grove) 

sat, just northeast of Haberdeventure. Beech Neck lay in the vicinity of Addition to May 

Day, a tract purchased by Thomas Stone in 1779 and expanded by his heirs. (See the map of 

Thomas Stone’s landholdings in Figure 5.)12

By establishing neighboring plantations, Gustavus Richard Brown and Thomas 

Stone may have intended to pool their resources at a time at a time when plantations in the 

Chesapeake were growing bigger at the end of the eighteenth century. Surviving documents 

do not indicate a sharing of free or bonded labor, tools, animals, or land in Stone’s lifetime. 

By the 1820s and 1830s, though, as Haberdeventure and Rose Hill matured, the adjacent 

estates “frequently shared” enslaved labor, “particularly those who possessed carpentry 

skills.” The 1825 marriage of William Briscoe Stone, Thomas Stone’s nephew and occupant 

of Haberdeventure, to Caroline Brown, Gustavus Richard Brown’s granddaughter, sustained overlapping kinship and business ties between the two properties in the nineteenth 

century.13

Thomas Stone and Gustavus Richard Brown were close companions in their adult 

lives, and it is tempting to speculate that their friendship reached back to their boyhood in 

Charles County. Brown’s father, Dr. Gustavus Brown (d. 1762), had treated residents of 

Poynton Manor as early as 1728, long before their births. At some point in their relationship, Stone must have been made aware of the prejudice that the English often harbored 

against Scots, whose contributions to British overseas expansion are too easily overlooked. 

Scottish ethnic identity ran strong in the Brown family, influencing the education and 

12 Rivoire, “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 26, 29n16; “Gustavus Richard Brown (1747–

1804),” Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us; Provincial Court Land Records DD#4:1765–1770, MSA, in Archives of Maryland 725:615–18; 

Robert Fergusson to “Mrs Judith Chaise,” August 6, 1787, John Glassford and Company Papers, Box 62, Library 

of Congress. The population census in the 1782 tax list, combined with property descriptions in the 1783 tax list, 

suggest that Chase had moved from Beech Neck to Frankum on the Potomac River (MSA). Dr. Gustavus Richard 

Brown’s father had named as the heir to Middleton Margaret’s brother “and the male heirs of his body, lawfully 

begotten, forever” (transcription of Gustavus Brown’s will [1762] in Sons of the Revolution in State of Virginia

Quarterly Magazine 2 [January 1923]: 24–25). A 1784 advertisement described Middleton as having “a large 

dwelling house, with brick chimnies, four rooms below, with fire-places, and a large passage, and four rooms 

above, one of which has a fire-place; the house is in good repair, a part of the plaister excepted; a framed kitchen 

with a brick chimney, good milk, meat, and corn houses; a stable, two new tobacco houses, a new barn, and two 

quarters; an orchard of excellent fruit, and some trees of the best heart, May-duke, and carnation cherries. The 

soil produces well, wheat, tobacco, Indian corn, &c” (Maryland Gazette [Annapolis], September 23). Residents 

on the property, according to the tax list from the year prior, included twenty people held in bondage (eight 

children, four prime male hands, two prime female hands, and six men and women above the ages of forty-five 

and thirty-six, respectively) (1783 tax assessment, MSA). 

13 Rivoire, “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 42–43. Sources on increasing plantation size 

include Sarson, “Landlessness and Tenancy”; Jean B. Lee, “The Problem of Slave Community in the EighteenthCentury Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 43, no. 3 (July 1986): 333–61; and Morgan, Slave 

Counterpoint.
87

Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

choice of marriage partners among the elder Dr. Brown’s children. Stone’s father-in-law 

identified as a Scottish laird (landlord). Rents from his landed property in Scotland paid 

for the education of his two sons, Richard and Gustavus Richard, in Edinburgh, and 

according to his will, Scottish bonds and securities were to finance his youngest daughter’s 

dowry. Richard Brown, who entered the clergy, married in Scotland. Gustavus Richard 

Brown, who studied medicine, wedded a Scottish-American like himself. Of the nine 

daughters born to the elder Dr. Gustavus Brown (d. 1762), all but three married native 

Scots in Maryland and Virginia. Margaret Brown’s decision to marry into a family of 

English descent, the Stones, represents something of a departure from her family’s pattern 

of marrying Scots and Scottish-Americans. (Margaret also appears to have rejected the life 

of a wife to a minister or physician that seven of her eight half-sisters pursued.) The Brown 

family’s close ties to Scotland, whose migrants tended to be loyal to the British empire, may 

have informed Thomas Stone’s reluctance to support the American colonies’ independence in 1776, though this is entirely speculative.14

Brown, whom Stone named as an executor of his estate, was in Stone’s presence 

during at least two major episodes of Stone’s life. One time was in Philadelphia in May 

1776, while Congress deliberated over forming independent states. In his well-known May 

20, 1776, letter penned in Philadelphia, Stone wrote, “The Illness of a wife I esteem most 

dearly preys most severely on my Spirits, she is I thank God something better this 

14 Payment to “Dr. Brown” in administrative account for Thomas Stone, September 8, 1728, Charles County, 

Register of Wills, Administrative Accounts 1708–1738, ff. 339–40 (MSA); “Rev. Richard Brown” in Horace 

Edwin Hayden, Virginia Genealogies: A Genealogy of the Glassell Family of Scotland and Virginia (WilkesBarre, PA: E. B. Yordy, 1891), 164; entries for the daughters of Gustavus Brown (d. 1762) in Early Colonial 

Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us. Dr. 

Gustavus Brown (in Maryland by 1708; d. 1762) was part of an exodus of “sojourners,” single males from 

Scotland who sought their fortune abroad with the intention of attaining sufficient wealth to buy an estate in their 

home country (Alan L. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake,

1740–1800 [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992], chapter 1; Hayden, Virginia Genealogies, 147). In his 

will, Dr. Brown identified himself as “practitioner in medicines and Laird of Mainside and House Byres, in 

Scotland.” Rather than return permanently to Scotland, though, Brown kept his family in Maryland and collected 

rents from his Scottish estate (Toner, “A Sketch of the Life of Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown,” 24 [quote] and 

passim). The ethnic background of Margaret (Brown) Stone and Gustavus Richard Brown’s mother, Margaret 

(Black Boyd) Brown, is unknown. Jean B. Lee contends that prejudice against Scots in Charles County kept them 

out of high local offices (Price of Nationhood, 21, 53). Educated Scottish men held respectable positions, though, 

as clergy, physicians, and educators around the mid-Atlantic.

Landsman comments that Scots who came to British America in the mid-eighteenth century (the spouses of 

Margaret’s half-sisters) came “at a time when maturing American communities were seeking to define in positive 

terms their relationship to metropolitan culture and authority” (“Introduction,” Nation and Province in the First 

British Empire, 26 [emphasis mine]). This strengthening of ties between colony and metropole on the eve of the 

American Revolution, has captured the attention of scholars of politics and consumer behavior, among others. 

See, for example, T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of the Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American 

Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, and 

David J. Silverman, eds., Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic (Philadelphia: University of 

Pennsylvania Press, 2015). In a public display of loyalty to the crown in August 1775, “Scotchmen at Port 

Tobacco & Piscataway” put down their arms to decline serving in the militia (George Washington to Lund 

Washington, August 20, 1775, Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, Revolutionary War Series, 1:334). 

The organization of Maryland’s militia companies that month charged political differences between loyalists and 

patriots (Lee, Price of Nationhood, 121–22). 
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afternoon, and this Intermission of her Disorder affords me Time to write to you. The 

Doctr. thinks she is in a fair way of being well in a few days. I wish I thought so.” Though 

Stone does not name the doctor, it is likely to have been Stone’s brother-in-law, Dr. 

Gustavus Richard Brown (who may have accompanied his sister to oversee her smallpox 

inoculation prior to her entrance into the city, about which more will be said shortly). Eight 

days after Stone penned his letter, the celebrated Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush 

had tea with a friend from medical school, whom he referred to as “Dr. Brown.” Rush, it is 

believed, was visiting with Gustavus Richard Brown; Rush and Brown both received their 

medical degrees from Edinburgh in 1768 and subsequently spent time together in London. 

A second pivotal time that Brown was with Thomas Stone was when George Washington 

hosted commissioners from Maryland and Virginia at Mount Vernon to negotiate an 

interstate commercial agreement in March 1785. Brown did not have an official role at the 

meeting (so far as is known), which raises questions about why he came in the company of 

George Mason IV’s son, George Jr. (Thomas’s brother, Walter, also visited during the 

Mount Vernon conference.)15

A high value placed on knowledge and education may have been one reason for the 

bond between Thomas Stone and Gustavus Richard Brown. Stone at the end of his life 

owned nearly eight hundred volumes of books plus pamphlets, and he was appointed as a 

visitor of St. John’s College of Annapolis. Gustavus Richard Brown studied medicine at the 

University of Edinburgh. Remarkably, five of Gustavus Richard Brown’s and Margaret 

Brown’s eight elder half-sisters married Anglican clergy, who were among the most educated of men in the colonial Chesapeake. Another half-sister married two doctors in 

succession.16

Having elder half-sisters in prominent community roles as the wives of clergymen 

and physicians must have made an impression upon Margaret. The women likely had 

sought-after skills in healing and caring for the sick from their experience of growing up in 

a physician’s household; their father, Dr. Gustavus Brown, practiced medicine in Charles 

County for half a century, and the long list of creditors to his estate at his death attests to 

his wide circle of patients. Because physicians of the stature of her father and her brother, 

Gustavus Richard Brown, were relatively rare in the eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for ill and dying to consult with “lay practitioners,” including clergymen. Ministers 

“were well read, had medical books in their libraries, and often wrote about health and 

15 Thomas Stone to [James Holladay?], May 20, 1776, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, eds. Smith et al.,

4:49; Benjamin Rush to “Mrs. Rush,” May 29, 1776, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2 vols. 

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951) 1:99–100; George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of 

Benjamin Rush: His “Travels through Life” Together with His Commonplace Book for 1789–1813 (Princeton, 

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), 38–45, 66; “Benjamin Rush,” Dictionary of American Biography (New 

York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936); Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, Diaries 4:108 (March 26 

and 27, 1785); Kate Mason Rowland, “The Mount Vernon Conference,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and 

Biography 11 (1887): 423, in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources.” 

16 Probate inventories of Thomas Stone, Appendix 4; Papenfuse, BDML, 2:787.
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Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

medical treatments.” Clergymen’s wives, already accustomed to “the traditional female role 

of home nursing,” shared in the work. Abigail Adams’s mother, Elizabeth Smith, for example, a minister’s wife in Massachusetts, checked “on the health of congregation members, 

visited the sick regularly, and offered nursing care and home remedies when needed.” 

Abigail learned in her educated family not only how to “read and write” but also “how to 

treat many common illnesses at home using a store of medicinal tonics and herbs.”17

Margaret’s father, Dr. Gustavus Brown, who died when she was eleven years old, 

directed in his will that her education be overseen by his widow, also named Margaret, and 

his eldest daughter, Frances (Brown) Moncure (1713–70), the wife of Rev. John Moncure of 

Overwharton Parish, Stafford County, Virginia. The fact that Margaret’s future daughters 

later married two of the Moncure’s grandsons lends some support to the idea that 

Margaret did join her half-sister’s household in Virginia, at least for some time. In the 

Moncure household, the adolescent would have been in genteel surroundings; the 

Moncures were close friends with George Mason IV of Gunston Hall. A genteel education 

for a girl included the polite arts, such as music, dancing, and fine sewing. Undoubtedly 

Margaret also would have been tutored in the practical skills of housewifery and managing 

an enslaver’s household.18

No letters by Margaret Stone survive, and the precise date of her marriage to 

Thomas Stone is uncertain. Nor do we have proof that the £300 sterling that Margaret’s 

father, Dr. Gustavus Brown, wanted to provide for his youngest daughter was paid to her. 

The money was to be raised out of bonds in Scotland, and any debts owed by Dr. Brown’s 

estate to creditors would have had precedence over Margaret’s portion according to 

17 Elaine G. Breslaw, Tools of the Trade: Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic (New York: New York University 

Press, 2012), 54 (quote); Jeanne E. Abrams, Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in 

Sickness and in Health (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 43, 120 (quotes); final administrative 

account of Gustavus Brown, July 28, 1768, Charles County Administrative Accounts 1759–70, f. 346–51, MSA.

18 “Frances Browne (1713–70),” “John Moncure (1714–64),” and “Francis Moncure (1745–1800),” in Early 

Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us; 

Rutland, ed., Papers of George Mason 1:lxxx, 60. Travers Daniel Jr. and John Moncure Daniel, who married 

Mildred and Margaret Stone respectively, were born by Frances Moncure (1745–1800), the oldest daughter of 

Rev. John Moncure and Frances (Brown). The Virginia lawyer John Mercer, who had hired a Scottish tutor to 

teach mathematics, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, “or any other learned languages” to his younger sons, felt no need to 

educate his daughters to the same academic standards: “The girls might do very well under their mother’s 

direction, but the boys cannot do without a Tutor” (Mulkearn, comp. and ed., George Mercer Papers, 199–201 

[quote 201]). 
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English common law. During his lifetime, Dr. Brown gave dowries of £300 sterling each to 

at least two of Margaret’s older sisters and their husbands, which indicates that a marriage 

gift of this amount had strong precedent in the family.19

Though we lack her voice, evidence of Margaret’s material life demonstrates that 

she shared with her husband a sense of belonging to a “leisured squirearchy” that elevated 

itself above the “working classes.” Margaret was visually different, with a high headdress—

recall her husband’s order for a carriage tall enough to accommodate his wife’s headdress—and a wardrobe valued at £80 current money. Margaret also was adept at using 

objects in performances of her gentility. Admittedly the probate inventory of 

Haberdeventure from January 1788 reveals little in this regard; the spinet, a keyboard 

instrument that females played, is one of the few indications of the social life of the house. 

The inventory of the Stones’ Annapolis house is much more revealing. The house appears 

to have been equipped to entertain dozens of people at a time with individualized serving 

and dining utensils. The presence of fifty chairs plus a couch, along with forty-two cups 

with saucers, suggests that company was a part of the life of the household. Eleven green 

Windsor chairs indicate that entertaining occurred out of doors in the garden. The 

Madeira, Hock, and claret wine kept on hand could be dispensed among seventeen wine 

glasses, and punch served in the large china bowl.20

Margaret did not do the work of entertaining on her own; five enslaved domestic 

servants were documented at the Annapolis house in early 1788, and more help could be 

hired. Margaret used servants to help her provide the hospitality that was expected in a 

genteel household. If Margaret had a chronic illness, as has been asserted, she may have 

been particularly reliant on support from other people to fulfill her responsibilities.

According to an account published fairly close to her lifetime—less than forty years 

after her death—Margaret underwent inoculation for smallpox by “mercurial treatment” 

to protect her from that dread disease during her stay in Philadelphia with her husband in 

19 Toner, “A Sketch of the Life of Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown,” 27, 37. The two sisters who are known to have 

received the £300 dowries are Ann, who married first Samuel Clagett, and Jane, wife of Rev. Isaac Campbell. A 

third, Frances, who married Rev. John Moncure, received an advance of an unknown amount. Rev. Moncure in 

his will referred to his wife’s portion from her father “intended to prevent my Estate being anyway affected by a 

marriage settlement,” adding that this portion was “never legally executed or recorded.” See “Anne Browne 

(1732–1800),” “Jane Browne (1728–after 1784),” and “Frances Browne (1713–70)” in Early Colonial Settlers of 

Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us. Sanderson in his 

brief biography of Thomas Stone wrote that Margaret Brown had a dowry of £1,000 sterling but did not give his 

source (Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, 9 vols. [Philadelphia: R. W. Pomeroy, 

1824], 9:330). Elie Vallette described the proper way to administer an estate, including the payment of a decedent’s debts before legacies, in The Deputy Commissary’s Guide... (Annapolis, 1774), 1–53.

20 Carson, Face Value, 33 (quote); probate inventories of Thomas Stone, Appendix 4. On green Windsor chairs 

as garden furniture, see Brandon Brame Fortune, “‘From the World Escaped’: Peale’s Portrait of William Smith 

and His Grandson,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 25, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 587–615, esp. 601.
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1776. The published account reports that Margaret’s health “gradually declined” after 1776 

and suggests that her “rheumatism” and “paleness” were unfortunate side effects of the 

“mercurial treatment.”21

This account of Margaret’s lingering illness should be reviewed critically. While it is 

very possible that Margaret was inoculated for smallpox upon arriving in Philadelphia—

Martha Washington, wife of George Washington, underwent inoculation in Philadelphia at 

roughly the same time, in late May and early June of 1776, when she came to the city—we 

should be cautious about the biographer John Sanderson’s simple association between “the 

mercurial treatment” and Margaret’s long-term health. To describe the smallpox inoculation procedure briefly, fluid drawn “from the pox of a smallpox sufferer was applied to an 

incision in the arm or leg of someone who had not yet had the disease.” Inoculation 

“caused a case of genuine smallpox, but one that was almost always considerably milder 

than smallpox caught ‘naturally.’” In the 1770s it was commonplace for those undergoing 

the procedure to prepare for several weeks, during which time the intended inoculate 

would undergo “purging, bleeding, and a limited diet, all intended to rid the body of 

excessive or corrupted humors before smallpox was introduced.” A doctor would assess a 

person’s constitution before prescribing the appropriate dose of mercury in the form of 

calomel (mercurous chloride) for purging. Mercury might also be given after inoculation, 

before smallpox presented itself in its gentler form. Contemporaries were aware of mercury’s hazards such as loose teeth, and it is worth exploring if by the time Sanderson wrote 

his biography of Stone in the early 1820s, public opinion discouraged the use of mercury, 

thus coloring Sanderson’s history.22

Smallpox was a major public health concern in 1776, though, with native-born 

Americans particularly vulnerable to the disease and the presence of British military forces 

increasing the risk of infection. Margaret’s brother, Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown, opened 

an inoculation hospital on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, opposite Charles County, 

21 J. Sanderson, “Thomas Stone and Samuel Chase,” in Biography of the Signers to the Declaration of 

Independence, 9 vols. (Philadelphia: R. W. Pomeroy, 1824), 9:332. This appears to be the first published account 

of Margaret (Brown) Stone’s illness, used repeatedly thereafter. Wearmouth, for example, writes in 1988 Historic 

Resource Study of Haberdeventure (Part I, pp. 15–16), that after Margaret Stone was inoculated “by the use of 

mercurial treatment against smallpox” in Philadelphia, 1776, “her entire system apparently was poisoned...and 

she reacted in a very serious and painful way, suffering from arthritis in its most debilitating form.” Wearmouth 

cites as his source J. Thomas Scharf’s History of Maryland, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1879), 2:235, which quotes 

verbatim from Sanderson.

22 Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, Revolutionary War Series, 4:172n5; Sara Stidstone Gronim, 

“Imagining Inoculation: Smallpox, the Body, and Social Relations of Healing in the Eighteenth Century, Bulletin 

of the History of Medicine 80 (Summer 2006): 247–68 (quotes 248, 257); Whitman M. Reynolds, “Inoculation 

for the Smallpox in Colonial America,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 22 (May–June 1948): 273–76; 

Deborah Brunton, “Pox Brittanica: Smallpox Inoculation in Britain, 1721–1830,” PhD diss., University of 

Pennsylvania, 1990, pp. 77–90, 100–101. Martha Washington was inoculated for smallpox “the day she arrived 

in Philadelphia” (Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, Revolutionary War Series, 4:352n3). Abrams 

recounts John Adams’ experience with smallpox inoculation in 1760s Massachusetts, including loose teeth, in 

Revolutionary Medicine, 123–24. See also Jennifer Van Horn, “George Washington’s Dentures: Disability, 

Deception, and the Republican Body,” Early American Studies 14 (Winter 2016): 20.
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Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

in June 1776. Nine months later, Thomas Stone informed his uncle that he was inoculating 

his “family,” a word that could encompass enslaved people. He wrote to Daniel of St. 

Thomas Jenifer in March 1777, “Upon my return from Annapolis I found it absolutely 

necessary to inoculate for the smallpox to prevent my family receiving that very dangerous 

Disorder in the natural way.” Stone specifically mentioned his son, who “has been and still 

is extremely ill requiring the most tender and constant care.” Stone did not name any 

enslaved people who may have been inoculated, but it would have made sense to inoculate 

people who lived and worked in and around the house to prevent contagion, if the cost 

could be afforded. Six weeks after Stone wrote to Jenifer about inoculating his “family,” 

Martha Washington at Mount Vernon, across the Potomac from Haberdeventure, was 

awaiting a shipment of “Jallop and Calomel” in order to administer inoculations on a large 

scale at Mount Vernon. George Washington, writing from New Jersey, urged the supplier to 

send enough for three hundred people to be inoculated: “the Smallpox, by my last advices 

from home, has got into my Family—and I suppose not less than three hundred Persons to 

take the disorder.”23

Whether or not Margaret suffered lingering effects from smallpox inoculation in 

Philadelphia in 1776, the couple had a difficult year in terms of their health in 1783. In 

March of that year, Thomas Stone reported that he had been “very ill” but was recovering. 

In subsequent letters in April and May from Haberdeventure, Thomas wrote that he and 

his wife “mend so slowly.” After spending a day at your “Brother Tom’s” in mid-May, the 

23 Thomas Stone to [Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer], March 14, 1777, Gwathmey Papers, Albert and Shirley Small 

Special Collections Library, University of Virginia; George Washington to William Shippen Jr., from Morris 

Town, May 3, 1777, Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, Revolutionary War Series, 9:340. Elizabeth 

A. Fenn discusses the vulnerability of the American population to Variola major in Pox Americana: The Great 

Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–1782 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). Alexander Gustavus Brown Jr. reproduced 

Gustavus Richard Brown’s advertisement for an inoculation hospital in the Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg), June 

28, 1776, in “Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown, of Maryland,” Sons of the Revolution in State of Virginia Quarterly

Magazine 1 (January 1922): 17. Note Martha Washington’s prominent role as the plantation mistress in receiving 

and dispensing the jallop and calomel medicine at Mount Vernon. More than two decades later, Thomas Jefferson 

used the word “family” to encompass relatives and enslaved residents at Monticello when he wrote about 

experiments with Edward Jenner’s method of vaccinating for smallpox with cowpox (Papers of Thomas 

Jefferson Digital Edition, Main Series, 35:34, 120).
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ever ebullient William Craik of Strawberry Hill (now La Grange) informed Walter Stone, 

“Tom looks better than expected.” A few weeks later, Craik reported that “Mrs. Stone” 

danced “two or three reels” at a Port Tobacco ball at the “end of the season.”24

It was in the context, then, of having been “very ill” but recovering that Thomas 

Stone accompanied his wife and sister Catherine Scott to “the Springs” in July 1783. This 

was not Mrs. Stone’s first trip to the Virginia mountains to take the waters. In 1778, 

Michael Jenifer Stone had charged his brother Thomas the significant sum of £35 for his 

expenses for a trip to Bath (formerly Berkeley Springs), now in West Virginia; Michael 

might have accompanied his sister-in-law Margaret on the journey. The following summer, 

in 1779, Margaret was in Bath in the company of the prominent Maryland couple Charles 

Carroll of Carrollton and his wife Molly. Margaret accompanied the Carrolls on a ride to 

“Cape Capon,” thought to be a reference to Cacapon, the name of a nearby mountain and 

river. Carroll wrote to his father, “The place agrees with Mrs Stone: I think she seems to be 

in good spirits, & to mend daily—if you have an opportunity let Mr Stone know this: it will 

give him great Satisfaction.” Visiting spas was a family affair. Thomas Stone’s brother 

Walter, their sister Catherine (Stone) Scott, and her son Alexander also visited spas in 

Virginia, as will be discussed below.25

Margaret’s illness therefore was not so debilitating, at least periodically, that it 

prevented her from traveling. Apart from her trip to Philadelphia in 1776, we know that she 

braved the mountain roads to Bath, enjoyed dancing the reel, and set up a residence in 

Annapolis in 1783–84. To our knowledge, Margaret bore no children after Frederick’s birth 

around 1773–75; this might be interpreted as a sign of her frailty in subsequent years, but 

family planning is not out of the question. If, for the sake of argument, Margaret was, at 

24 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, March 30, 1783, John Work Garrett Library, Johns Hopkins University, 

transcription in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology from Select Primary Sources” (“lately very ill”); 

Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, May 24, 1783, Gratz Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, transcription 

in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology From Select Primary Sources” (“I am now much better than I have 

been for some time”); Michael Jenifer Stone to Walter Stone, April 16, 1783, Maryland Historical Society (T. 

Stone is “in better health”); Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, May 24, 1783, Pequot Library Collection, Yale 

University, transcription in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology From Select Primary Sources” (“mend so 

slowly”); William Craik to Walter Stone, May 12, 1783, Stone Family Papers, LC; William Craik to Walter 

Stone, June 2, 1783, Thomas Stone National Historic Site manuscript collection (Port Tobacco ball reference). In 

this last letter, Craik told Walter, “Your Brother Tom came home from Annapolis the day before in order to attend 

Washington’s trial which comes on tomorrow.” On Washington’s possible identity, see Thomas Stone to Walter 

Stone, April 27, 1783, mentioning a Mr. Lawrence Washington and his son, reproduced in William Brotherhead, 

ed., The Book of the Signers (Philadelphia, 1861), and in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Primary 

Sources.” 

25 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, July 10, 1783, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, transcription in 

Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology From Select Primary Sources” (1783 trip to “the Springs”); Michael 

Jenifer Stone day book, p. 12, Kremer Collection, SMSC; Charles Carroll of Carrollton to Charles Carroll of 

Annapolis, July 28, 1779, in Ronald Hoffman, ed., Dear Papa, Dear Charley: The Peregrinations of a 

Revolutionary Aristocrat, as Told by Charles Carroll of Carrollton and His Father... 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: 

University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 3:1245. Charles Carroll of Annapolis replied, “I communicated to Mr: 

Stone what You sayed of His Lady’s Health” (ibid., 3:1262). The Carrolls built a house at Bath in 1778 

(2:1100n5).
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times, physically unable to preside in the kitchen, superintend the laundry, pick up her 

children, or perform the rituals of a tea service, then who among the household staff or in 

her family performed these roles in her stead? Besides older enslaved domestic servants 

like Clare and Rachael, Margaret’s sister-in-law, Grace Stone, is another strong contender 

for the role of supporting Margaret in her duties as the wife of a planter and officeholder 

and as a mother.26

Grace Stone

Much remains unknown about the life of Grace Stone, Thomas Stone’s youngest sister—

about what her interests were and how she contributed to Thomas Stone’s household. 

Called Gracy by her siblings, very few documents survive in her own hand. Several surviving statements of account from after Thomas’s death show her interest in clothing, a 

creative outlet for women. The accounts also show purchases and services for the enslaved 

people she inherited from her parents. The eight or so people she held in bondage over her 

lifetime might have lived at Haberdeventure during Grace’s residence there in the 1770s, 

1780s, and beyond if they did not live on another Stone family property or were hired out. 

Grace’s slaveholding diminished, but did not altogether erase, her need for support from 

her brothers.27

Thomas Stone and his brother, John Hoskins Stone, a resident of Annapolis, both 

contributed to Grace’s expenses while she was a minor. The first documented reference to 

Grace is from 1777, when Michael Jenifer Stone charged Thomas Stone for cash given to 

Grace. It would make sense that Grace moved to Haberdeventure after her mother died in 

1776. Whether she was old enough to play the role of nanny or tutor to her nieces and 

nephew at that time is uncertain, her birth year being unknown. In 1779, Grace took 

lessons from a “dancing master,” which suggests she had not yet reached adulthood by that 

time. John Hoskins Stone paid the lesson fees.28

Like her siblings and sister-in-law, Margaret, Grace had the opportunity to travel in 

the region. In August 1779, she fell ill while on a visit to St. Mary’s County; she may have 

been visiting with her aunt, Elizabeth “Betty” (Jenifer) Eden (ca. 1725–91), who was married to a St. Mary’s County planter and would bequeath to Grace a portion of her clothes. 

26 Ronald Hoffman and Sally D. Mason recount two Annapolis gentry women, Mary Ridout and Henrietta Ogle, 

who bore three children in close intervals and then had a “fourth and final” child ten years later (Princes of 

Ireland, Planters of Maryland, 371). 

27 A letter of February 26, 1783, by Grace Stone to her brother Walter, survives in the Stone Family Papers, MS 

406, Maryland Historical Society. While this is the only known letter by her, store accounts from the 1790s, part 

of the William Briscoe Stone Papers at Duke University, provide additional insights into her life (see Appendix 

16).

28 Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 9. On Elizabeth (Jenifer) Stone’s death date, 

see Appendix 2. 
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Grace also had a sister, Betty Ann (Stone) Eden, in St. Mary’s County. In December 1783, 

Grace was in Annapolis while Thomas and his wife Margaret were at Haberdeventure 

feeling ill. Thomas encouraged Grace to stay in the capital for the winter, but Grace had the 

freedom to travel to Charles County if she chose to do so. In 1784, she attended a wedding 

in Virginia.29

Grace’s brothers kept records of her expenses, presumably out of expectation for 

financial compensation. Grace owned no land but she did inherit bonded labor from her 

parents in 1778. According to the law on intestate decedents, Grace would have been 

entitled to a portion of her parents’ estate equal in value to that of her siblings, which 

amounted to £142.10.0 in Maryland currency. Grace inherited at least two enslaved 

females, Lucy or Luce, age forty-five, and Winney, age nine. Lucy had two children, George 

and Luce, ages seventeen and fourteen in 1778, who passed into the ownership of John 

Hoskins Stone and Michael Jenifer Stone respectively. Winney came from a family of four 

children born to a woman known as Rose. A youth named Will also likely became Grace’s 

property after her parents died; the age of a man named Will in Grace’s probate inventory 

matches that of Will, born 1766, son of Hannah and the younger brother of Jesse who 

passed into Michael Jenifer Stone’s ownership. By the end of her life, Grace’s slaveholding 

swelled to eight people.30

29 Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 9; Michael Jenifer Stone to Walter Stone, 

November 1783, MS 406, Stone Family Papers, MdHS; “Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Jenifer,” in Early Colonial Settlers of 

Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us; Thomas Stone to 

Walter Stone, December 3, 1783, The Rosenbach, Philadelphia; Catherine Scott to [Walter Stone], April 20, 

1784, Stone Family Papers, LC.

Apparently the Annapolis townhouse that Thomas Stone purchased in May 1783 was not ready to be moved 

into as of December of that year. In the letter to Walter Stone of December 3, 1783, Thomas instructed Walter to 

tell “Mrs Ghiselin” to keep a room for him in the city that winter (The Rosenbach, Philadelphia). Mary Ghiselin, 

widow of lawyer and officeholder Reverdy Ghiselin, let rooms out “to board gentlemen who attend courts or 

other public business, by the day” in order to support herself and her family (Maryland Gazette [Annapolis], July 

13, September 21, 1775; biographical information on Reverdy Ghiselin in Day, A Social Study of Lawyers in 

Maryland, 355).

30 The amount of Michael Jenifer Stone’s portion of his parents’ personal property is recorded in his day book, 

Kremer Collection, SMSC, pp. 9 and 10, and the 1778 settlement between Thomas Stone and John Hoskins 

Stone for Michael Jenifer’s Stone’s portion of the estate of David Stone, Elizabeth Stone, and Daniel Jenifer 

Stone (Appendix 6). On the Maryland laws and customs for the distribution of property of intestate decedents, 

see Carr, “Inheritance in the Colonial Chesapeake,” and Jean B. Lee, “Land and Labor: Parental Bequest 

Practices in Charles County, Maryland, 1732–1783,” in Colonial Chesapeake Society, eds. Lois Green Carr, 

Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 306–41. Lucy, 

Winney, and Will are discussed at greater length in Chapter 3. Catherine Scott held in bondage another person 

named Will, which lends to potential confusion between the two. In two extant letters, John Hoskins Stone 

referred to an enslaved man named George who traveled between Annapolis and port Tobacco for the merchant 

(John Hoskins Stone to Walter Stone, October 30, 1785, and October 27, 1786, Stone Family Papers, MdHS). 

Grace Stone’s name does not appear in the 1783 tax list as a landowner or as a slave owner; her brothers must 

have paid taxes owed on Winney, Will, and anyone else under the ages of forty-five for men and thirty-six for 

women, or these persons had been hired out. (For the law on the 1783 tax, see Session Laws of Maryland, 

chapter VI, Nov. 4, 1782–Jan. 15, 1783.) Apparently Grace never acquired land during her lifetime, as her will 

makes no reference to land in her possession (Charles County Register of Wills, Liber HBBH 13:51–52, MSA). 
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Undoubtedly, Grace’s siblings presumed that her ownership of slaves would have 

helped her to attract a marriage partner, and they supported her in the expectation that her 

unmarried state would not last forever. Thomas Stone, for example, writing his will in 1787, 

intended Grace to have an annuity of £15 a year out of his estate until she married. Walter 

Stone, several years later, bequeathed the residue of his estate to Grace “and her heirs,” 

providing for any children she bore after wedlock. Grace, however, for unknown reasons, 

never married.31

Grace remained a resident of Charles County for the remainder of her life. Her 

place of residence after Thomas and Margaret Stone’s deaths remains a mystery. Likely she 

initially stayed at Haberdeventure with her brother Michael Jenifer Stone. Her status 

became more uncertain in 1793, when, in the space of a single year, Michael Jenifer Stone 

took a wife; the intended heir to Haberdeventure, Thomas Stone’s son Frederick, died 

unexpectedly of yellow fever; and Frederick’s sister Margaret married and stayed in the 

area. By 1797 Michael Jenifer Stone had moved to a plantation called Equality, but he 

continued to be involved in Grace’s affairs after his marriage. Between 1792 and 1796, 

Michael Jenifer Stone recorded his outlays of cash to Grace and others on her behalf, his 

purchases for her, and his expenditure of £25 a year for Grace’s board in an unspecified 

location for four months in 1792 and then again from August 1794 to August 1796. 

Presumably Michael Jenifer Stone offset these expenses by hiring out enslaved people in 

Grace’s possession, though the only known documentation of this is a surviving account of 

Port Tobacco merchant George Clements with Michael Jenifer Stone from 1794 to 1795, 

which shows a credit to Michael Jenifer Stone of a thousand pounds of tobacco (valued at 

17.10.0£) for Clements’s hire of Grace’s bondsman Basil. (Michael Jenifer Stone’s surviving 

day book ends in 1796, cutting off our view of any additional hiring out by Michael Jenifer 

Stone of people whom Grace claimed ownership of.)32

31 Will of Thomas Stone, 1787, Appendix 3; will of Walter Stone, 1790–91, in Petravage, “Historic Furnishings 

Report,” 34–35. 

32 Information on marriage dates in Rivoire, “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 7, 11; Michael 

Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 40; account, George Clements with Michael Jenifer Stone, 

January 7, 1794, to January 1, 1795, William Briscoe Stone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and 

Manuscript Library, Duke University. The Federal Direct Tax list of 1798 indicates that at that time, Margaret 

(Stone) and her husband John Moncure Daniel occupied but did not own the mansion house at Haberdeventure. 

Her sister Mildred and her brother-in-law, Travers Daniel, were absentee owners of Haberdeventure; this was 

consistent with the verbal agreement between the sisters after their brother’s death and before their marriages 

that, in an equal division of the landed property, Mildred inherited Haberdeventure and Margaret possessed all 

other land (1798 Direct Tax list, MSA; John M. Daniel, Travers Daniel, Jane C. Daniel, and Margaret E. Daniel 

v. Mildred Daniel, August 1827, Charles County Court Proceedings 1826–1829, pp. 272–86; Rivoire, “Summary 

Report of Additional Research Findings,” 11). Travers Daniel, who married Mildred Stone between 1794 and 

1797, took his bride with him to Virginia by 1797, as evidenced by the January 13, 1798, “Articles of 

Agreement” by Travers Daniel “of Stafford County” and others (in Scott v. Stone et al., Chancery Court, 

Chancery Papers, case 4647, MSA) and the 1797 runaway advertisement for Jack, subscribed by Travers Daniel 

in Stafford County (Appendix 8). 
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Further evidence of Grace’s financial support through her slaveholding is a surviving account between Grace Stone and the company formed by her brothers John Hoskins 

Stone and Walter Stone. The document shows Grace’s expenditures in 1790 and 1791 for 

coarse linen, woolen, and cotton fabric, yarn hose, thread, shoes, a hat, tea, sugar, and 

some pre-made clothes for eight bondspeople whom it was her responsibility to maintain—

Sall, Jim, Bill, Basil, Winny, and three children. (Winny had by then become old enough to 

bear children; the same account shows payment of a midwife’s fee for Winny.) The firm of 

John Hoskins Stone and Walter Stone offset a portion of these expenditures by hiring out 

two bondspeople in Grace’s ownership, Will and Bill.33

For lack of other documentation, Grace’s personal wealth appears to have been 

entirely dependent on the bondspeople whom she held legal title to; no evidence survives 

of Grace, for example, being paid for sewing or other female employment. When Grace 

died in 1809, her probate inventory (taken two years after her death) listed very few furnishings: four old trunks, one old bed with two pillows, a small pitcher, and two old books, 

plus her clothing. The lack of kitchen utensils suggests she shared a house with other 

people. A far greater part of her wealth lay in her slaveholdings. She manumitted two 

people in her will, Lucy, who was by then around eighty years of age, and Billy, who was 

about seventeen (working backward from his age of “about fifty” in his 1828 certificate of 

freedom). The remaining six people she bequeathed to her nieces by Michael Jenifer Stone. 

Her choice to give her wealth in enslaved people to her nieces was an endorsement of 

slaveholding as a means of financial support for females.34

In some ways, Grace’s brothers treated their youngest sister as a dependent, but her 

slaveholding gave her a means of supporting herself. From the point of view of the people 

she held in bondage, the lines of authority must have been blurred. Grace appears to have 

ceded to her brothers the power to hire out the bondspeople whom she held by inheritance, at least when she lived in her brothers’ households. In return, she had her brothers’ 

protection.

33 Account, Grace Stone with John and Walter Stone, November 23, 1790–September 26, 1791, William Briscoe 

Stone Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University. See Appendix 16 for a transcription. In 1793, Michael 

Jenifer Stone paid a fee to Mrs. Clements for attending Winny (Michael Jenifer Stone day book, p. 40, Kremer 

Collection, SMSC).

34 Probate inventory of Grace Stone, 1811, Charles County Register of Wills, Inventories and Accounts 1808–

1812, p. 416, MSA (see Appendix 18 for a transcription); certificate of freedom for Billy, “about fifty years” old, 

December 19, 1828, Charles County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), 1826–1860, MSA; will of 

Grace Stone, in Petravage, “Historic Furnishings Report,” 36. Grace Stone was not the head of her own household in 1790, judging by her absence in the 1790 US census (as published in Margaret Brown Klapthor and Paul 

Dennis Brown, History of Charles County, Maryland [La Plata: Charles County Tercentenary Inc., 1958], 

179–95). Billy’s certificate of freedom is one of sixty-five to survive from Charles County court records dating to 

between 1826 and 1860. On the 1805 law mandating manumitted and free blacks to register at county courts, see 

Archives of Maryland 607:46 (chapter 66) and Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland (Annapolis: 

Maryland State Archives, 2020). 
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Catherine (Stone) Scott and Alexander Scott 

Catherine (Stone) Scott (d. 1801) and her son Alexander (1770–1838) joined Thomas 

Stone’s household at Haberdeventure in 1774 or 1775, after Catherine lost her husband. 

Like her younger sister Grace, Catherine had the benefit of being supported by brothers 

who had property, education, and high social standing. The brothers did not act out of 

kindness alone, though. Similar to Grace, Catherine was a landless slaveholder, and by 

hiring out slaves she could help pay for her living expenses. As also was the case with 

Grace, the brothers took in Catherine with the understanding that someday another male 

would take over her care; whereas it was expected that Grace would someday marry, 

Catherine had a son who stood to inherit a large fortune from his father’s family.

Thomas Stone and Michael Jenifer Stone assumed responsibility for caring for 

Catherine after their parents died and Catherine’s husband, Robert Scott (b. 1753) of 

Prince William County, Virginia, left Catherine’s side while his son was in his infancy or 

shortly thereafter. The circumstances of Robert Scott’s departure from his wife are a 

mystery. According to a legal document filed by Thomas Stone’s daughters and their 

husbands in answer to a Chancery Court suit brought by Catherine and Robert’s son, 

Alexander Scott, in 1805, against Thomas Stone’s estate, Robert Scott by 1775 “had gone to 

Sea and was never more heard of.” Based on a variety of evidence—the wording of this 

statement, hints in the case that Catherine was difficult to live with (“weak in body and 

affected with an habitual asthma”; “indulged in her eccentricities”; “the state of health[,] 

appetites[,] Spirits and Habits of the said Catherine Scott called for uncommon care” and 

“trouble”), and Robert’s unusual decision to leave property to his parents and not to his 

wife and child in his will—it is possible that Robert Scott abandoned his wife. Robert’s will, 

written in 1770, was not proven in Prince William County, Virginia, until 1783, following 

the deaths of his parents to whom he granted his estate. Perhaps the will was contested, or 

Robert Scott was not considered legally dead until 1783. Catherine’s brother Frederick 

Stone referred to Catherine as a widow in his will of April 1772; this is the earliest indication of Catherine’s status as a widow, though Frederick’s choice of words may have been 

intended to help Catherine (and her son) lay claim to her husband’s estate. Frederick 

Stone’s will should not necessarily be read as a statement of fact of Robert’s death.35

35 Answer of John M. and Margaret Daniel, Travers and Mildred Daniel, 1806, and answer of Michael Jenifer 

Stone 1807, in Alexander Scott v. Michael Jenifer Stone, John M. and Margaret Daniel, Travers and Mildred 

Daniel, and Thomas Stone’s Estate, 1805, Chancery Court, Chancery Papers, case 4647, MSA; “Robert Scott, 

1749–83” and “Rev. James Scott, 1715–82,” in Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s 

Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us; will of Frederick Stone, Prerogative Court, Wills, 

Liber 39:291–93, MSA. Robert Scott was a son of Scottish-born clergyman Reverend James Scott (d. 1782) and 

his wife Sarah (Brown) of Prince William County, Virginia. His mother’s parents were Dr. Gustavus Brown (d. 

1762) and his first wife, Frances (Fowke). Alexander Scott, the plaintiff in the 1805 Chancery Court suit, sought 

payment of a sum he believed was owed to his late mother out of Thomas Stone’s estate. 
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The Stone family’s legal posturing in Alexander Scott v. Michael Jenifer Stone et al.

obscures the truth of when and how Catherine became a widow and “destitute of a home.” 

Also, Thomas Stone’s surviving executor, Michael Jenifer Stone, in order to deflect his 

nephew’s charge that Thomas’s estate owed Alexander Scott money, emphasized the 

financial burden that Thomas Stone assumed by supporting Catherine and her son while 

Thomas was himself “poor” while courts were closed during the “Heat of the War.” The 

court documents are helpful nevertheless for providing insight into the Stone family’s 

attitudes and practices regarding financial and emotional support within the family. 

Thomas Stone took in Catherine and her son, despite the hardships it presented for 

him and his family, because Catherine was “connected” with him, Michael Jenifer Stone 

wrote. Thomas’s brother does not explain the depth of the connection between Thomas 

and Catherine. Not only was Catherine a full-blooded sibling to Thomas, but, like him, she 

was a member of the extended Brown family. Around the same time as Thomas’s marriage, 

Catherine married one of Margaret (Brown) Stone’s nephews, a son of Margaret’s elder 

half-sister, Sarah (Brown) (1715–84). Catherine’s son Alexander was just a year older than 

Thomas and Margaret Stone’s firstborn child. This mutual connection to the Brown family 

may have raised the stakes for Thomas to see his sister and nephew cared for and housed 

respectably without having to liquidate their wealth in slaveownership (about which more 

will be said shortly). Thomas’s support allowed Catherine to maintain a genteel lifestyle, 

including trips to the Virginia mountain spa town of Bath for health, leisure, and society.36

In whatever manner she came into her “widowhood,” Catherine and her son 

Alexander lived at Haberdeventure during two periods in Thomas Stone’s lifetime. First 

she stayed from 1774 or 1775 until 1780, at which time she moved out with Michael Jenifer 

Stone to a series of other Charles County properties rented by Thomas Stone. She returned 

to Haberdeventure with Michael Jenifer Stone in 1784, after Thomas and his wife moved to 

Annapolis, and stayed until 1790. 

Financial considerations were never far from mind in the Stone family’s care for 

Catherine and her son. Thomas and Michael Jenifer Stone kept records of Catherine’s 

expenses and income. While Thomas’s book of accounts does not survive, Michael Jenifer 

Stone’s day book shows occasional payments on Catherine’s behalf in the 1770s and 1780s, 

36 Thomas Stone’s daughters and their husbands mentioned that Thomas Stone gave Catherine Scott “the means 

of going to the Berkel[e]y Springs,” another name for Bath, now in West Virginia, in their answer to Scott v. 

Stone et al. In a letter of July 10, 1783, Thomas Stone wrote of his intention to travel to “the Springs” with his 

wife and “Mrs. Scott” (Signers of the Declaration of Independence Collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University, 

Bloomington, transcription in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources”). Around the 

eighteenth-century British Atlantic, where commerce relied on long-distance credit transactions, kinship ties 

helped to offset the risk of financial ruin. Thomas Stone in 1774 joined his brother-in-law Gustavus Richard 

Brown and other members of the Brown family to raise over £200 to purchase enslaved people and other 

“necessaries” to support Ann Horner. Ann, one of Margaret (Brown) Stone’s half-sisters, became an impoverished widow after the death of Robert Horner, an English-born merchant who invested in a mill and bake house 

at Allen’s Fresh in Charles County (“Anne Browne, 1732–1800,” and “Robert Horner, 1718–73,” in “Early 

Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties,” www.colonial-settlers-md-va.

us; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 62–63).
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such as for the purchase of “black silk mitts” from Port Tobacco merchant Thomas How 

Ridgate and for shoeing her horse, presumably at Michael Jenifer Stone’s blacksmith shop. 

Michael Jenifer Stone engaged local craftsman James Ray for leatherwork on a chair for 

Catherine and helped Catherine sell a hogshead of tobacco to Ridgate. According to 

Michael Jenifer Stone’s 1807 legal statement in his defense against Alexander Scott, 

Catherine’s income in the 1770s and 1780s was limited to the hiring out of an enslaved man 

known as Will.37

Catherine’s expenses in the 1770s and 1780s included the cost of clothing, feeding, 

and housing at least one enslaved woman and several enslaved children, whose names are 

unknown, plus the care of a horse. To better provide for the support of Catherine, Michael 

Jenifer Stone, and the people they held in bondage, Thomas Stone rented a plantation at 

Nanjemoy, where Catherine and Michael Jenifer Stone resided together in 1780 and 1781. 

By raising a variety of crops and hogs and marketing the surplus, Catherine, Michael 

Jenifer Stone, and unknown enslaved people reduced the strain on Haberdeventure’s 

resources. In 1782, Catherine and Michael Jenifer Stone moved to Theobald’s Hill (on 159 

acres made up of part of St. Nicholas and part Chandlers Hills, closer to Haberdeventure), 

apparently occupying separate houses but in close proximity to one another. Here, too, 

Thomas lent a helping hand by paying half the rent, hiring or renting out to Catherine an 

unidentified enslaved man, and providing corn and other foodstuffs.38

37 Travers Daniel is the last person known to have held the book of accounts in which Thomas Stone recorded 

his transactions with Catherine Scott (Michael Jenifer Stone’s statement, December 16, 1807, in Chancery Court, 

Chancery Papers, case 4647, MSA). Entries for Catherine and Alexander Stone can be found on pp. 16, 21, 29, 

30–31 and passim in Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC. For the hiring out of Will, see 

page 16 of Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book; Michael Jenifer Stone did not record who hired Will, in this case, 

in 1780–1782. Alexander Scott, in his bill of complaint in Scott v. Stone et al., attested that Thomas Stone hired 

Will from his mother in 1777 and 1778 for £20 current money per year. Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book does 

not provide clues about Alexander’s education, apart from the uncle’s payments in 1779 for a dancing master and 

a school master. 

38 Tax records verify Michael Jenifer Stone’s assertion in his written answer in Scott v. Stone et al. (Chancery 

Court, Chancery Papers, case 4647, MSA) that he and Catherine moved off of Haberdeventure for a number of 

years to reduce Thomas’s expenses. Michael Jenifer Stone paid the tax assessment for Catherine in 1780, which 

offers a clue that they shared a household in Durham Parish (Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, 

SMSC, p. 16). In 1782 and 1783, though, Catherine Scott and Michael Jenifer Stone appear side by side on 

surviving tax lists, each as a head of household. The 1782 tax assessor for Durham Upper Hundred charged 

Catherine for an enslaved woman between the ages of fourteen and thirty-six, three children, and a horse, and 

Michael Jenifer Stone for a horse. Leaving the enslaved family behind on the rented Nanjemoy plantation by 

1782 (perhaps only for a short period), the Stone siblings moved to Port Tobacco Upper Hundred, which fell 

within the Fourth District of the 1783 tax assessment, and set up separate households there. In a letter by Michael 

Jenifer Stone to Walter Stone, addressed from “Theobald’s Hill” on March 12, 1782, he wrote that “Mrs. Scott is 

with me.” In another letter from 1782, James Craik Jr. mentioned to Walter Stone that he attended a party at 

“your Sister Scott’s” and a dinner at “your [Brother] Tom’s” (June 4, photocopy in Kremer Collection, SMSC). 

The 1783 tax assessor for the Fourth District recorded the presence in Catherine’s household an enslaved woman 

between the ages of fourteen and thirty-six, four enslaved children, and other taxable personal property valued at 

£6. Her brother Michael Jenifer Stone paid taxes on himself, four enslaved males between the ages of fourteen 

and forty-five, a female between fourteen and thirty-six years of age, an older enslaved man or woman above the 

age of forty-five, four horses, ten black cattle, and £200 in other taxable personal property. Michael Jenifer Stone 

occupied a “middling good” dwelling house with a kitchen outbuilding, “study” outbuilding, and a barn (1783 

tax assessment, MSA). 
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Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

When Thomas Stone moved his family to Annapolis in 1784, he allowed his siblings 

Catherine Scott and Michael Jenifer Stone (and their dependents) to live rent-free at 

Haberdeventure, undoubtedly with the expectation that they would maintain the plantation in good working order. The death of Thomas Stone, Catherine’s benefactor, a few 

years later must have been a major inflection point for her in ways it was not for her 

brother, Michael Jenifer, because of her social status that discouraged female self-support 

through manual labor or private enterprise. Michael Jenifer Stone, in his answer to the suit 

brought by his nephew in 1805, wrote that Thomas “generally supplied” Catherine “with 

Everything she requested,” as far as his own finances enabled him to do. The loss of this 

benefactor while her son was still a minor threw into relief Catherine’s reliance on 

Haberdeventure for a measure of stability.39

Catherine appears to have stayed in Charles County, presumably at 

Haberdeventure, for a few years after Margaret and Thomas Stone’s deaths in 1787. Then it 

seems that in late 1790 she briefly moved away; in early 1792, she was living in Fauquier 

County, Virginia, which is adjacent to her late husband’s native Prince William County. 

What drew her there is not known, though her son would some years later marry a 

Fauquier County native.40

Perhaps Catherine believed that it was a good time to travel in 1790, while other 

members of the family were away. In 1789 and 1790, Michael Jenifer Stone, sometimes 

accompanied by his nieces, Margaret and Mildred, left Charles County periodically to 

serve in Congress or to conduct business in Annapolis. Walter Stone and Gustavus Richard 

Brown took care of local family business. Catherine’s son Alexander apparently was living 

in or near Philadelphia, too, by late 1790. He and his cousin Frederick Stone, Thomas 

Stone’s son, then a second-year student at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton 

University), spent Christmas with Michael Jenifer Stone in Philadelphia in a house shared 

with James Monroe of Virginia and his wife from New York, Elizabeth. Michael Jenifer 

Stone wrote to his brother Walter on Christmas Eve, 1790, “Frederick and Alexander are 

both here—And there are not two finer Lads in America—I can’t tell which is the cleverest 

fellow.” Michael Jenifer Stone had lived with Alexander, off and on, for the last fifteen 

39 On the date of Thomas Stone’s move to Annapolis, see note 29 in this chapter.

40 Michael Jenifer Stone, in his statement to Maryland’s Chancery Court of 1807, testified that there was a hiatus 

in Catherine’s financial support by Thomas Stone’s estate between 1787 and 1791 (Chancery Court, Chancery 

Papers, case 4647, MSA). However, indications of Catherine’s continued presence in Charles County, at least 

until 1789, include her recorded purchases from Michael Jenifer Stone in 1788 and 1789 of corn “from the mill,” 

salt pork, salt beef, a sorrel mare, bedding, and blacksmith work. In November 1790, Michael Jenifer Stone drew 

up a “final settlement” of his account with Catherine, presumably before she moved away. In a letter of February 

25, 1792, Port Tobacco merchant Robert Fergusson asked a Virginia partner to forward a letter to “Mrs. Catherine 

Scott now of Fauquier County” (R. Fergusson to Alexander Henderson, Container 61, John Glassford and Co. 

Records, LC). By 1802, Alexander Scott married Elizabeth Blackwell (ca. 1781–1831), a daughter of William 

Blackwell of Fauquier County (1738–82) (“The Blackwell Family [continued],” Virginia Magazine of History 

and Biography 23, no. 1 [January 1915]: 103).
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years, and served as his guardian and legal representative after the passing of his paternal 

grandparents in Virginia; in some respects, he must have felt like a father figure to 

Alexander.41

Frederick’s and Alexander’s lives continued to overlap in Philadelphia for the next 

several years. After finishing at Princeton in September 1791, Frederick moved to 

Philadelphia to study law; Alexander may have been pursuing professional studies in the 

city, too. In the early 1790s, Michael Jenifer Stone remitted money to both Alexander and 

Frederick through Philadelphia merchant Thomas Fitzsimmons.42

Into the early 1790s, then, Catherine and her son Alexander continued to rely on 

the Haberdeventure household for financial and social support. When Catherine returned 

in September 1792 from her sojourn in Virginia, she stayed with Michael Jenifer Stone for a 

year, and her son Alexander occasionally joined her during the summer of 1793. But 

tensions frayed. At the end of her stay, in October 1793—notably, a few weeks after the 

death of Frederick Stone, the intended male heir to Haberdeventure—Michael Jenifer 

Stone drew up an account with Alexander Scott with charges for boarding his mother 

(£56.10.0), “Wat” and “Jean” (domestic servants, likely enslaved, at £17.10.0 each), and two 

horses. Beneath the last entry, charging for Alexander’s occasional stays at Haberdeventure 

from May through September 1793, Michael Jenifer Stone wrote in his day book that he 

added a third to “the Expenses” because “the servants were destructive and thievish.” It is 

not clear if Michael Jenifer Stone was referring to behavior during the summer or over the 

course of the year. The statement is nonetheless our first hint of tension in the relationship 

between Alexander and his uncle Michael Jenifer Stone; recall that Alexander filed an 

expensive Chancery Court suit against his uncle in 1805, seeking payment of an annuity out 

of Thomas Stone’s estate.43

41 “Frederick A. Stone,” in Princetonians, 1791–1794, eds., J. Jefferson Looney and Ruth L. Woodward 

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 112–13; Michael Jenifer Stone to Walter Stone, July 3, [1789] (in 

which he asked, from New York, how “Grace and Mrs. Scott” are doing), Stone Family Papers, LC; Margaret 

Stone, in Annapolis, to Walter Stone, August [14?], 1789, in same; Michael Jenifer Stone, in New York, to Walter 

Stone, April 12, 1790; Michael Jenifer Stone to Walter Stone, December 24, 1790, about being with Alexander, 

Frederick, Margaret, and Mildred Stone in Philadelphia, in same. Letters in the LC collection attest to the 

youngest brother managing family affairs in Charles County and Annapolis during this time. Michael Jenifer 

Stone served in the US Congress for Maryland in 1789–91 (Papenfuse, BDML, 2:786). 

42 Michael Jenifer Stone recorded his remittances to Alexander through Thomas Fitzsimmons in his day book, p. 

33, Kremer Collection, SMSC. On Christmas Day, 1802, Port Tobacco merchant Robert Fergusson forwarded to 

Michael Jenifer Stone a letter and accounts from Thomas Fitzsimmons of Philadelphia for money that Michael 

Jenifer Stone, as Thomas Stone’s executor, had advanced to Frederick as well as money that John Hoskins Stone 

had advanced to Alexander. Fitzsimmons likely was seeking a settlement of the account (repository of original 

letter unknown, copy in the Kremer Collection, SMSC, Box 1, Folder 19). See also interrogatories by Michael 

Jenifer Stone to William Campbell, [after Nov. 1793], William Briscoe Stone Papers, Duke University.

43 Michael Jenifer Stone day book, p. 33, Kremer Collection, SMSC. Offering further evidence of Catherine and 

Alexander Scott’s use of Haberdeventure as a waystation in the latter half of 1792, Michael Jenifer Stone in 

October advertised for a horse which belonged to Alexander Scott and had strayed or been stolen from 

Haberdeventure; the gelding “trots and has been used for the carriage” (advertisement dated October 3, Maryland 

Gazette [Annapolis], November 8, 1792).
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While Catherine Scott and her son continued to consider Haberdeventure a home 

or a refuge, Michael Jenifer Stone’s patience wore thin, and the plantation’s financial 

picture changed after Frederick Stone’s unexpected death by yellow fever in 1793. Also that 

year, Alexander had reached the age of majority and now bore responsibility for maintaining his mother financially; Michael Jenifer Stone charged Alexander, not Catherine, for 

Catherine’s and her servants’ board in 1792 and 1793. In 1794, Alexander began to set up 

his own household and legal practice in Charles County, quickly acquiring over 1,000 acres 

of land. By 1800, his household had grown to thirty-one people, his mother included; four 

out of every five residents on his property were enslaved. Though he took up residence in 

other locations, including Georgetown in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Venezuela, 

Alexander etched his name into the glass of Haberdeventure’s East Room in 1815. Not only 

was Alexander’s personal connection to Thomas Stone and other members of the Stone 

family useful to him as a lawyer, planter, and officeholder, but also Alexander may have had 

an emotional or sentimental connection with Haberdeventure. Here Alexander and his 

mother found shelter, and the estate shielded them from the financial distress that would 

have endangered retention of their enslaved property before Alexander came into his 

inheritance.44

To summarize, Thomas Stone took his widowed or abandoned sister Catherine 

Scott into his household after his parents’ passing as much to help his own reputation as 

his sister’s. Catherine was able to contribute toward the costs of her and her son’s support 

through her modest slaveholding and live a life of apparent leisure with the help of her 

brother Thomas. She did not, for instance, operate a tavern to support her young family as 

a femme sole, as other propertied white women in Port Tobacco like Rachel Forry and Ann 

Halkerston did. For Catherine’s siblings, supporting their sister also made them invested in 

her son, who formed close ties with members of the Stone family and who was to become, 

in his uncle’s words, “very rich.”45

Alexander’s story hints at what might have been for Thomas Stone’s son, Frederick, 

had Frederick survived the yellow fever epidemic. Both young men, it appears, resided in 

Philadelphia in their teens and early twenties for legal training and no doubt social polish 

in what was then the most sophisticated city in America. The cousins both lost their fathers 

44 Charles County Land Records, N#4:200 (in which Alexander Scott is identified as “of Virginia”), 276 (which 

refers to Alexander Scott as an “Attorney at Law of Charles County”), 368, MSA; 1798 Direct Tax Records, 

MSA; federal census of 1800. According to the CLR (1996), “one of the windows of the Haberdeventure room at 

the Baltimore Museum of Art has ‘Alex Scott 1815’ scratched on one of the panes, and ‘Alex Scott Port Tabac’ is 

inscribed in pencil on plaster in one of the corner cabinets on [sic] the same room” (15n32). For more information on Alexander Scott’s life after 1800, see “Conclusion and Suggestions for Further Research” at the back of 

this HRS. 

45 Michael Jenifer Stone’s answer, 1807, Chancery Court, Chancery Papers, case 4647, MSA. Jean B. Lee writes 

about Rachel Forry and Ann Halkerston in Price of Nationhood. Halkerston’s son, William, attended grammar 

school and college at Princeton, apparently leaving the latter in 1774 (Richard A. Harrison, Princetonians,

1776–1783: A Biographical Dictionary [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981], 226–28). Daniel 

Jenifer, Thomas Stone’s uncle, and John Jordan, also of Port Tobacco, were a class ahead of him (ibid., 190–92).
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during childhood, and both had inheritances waiting for them upon reaching age twenty-one. These inheritances carried responsibilities; sound wealth management undergirded 

the well-being of household dependents and the family’s social standing. Alexander chose 

to build his wealth in Charles County in the 1790s, before moving to other venues. Like 

other members of the extended Stone family, Alexander Scott faced challenges to his 

slaveholding from members of the Thomas family who pursued their freedom through 

legal and extralegal means.46

Betty Ann Eden

Another sister of Thomas Stone, Betty Ann (d. after 1805), also turned to her brothers for 

support. Documentation for this is strongest, though, after her husband died in November 

1787, a few weeks after her brother’s death. Whether or not Betty Ann stayed at 

Haberdeventure during Thomas Stone’s lifetime, she appears to have been in a less precarious financial position, at that time, than her sisters Grace and Catherine. Thomas Stone did 

not leave her a legacy in his will, unlike with Grace and Catherine, and Michael Jenifer 

Stone did not record transactions made on Betty Ann’s behalf. It was when Betty Ann 

became a widow in late 1787 that she became a subject of concern for Haberdeventure’s 

surviving male stakeholders, Michael Jenifer Stone and Walter Stone.47

Whereas Catherine (Stone) Scott married into a branch of the Brown family on the 

Virginia side of the Potomac River, Betty Ann (Stone) Eden strengthened kinship ties with 

her maternal family, the Jenifers, within Southern Maryland. Betty Ann followed the 

footsteps of her mother’s sister, Aunt Betty (Jenifer Rogers) Eden, when she married into 

the Eden family of St. Mary’s County. Aunt Betty married second John Eden (ca. 1728–75), 

a St. Mary’s County planter and a justice of the peace who served briefly in the Maryland 

House of Delegates. Betty Ann cemented a close relationship with Aunt Betty by marrying 

Aunt Betty’s stepson, Townsend Eden (1754–87).48

46 A search for “Alexander Scott” in O Say Can You See: Early Washington, DC, Law and Family, at 

http://earlywashingtondc.org, brings up documents related to Walter Thomas and Dennis Thomas v. Alexander 

Scott, Circuit Court for the County of Washington and District of Columbia, 1809–10, which referred to records 

and reminiscences of Thomas family actions in several Western Shore county courts in the 1790s. William G. 

Thomas III’s book A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to 

the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020) provides context for freedom suits in Southern 

Maryland in the 1790s and early 1800s, including claims against Scott (p. 153). See also Chapter 3’s discussion 

of freedom petitions.

47 Thomas Stone’s daughters and their husbands in their answer to Scott v. Stone et al. in 1806 included Betty 

Ann Eden in their long list of family members whom Thomas Stone supported at Haberdeventure (Chancery 

Court, Chancery Papers 4647, MSA). Supporting evidence is lacking, though. See also CLR (1996) 14 and 

Rivoire, “Summary of Additional Research Findings,” 10.

48 “Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Jenifer (ca. 1725–1791),” “John Eden (after 1700–1775),” and “Townshend Eden (1754–

before 1791),” in Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.

colonial-settlers-md-va.us; “John Eden (ca. 1728–1775),” in Papenfuse, BDML, 1:298–99 (quote). 
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When John Eden died, his estate included “many luxury items,” and Aunt Betty 

retained a genteel style of life during her second widowhood. From Aunt Betty’s will, we 

learn that her house had both a dining room and a parlor. An enslaved man she referred to 

as Will, “my personal waitingman,” would have expertly navigated these refined spaces. 

The house was outfitted with mahogany tables, looking glasses, glassware, silver, and china, 

and she owned a carriage. Her disbursement of clothing and accessories offers a wealth of 

information about the materials she handled, not only what they were but also how she 

related to objects. To give a few examples, Betty Eden gave away to other females calico and 

muslin gowns, linen and muslin aprons, a beaver skin cloak (which she intended for 

Catherine [Stone] Scott), and pieces of country cloth and chintz. She bequeathed a fan, 

several caps, and a “worked [i.e., embroidered] lawn handkerchief.” She wanted her 

brother Daniel Jenifer to have her sleeve buttons made out of Bristol stone.49

The close relationship between Betty Ann (Stone) Eden and her aunt Betty (Jenifer 

Rogers) Eden, both residents of St. Mary’s County, highlights the importance of white 

female networks for mutual support and advancement. When Townsend Eden passed away 

in November 1787, without a will and his estate encumbered by debts, it appears that Aunt 

Betty took Betty Ann (Stone) Eden and her four daughters in. At her death in 1791, Aunt 

Betty generously gave to her niece “all of my chairs and tables not before bequeathed,” two 

beds with bedding, “my spinning wheels,” and “all of my kitchen furniture.” Whereas Aunt 

Betty perhaps did not have the authority to leave the house itself to Betty Ann, she did 

provide her niece with starter furnishings for a new household. Furthermore, Aunt Betty 

willed to each of Betty Ann Eden’s daughters an enslaved female and their future offspring 

plus a sum to be held in trust by their uncles Michael Jenifer Stone and Walter Stone. One 

motivation for Aunt Betty to help her niece must have been that her late husband’s debts 

contributed to her stepson Townshend’s financial troubles.50

While Aunt Betty provided social, emotional, and material support to her niece, 

Betty Ann’s brothers served critical roles in her complicated financial and legal affairs. 

Walter Stone, for instance, assumed the role of co-administrator of the estates of Townsend 

Eden and his father John Eden Sr. In 1788, Walter Stone assisted Betty Ann in the sale of 

her dwelling plantation and its enslaved residents, no doubt in an effort to pay off 

49 Papenfuse, BDML, 1:298–99 (quote), 940; will of Betty Eden, January 11, 1790, proved November 30, 1791, 

St. Mary’s County Wills JJ2:6–9.

50 Betty Eden directed that an enslaved woman named Cumbo, another named Terry with her child Jenny, plus 

two enslaved girls, Molly and Nancy, be distributed among Betty Ann Eden’s daughters. The Willliam Briscoe 

Stone Papers in the Rubenstein Library, Duke University, contains several documents related to the Eden family 

estate that show that Townsend Eden died intestate in 1787.
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Townsend’s debts. When Walter died in 1791, Michael Jenifer Stone took over as administrator of the Eden estates. His son, William Briscoe Stone, was active in the case as late as 

1826.51

Walter Stone

As with his sisters Grace and Catherine, Walter Stone (?–1791) elicited from Thomas Stone 

a desire to support and protect a dependent sibling. If held by the standard of his older 

brothers, Walter did not achieve a masculine position as head of his own household as the 

dominant English culture dictated. Nor did he become a landowner, an indubitable marker 

of gentry status, before he died in his thirties or early forties. Instead Walter sought to make 

his fortune in the commercial world. Thomas Stone and other observers raised questions 

about Walter’s personal happiness as the youngest of the Stone brothers sought his way in 

the world.52

Presumably after having some formal schooling, Walter resided in Philadelphia 

from 1781 until 1783. Through the patronage of his uncle Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, in 

September 1781 Walter secured a clerkship in the US Office of Finance in Philadelphia, 

headed by the influential Robert Morris (1734–1806). In 1783, Walter lost a bid to be a 

secretary to Morris, and he moved briefly to the Office of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs. 

Walter maintained a valuable connection with Morris, who financed the American 

Revolution and obtained the lucrative contract with the French tobacco monopoly in 1785 

that Port Tobacco merchant Thomas How Ridgate subcontracted for. Undoubtedly 

Walter’s connection to Morris helped the young man’s prospects in trade. Morris knew 

Walter well enough to laud him for his “Fervent integrity of Heart,” which Morris considered Walter’s “grand characteristic.” Other letters written to Walter attest to the warmth of 

Walter’s friendships. Morris put his own “integrity and Honor” on the line when he wrote 

a letter to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in support of Walter’s bid to be a US consul 

in London in 1790. Morris needed Walter’s help as well as a Maryland correspondent. In 

1784, Walter and his brother John Hoskins Stone started a commercial partnership, with 

Walter based in Port Tobacco and John Hoskins in Annapolis. In the spring of 1790, 

Morris, in Philadelphia, turned to Walter when Thomas How Ridgate died unexpectedly. 

Regarding himself as Ridgate’s “biggest creditor,” Morris felt “most Cruelly treated by” 

51 Advertisement, March 6, 1788, Maryland Gazette (Annapolis); will of Walter Stone, in Petravage, “Historic 

Furnishings Report,” 35; bill of complaint by Betty Ann Eden and Elizabeth Llewellen of St. Mary’s County vs. 

James Eden, [after December 1796], William Briscoe Stone Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University. Two 

undated letters by Betty Ann Eden to Walter Stone about legal affairs survive in the Stone Family Papers, LC. 

The Eden Family Archive (1772–1974) in the Avon Papers, Cadbury Library, University of Birmingham, United 

Kingdom, contains lists of legal fees due to Michael Jenifer Stone and William Briscoe Stone. 

52 Walter’s birth year is unknown. He was younger than Michael Jenifer Stone, who was born in 1747; therefore 

Walter was no more than forty-four years of age when he died in 1791.
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Ridgate for what he believed was Ridgate’s indifference to paying down a debt. Morris 

apologized for not naming Walter’s senior partner, John Hoskins, as his legal representative 

in Ridgate’s estate settlement but still wanted Walter to look after his interests in the settlement process.53

During his two-year residence in Philadelphia, Walter had acted as an agent in 

different capacities for his elder brother and others, including the sale of “country produce” from Maryland to finance the purchase of finished goods. His friend and fellow 

bachelor James Craik Jr. of Strawberry Hill (now La Grange) sent him flour to sell and 

asked in return for “one of the most fashionable Light coloured Cloths for a Coat with a 

very neat pattern” with “trimmings suitable so as to make it a very Dressy one,” along with 

a silk jacket and breeches and “four yards of good Black hair Ribbon.” Thomas Stone 

intended to send his younger brother tobacco in the Philadelphia market, which circumvented the wartime embargo by selling tobacco via the West Indies. Whether Thomas 

followed through on his intentions is not known, but Thomas had some means of credit in 

Philadelphia. In addition to the carriage order that Thomas wanted Walter to supervise, 

discussed previously, Thomas also asked Walter to procure for him medicinal goods such 

as Dr. Baker’s dentifrice. Thomas must have preferred Dr. Baker’s compound over a local 

Charles County doctor’s offering, which was promised to be “the same as Baker’s” and 

used to “restore the gums to their pristine state, prevent the tooth-ach, and render the 

breath delicately sweet.” Having clean, healthy teeth was considered important for mixing 

in polite society.54

53 E. James Ferguson et al., eds., The Papers of Robert Morris, 1781–1784 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh 

Press, 1973–), 2:206, 208n, 285, 290; Michael Jenifer Stone to Walter Stone, May 3, 1783, Stone Family Papers, 

LC; Robert Morris to Walter Stone, February 7 (quote), March 21, April 11 (quote), July 18 (quote), August 8, 

1790, Stone Family Papers, LC; Michael Jenifer Stone, in a letter to Walter Stone, April 12, 1790, mentioning the 

“shock” of Ridgate’s death; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 226–27. Morris chose to give power of attorney to Port 

Tobacco merchant Robert Fergusson to pursue his claims on Ridgate’s estate. Morris asked Walter to consult 

Fergusson on “bidding” for goods on sale and “as to selling our Credit.” In the same letter of August 8, 1790, 

Morris informed Walter that Joshua Johnson of the Annapolis firm Wallace, Johnson and Muir had been chosen 

over Walter Stone for the consulship in London (Stone Family Papers, LC). The Papers of Thomas Jefferson

confirms Morris’s application to Jefferson on behalf of Walter Stone (“Documents on American Commercial 

Policy,” 16:523; “List of Consular Vacancies,” 17:256). 

54 James Craik Jr. to Walter Stone, June 4, 1782, Kremer Collection, SMSC; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, 

October 8, 1781, Fogg Collection, Maine Historical Society, transcription in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A 

Chronology of Select Primary Sources”; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 21 and July 16, 1782, April 8 and 

26, 1783, Stone Family Papers, LC; Thomas M. Doerfinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and 

Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986) 

205–6; advertisement for “Doctor Fendall” in Maryland Gazette (Annapolis) October 7, 1784; Van Horn, 

“George Washington’s Dentures,” 19–21. Other purchase requests while Walter was in Philadelphia included 

stays for Margaret Stone and silver buttons for fourteen-year-old Alexander Scott (Thomas Stone to Walter 

Stone, March 30, 1783, Stone Family Papers, LC; Alexander Scott to Walter Stone, November 29, 1781, Stone 

Family Papers, MdHS).
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Thomas also asked his brother to conduct professional business for him in the city, 

including settling a debt with a Mr. Coleman and facilitating his correspondence with 

clients Peter and Isaac Wikoff. Walter also brokered an unknown job offer from Robert 

Morris to Thomas Stone in 1782, which Thomas declined.55

Thomas Stone was supportive of his brother’s occupations in Philadelphia, believing that the city offered “greater Opportunity of improvement” (that is, personal advancement) than Maryland. But Thomas also welcomed Walter home when the younger brother 

established himself as a merchant in Port Tobacco by July 1784, trading in partnership with 

their brother John Hoskins Stone, buying tobacco and wheat and selling imported goods. 

At Port Tobacco, Walter also served as a plantation clerk or agent for Haberdeventure, a 

position described in Chapter 4. Walter straddled two worlds, trade and planting, when 

manning the retail store, negotiating an employment contract for the miller at Thomas’s 

mill, and selling and hiring out enslaved people at Thomas’s direction.56

Thomas had encouraged Walter to return to Maryland to be closer to the people 

who knew him best—though he advised Walter to avoid the state’s fastest-growing city, 

Baltimore (“you want friendship[,] thought[,] and attention more than knowledge and I am 

sure Baltimore is not the place to acquire these habits”). In late 1790, when Walter’s health 

took a turn for the worse, prompting him to compose his will, the prominent physician 

Benjamin Rush also encouraged Walter to seek the society of friends. Walter must have 

been experiencing gastrointestinal distress, as Dr. Rush recommended keeping his bowels 

“open” through diet and an “opening medicine” and offered a cure for worms that Dr. 

Rush suspected were aggravating his condition. More forcefully, Dr. Rush recommended 

marriage as a cure for Walter’s distress.57

Rush encouraged travel and approved of Walter’s plan to travel to the “Virginia 

Springs,” a cluster of spas that developed after the Revolutionary War south of Bath, 

Virginia, along a seventy-five-mile stretch known collectively as the “Virginia Springs” or 

55 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, March 30, 1783, Garrett Library, Johns Hopkins University; Thomas Stone to 

Walter Stone, April 21, 1782, April 8, 1783, Stone Family Papers, LC; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 26, 

1783, Gratz Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 27, 1783, 

Emmet Collection, New York Public Library; Peter and Isaac Wikoff to Thomas Stone, April 29, 1783, William 

Cooke Papers, MdHS. Transcriptions of these letters can be found in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of 

Select Primary Sources.”

56 John Hoskins Stone to Walter Stone, July 29, 1784, MS 406, MdHS; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 226. When 

Walter moved back to Port Tobacco in 1784, he might have resided at the store that John Hoskins Stone advertised for sale in 1795. On a Port Tobacco water lot was “a large wooden house, having at one end two rooms 

completely fitted for a retail store, and at the other end two handsome well finished rooms, besides a large 

counting-room and lodging room for clerks.” This store, “finished entirely for the reception and storage of dry 

goods,” had a “a piazza the length of the house” on which goods would have been put on display. Also on the lot 

were a wooden dwelling house, two-bays wide, with four rooms, each with fireplaces, and a stable (Maryland 

Gazette [Annapolis], July 30, 1795).

57 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, December 3, 1783, The Rosenbach, Philadelphia; will of Walter Stone in 

Petravage, “Historic Furnishings Report,” 35; Benjamin Rush to Walter Stone, January 5 and 30, February 11, 

1791, Stone Family Papers, LC. These letters are transcribed and edited in L. H. Butterfield, Letters of Benjamin 

Rush, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1: 574–77. 
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Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

simply “the Springs.” Guests sought both health and pleasure from bathing in thermal 

pools, imbibing mineral water, taking in the mountain scenery, and mixing in society. 

Among the spas was Sweet Springs in Botetourt County, where Walter passed away in 

September 1791. Walter named his nephew Alexander Scott the executor of his will; 

allegedly Alexander Scott had a house at the “Springs,” to which Alexander invited Thomas 

Stone’s son, Frederick, in 1792. This may have been the house where Walter spent his last 

days.58

The documentary record gives tantalizing glimpses of the emotional and financial 

relationships between Thomas Stone and his younger brother, Walter. Thomas looked after 

Walter’s welfare and vice versa; when Thomas reviewed his will with Walter as part of his 

preparations for leaving for the West Indies, the brothers reminded each other of “matters” 

about the estate.59

The brothers’ overlapping personal ties and business interests also intertwined 

with the lives of African Americans. Take, for example, the remarkable timing of the escape 

of “Bob,” a thirty-eight-year-old enslaved blacksmith, from Port Tobacco. Bob emancipated himself “some days” before October 3, 1787, about the same time that Thomas Stone 

was in Alexandria, Virginia, preparing to depart for the West Indies for his health. (Thomas 

died in Alexandria on October 5.) Bob may have taken advantage of Thomas’s departure to 

flee a new situation; just a month prior, Walter and John Hoskins Stone had purchased Bob 

and his family from Walter Pye of Charles County. Research into the history of African 

Americans in Charles County will, over time, provide new perspectives on the Stone 

family.60

To conclude, Haberdeventure had numerous stakeholders within Thomas Stone’s 

family. Thomas’s father, David Stone, may have invested in the plantation to provide a 

measure of financial support to his children by his second marriage who would not inherit 

land. Thomas Stone and his brother-in-law Gustavus Richard Brown partnered in Charles 

58 Barbara G. Carson, “Early American Tourists and the Commercialization of Leisure,” in Of Consuming 

Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert 

(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 395; death notice for Walter Stone in Maryland Gazette 

(Annapolis), October 6, 1791, announcing his death the “6th ult[imate]” (i.e., September 6, 1791); Frederick 

Stone to Michael Jenifer Stone, July 25, 1792, MS 406, MdHS. Walter’s possession of a case of lancets engraved 

with his name tells us that bleeding was a regular method of healing for him (will of Walter Stone in Petravage, 

“Historic Furnishings Report”). 

59 Walter witnessed Thomas composing the codicil to his will, and the two exchanged information about the 

estate (deposition of Walter Stone, December 29, 1787, in Chancery Court, Chancery Papers, case 4647, Scott v. 

Stone et al., MSA; see also Appendix 3). Thomas did not leave a gift to Walter in his will, whereas he did for 

Walter’s sisters Catherine and Grace. Presumably Thomas considered Walter’s circumstances sufficient for his 

own support, or the two men had a verbal agreement that was not put in writing.

60 For Walter and John Hoskins Stone’s advertisements for Bob, see, for example, Maryland Gazette (Annapolis) 

November 1, 1787, and Maryland Journal (Baltimore), November 16, 1787. The latter mentions that Bob had a 

“written permission” from a previous owner “to hire himself wherever he chose.” Walter Pye sold Bob, his wife 

Suck, age twenty-six, and their four children to John Hoskins Stone in late August 1787 (Charles County Land 

Records, D#4:116, MSA). 
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Haberdeventure as a Stone Family Enterprise 

County’s real estate market as early as 1769, when Thomas applied his skills and knowledge 

as an attorney to help Brown convert entailed land to fee simple land through a complex 

legal maneuver called common recovery. (Chapter 4 revisits Brown’s docking the entail on 

his inherited property.) Thomas did not allow his younger siblings Michael Jenifer Stone, 

Walter Stone, Grace Stone, and Catherine Scott to live off his estate entirely for free. Each 

contributed resources, such as people held in bondage in Grace’s case and clerical skills in 

Walter’s case. During the Revolutionary War, Thomas Stone rented land for Michael 

Jenifer Stone and Catherine Scott to live off of and make saleable goods. Thomas Stone’s 

dual obligations to bequeath an estate to his son that was large enough to make him “independent” and also care for his siblings gave rise to occasional tensions within the family. 

But building security in wealth and preventing financial ruin was in the interest of all who 

sought support from Haberdeventure.
111

CHAPTER THREE

African American Life at

Haberdeventure and in Charles

County, Maryland, 1770–1790s

On October 3, 1776, a “young Negro woman named BET...her ears bored for 

rings” escaped from Thomas Stone’s household in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

Bet made her own bid for independence three months after Stone and other 

members of the Continental Congress voted for independence in early July. Given the 

timing of Bet’s departure, while Stone was preparing to return to Maryland at the end of 

the month, it is reasonable to assume that she refused to travel south with the household. 

The young woman, whose birthplace is unknown, also took advantage of the chaotic 

retreat of American forces from a military campaign in New York. Stone was skeptical of a 

tip that “a Negro woman, answering her description, was seen at Brunswick, in Jersey, with 

some soldiers,” but he published the rumor anyway to improve the chances of Bet’s 

capture. While confident in his claims of ownership of the bondswoman, Stone admitted 

the chances that Bet could slip into an ambiguous position between free and non-free while 

outside the confines of his urban household.1

Bet’s actions in Philadelphia—not only her departure as war approached the city, 

but also her choice to take clothing with her—serve as a useful framework for an exploration of African American life at Haberdeventure in a number of ways.

First, Bet’s decision to flee in 1776 took place in the context of the growth of the 

free black population in Philadelphia and Maryland in the last quarter of the eighteenth 

century, and the demographics of the African American population in both of those places 

is an important backdrop to this chapter. About one in three of the enslaved people listed 

in Thomas Stone’s probate inventories of early 1788 (eight out of the twenty-five plus Bet) 

are known to have obtained, or attempted to obtain, freedom by legal or extralegal means 

between 1776 and the 1790s. Bet’s experience was more typical for pursuing personal 

1 Runaway advertisement, dated October 16, appearing in the Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia), 

October 19, 1776. Thomas Stone, who had been in Philadelphia since April with the exception of a brief 

departure at the end of that month to accompany his wife to the city, left it by the end of October. He apparently 

went home to Haberdeventure before attending the Maryland Senate in Annapolis in February (Burnett, Letters 

of Members of the Continental Congress, 1:xlvii; 2:l–li; Thomas Stone to Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, April 24, 

1776, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, eds. Smith et al., 3:580–81; letters to and from Stone 

between December 7, 1776, and February 22, 1777, in Jefferson’s “Thomas Stone: A Chronology from Select 

Primary Sources,” suggesting his removal to Annapolis by the latter date. Maryland troops from Charles County 

served in the campaign of 1776 in New York and New Jersey (Lee, Price of Nationhood, 157–58).
African American Life at Haberdeventure and in Charles County, Maryland, 1770–1790s

112

freedom outside of the legal system. Nevertheless, expanded access to legal freedom for 

enslaved African Americans in late eighteenth-century Maryland is an important part of 

Charles County’s history.2

Bet’s decision to leave Stone’s household also challenges us to consider how 

enslaved African Americans formed social connections independent of slaveholders. As is 

the case for the majority of people (eighteen out of twenty-five, or 70 percent) whom 

Thomas and Margaret Stone held in bondage at the end of their lives, we do not know Bet’s 

birthplace or who her parents were. Furthermore, Bet was one of at least seven enslaved 

people who worked off the plantation, in one of the family’s urban residences in 

Philadelphia and Annapolis or as hirelings in other households. With whom did Bet identify, and where did they live? Fortunately, freedom suits in late eighteenth-century 

Maryland offer a glimpse into African American kinship networks in Southern Maryland, 

including the Thomas family, a number of whom resided at Haberdeventure. 

This chapter, in a three-part structure, will draw on recent scholarship on slavery 

and freedom in the revolutionary era as well as a wide range of primary sources about 

African Americans in Charles County in order to advance the conversation about African 

American life and black heritage at Haberdeventure. Bet’s use of clothing as a freedom 

strategy opens a discussion about the material life of African Americans who were attached 

to larger Chesapeake plantations, demonstrating how clothing and forms of material 

culture could be used strategically for personal autonomy. This section will also compare 

the demographics of the African American population in Philadelphia and Charles County. 

Next, the chapter will explore the histories and identities of African Americans with connections to the Stone family and Haberdeventure. Particular attention will be paid to the 

descendants of a seventeenth-century mixed-race couple, Elizabeth Thomas and Joseph 

Mingo, who for generations asserted their lineage to advocate for their freedom. The last 

section will return to Bet’s story as a runaway in an overview of African Americans with 

ties to the Stone family who used legal and extralegal means to exercise liberty in the late 

eighteenth century.

2 Of the twenty-five enslaved individuals listed in Thomas Stone’s probate inventories, the following eight are 

known to obtained legal or extralegal freedom: Henry Semple (manumitted, 1793), Ibe (manumitted, 1793), John 

(manumitted, 1793), Gustavus Thomas (emancipated by the General Court of the Western Shore, 1798), Violette 

Thomas (manumitted, 1799), Jack (runaway, 1797), Phil (presumed runaway, 1799), and Rachael (runaway 

between 1791 and 1797). A ninth person, Bet (runaway, 1776), did not appear in the probate inventories. 
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African American Life at Haberdeventure and in Charles County, Maryland, 1770–1790s

Strategies for Formal and Informal Freedom

When Bet left the Stone household in Philadelphia in early October 1776, she took advantage of a social environment in which she might pass as a free person. Given that Bet 

apparently had darker skin (Stone described her as “Negro” instead of mulatto in his 

runaway advertisement), clothing was, for her, a vitally important tool to allow her to pass 

as free. 

The clothing described in Stone’s advertisement for Bet was consistent with that of 

a higher-ranking domestic servant. Stone did not accuse Bet of stealing the clothes, leaving 

open the possibility that the clothes were recognized as Bet’s possessions. (As an enslaved 

person, Bet lacked legal personhood and therefore she did not have a formal right to own 

property.) The quality of the fabrics signaled her status above that of an agricultural 

laborer—and her desire to retain that status. Generally speaking, manual laborers dressed 

in coarse fabrics and genteel people wore smooth fabrics. Bet’s clothing put her in a broad 

range in between.3

3 Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Clothing and African-American Culture in the Eighteenth and 

Nineteenth Centuries,” Past and Present 148 (1995): 149–86. The author is indebted to Linda Baumgarten for 

her valuable contributions to the analysis of Bet’s clothing (in the author’s files). 
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African American Life at Haberdeventure and in Charles County, Maryland, 1770–1790s

Figure 29. Advertisement by Thomas Stone, Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia), October 19, 1776. 

Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Bet carried with her enough clothing for several complete outfits, with different 

combinations possible between several tops—four jackets and a short gown, which was 

worn over petticoats and belted around the waist—and three sets of petticoats. Given the 

quantity of the clothing that Bet took with her, she may have intended to sell or barter 

clothing to finance her escape. Perhaps some was intended to show potential employers 

her skill with the needle. In any case, Bet appears to have anticipated winter weather. Her 

warmer clothes consisted of an “old blue shalloon jacket and petticoat,” “new purple and 

yellow checked stuff jacket and petticoat,” a “half worn scarlet cloak,” and a “black bombazeen quilted petticoat.” The white linen jacket, blue and white stamped linen jacket, and 

red and white calico short gown were lighter clothes for warm weather. 

Bet’s ensembles identified her as a working woman, possibly a ladies maid or 

skilled craftswomen such as a seamstress. She did not have the full gowns with more fabric 

yardage that wealthier women could afford. But the quality of the fabric was a notch above 

the coarse linens and woolens issued to field hands. Bet’s purple and yellow checked jacket 

and petticoat, for example, was made of stuff, a worsted wool fabric popular among female 
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African American Life at Haberdeventure and in Charles County, Maryland, 1770–1790s

laborers because it was durable, warm, and affordable. But stuff also “had some of the 

shine and visual appeal of silk.” The shalloon of Bet’s blue jacket and petticoat was a shiny 

worsted wool textile, too, in contrast to the “rough” weave of plains, a woolen common 

among the very poor. One of Bet’s short gowns was made of calico, a printed cotton that 

was easier to wash than woolens and more costly than a coarse linen-like osnaburg.4

Bet’s clothing conveyed a degree of refinement and a sense of fashion. The purple 

and yellow checked jacket and petticoat were new, suggesting that Bet updated her wardrobe on a regular basis. “Hats and caps were a key focus of fashion between the 1770s and 

1790s,” and the first piece of clothing mentioned in Bet’s advertisement is her black bonnet 

made of alamode, which was a silk material, and lace. Bet’s petticoat of bombazine, a weave 

of “fine wool and silk,” was in the fashionable color of black. Accessories were also a focus 

of fashion at the time, too; Bet’s earrings and silver shoe buckles fall under this category.5

Bet had two advantages for access to clothing: her position as a domestic servant 

and her residence in a city. Enslavers typically expected domestic servants to wear “finer 

quality clothing” than field hands. Furthermore, in a city, Bet had opportunities within 

walking distance to barter and sell clothes.6

To provide a point of comparison, at the Charles County plantation Araby a decade 

earlier, enslaved field hands were issued “country cloth” and osnaburg. Country cloth was 

locally made, often a combination of wool and cotton or wool and flax. Osnaburg was an 

imported coarse linen fabric. Araby’s owner also supplied “Negro shoes” and “Negro 

hose” or stockings. Phil, a man formerly enslaved by Thomas Stone, wore an “osnaburg 

shirt” and “striped country cloth trousers” when he escaped from a slaveholder in Virginia 

in 1799. Phil’s “old hat,” “old shoes,” and drab-colored “gray cloth jacket, faced with blue” 

underscored his material poverty. Phil’s clothing, made of coarse fabrics and dull tones, is 

4 Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (New 

Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 43 (quote), 114–18; Sally A. Queen, Textiles for Colonial Clothing: A 

Workbook of Swatches and Information (Arlington, VA: Q Graphics Production Co., 2000) 16 (quote); John 

Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University 

Press, 2007), 282. Styles’s book has a helpful chapter on the clothing of servants in contemporary England 

(277–301).

5 Styles, The Dress of the People, 284, 285 (quote); “à la mode,” Oxford English Dictionary Online; Leimomi 

Oakes, “Terminology: What Is Alamode or Allamode Fabric?,” in The Dreamstress, www.thedreamstress.

com/2012/03/terminology-what-is-alamode-or-allamode-fabric, accessed March 14, 2020. For examples of 

women’s fashionable clothing in black, 1770–80, see figures 15, 16, and 357 in Baumgarten, What Clothes 

Reveal.

The advertisement for Bet provides some of the few clothing and fabric descriptions we have from the Stone 

household. Other sources include Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book in the Kremer Collection, SMSC, fabrics 

listed in Thomas Stone’s probate inventories (Appendix 4), and Grace Stone’s accounts in the William Briscoe 

Stone Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University (e.g., Appendix 16). Robert Edge Pine’s practice of sketching 

heads in person and painting bodies in studio would suggest that Pine’s portraits of Thomas and Margaret Stone 

are not reliable representations of their personal clothing (Robert G. Stewart, Robert Edge Pine: A British 

Portrait Painter in America, 1784–1788 [Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979], esp. 29, figure 9 on 

p. 32). 

6 Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 181; White and White, “Slave Clothing,” 160.
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African American Life at Haberdeventure and in Charles County, Maryland, 1770–1790s

in sharp contrast to Bet’s better-quality wardrobe. Enslavers purchased cheap, coarse 

fabrics for field hands to keep down the cost of clothing, which was “probably the largest 

plantation expenditure.” Illustrating this point, Thomas Stone asked his brother Walter to 

purchase for him in Annapolis “coarse negro stockings” if they could be found cheaply 

enough as the winter of 1783 approached.7

Clothing was a highly portable marker of social status, well-suited to an eighteenth-century “world in motion” where “migrants and travelers” away from their ancestral homes “needed a standardized system” for identifying social rank. In this 

“standardized system,” there was, of course, room for individual expression, cultural 

variance, and purposeful ambiguity. Not only did some African Americans combine colors 

in ways that set them apart from the dominant English culture. Blacks, like whites, also 

used clothing to blur social hierarchies. The enslaved “repeatedly contested” enslavers’ 

ideas of “how slaves...should look” with respect to their clothing.8

In terms of achieving freedom in the earthly world, if that was Bet’s goal, the 

ambiguous nature of her clothes, in terms of social status, was a potent strategy when she 

left Stone’s household. In Philadelphia, where the number of manumissions jumped in the 

1770s, “how...could one really tell who was a slave, who was a freeman, who a servant, and 

who a runaway?” Bet’s escape occurred on the cusp of a shift toward greater access to free 

status among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the British Atlantic world at the 

end of the eighteenth century.9

In 1776, the free black population of Philadelphia was on trend to exceed the 

number of enslaved African Americans in the city as a result of manumissions and migration. At that time, Pennsylvania’s capital was the most populous city in British North 

America, with twenty-five thousand people. According to one estimate, there were approximately two hundred to three hundred free black residents in the city in 1770, and this 

number is thought to have doubled by the year that Bet left Stone’s household, reaching a 

number roughly equal to that of enslaved people in the city. By 1783, the free black population surpassed one thousand people. A high mortality rate and low birth rate meant that 

7 Probate inventory of William Eilbeck, Charles County Inventories 1753–66, pp. 449–455, taken November 7, 

1765, recorded May 1, 1766, transcription provided by the website Probing the Past: Virginia and Maryland 

Probate Inventories, 1740–1810, https://chnm.gmu.edu/probateinventory; runaway advertisement for “Phill,” 

Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), August 8, 1799 (see Appendix 8, runaway advertisements); Walsh, Motives of 

Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 555n (quote); Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, December 3, 1783, The Rosenbach, 

Philadelphia (quote). For more about Phil, see Chapter 4 and Appendix 9.

8 Carson, Face Value, 35 (quote); Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal, 136–37; White and White, “Slave 

Clothing,” 155 (quote), 169 on an “African-American aesthetic” of “contrasting colours.” “Slaves’ textiles were 

purchased in a restricted range of colors, usually white, blue, or green” (Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal, 115).

9 David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in 

the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 56 (1999): 257 (quote); Gary B. 

Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard 

University Press, 1988), chapters 1 and 2; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 488–90. 
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African American Life at Haberdeventure and in Charles County, Maryland, 1770–1790s

despite access to schools, churches, and other places of community, living conditions were 

difficult. Nevertheless “the concentration of free blacks” in cities like Philadelphia “promised security against a hostile world.”10

Was it Bet’s intention to join this growing free black community, or was she simply 

taking advantage of the community’s presence in the short term to elude her would-be 

captors? According to an advertisement for Bet undersigned by city resident Michael 

Clarke on Thomas Stone’s behalf, “It is supposed that she is concealed in this city.” Clarke 

advertised until at least November 9, 1776, after which time Bet’s name drops from view.11

The example of another enslaved housemaid, Ona Judge, who fled President 

George Washington’s household in Philadelphia in 1796, is instructive here for highlighting 

the nascency of abolition in the Revolutionary Era. Judge, who was born at Mount Vernon 

in 1773, was perhaps as much as a generation younger than Bet; Judge was only three years 

old when Bet, as a “young woman,” became a fugitive. In the twenty years between each 

woman’s flight—1776 and 1796—modest changes in the laws of Pennsylvania offered paths 

to legal freedom. Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation law, passed in 1780, set a term of 

twenty-eight years in bondage for children born to enslaved women after March 1, 1780. 

The same act prohibited non-resident slaveholders, like George and Martha Washington, 

from keeping enslaved people in the state for more than six months. In the intervening 

years, the city’s free black community had grown larger and more vibrant, giving rise to 

civic organizations and leaders such as the Reverend Richard Allen, founder of the African 

Methodist Episcopal Church. This more mature community was better equipped to provide Judge with a level of support upon her escape from the President’s House than Bet 

experienced twenty years earlier. Even so, Judge opted to remove herself to Portsmouth, 

New Hampshire, where she was less likely to be recognized due to her association with the 

Washingtons and seized as a fugitive under the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1793.12

10 Nash, Forging Freedom, 33–34, 47 (quote), 73 (quote); Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African 

American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

11 Pennsylvania Ledger and the Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey Weekly Advertiser 

(Philadelphia), November 2 and 9, 1776. The advertisement for Bet that Thomas Stone subscribed, dated October 

16, appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia) on October 19, and in the Pennsylvania Packet

(Philadelphia) on October 22 and 29, 1776. Michael Clarke’s ad, dated October 5, appeared earlier in the 

Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia) on October 5 and the Pennsylvania Packet on October 15. Clarke’s ad 

can also be found in the Pennsylvania Ledger’s issues of November 2 and 9. The relationship between Stone and 

Clarke is a mystery. Clarke appears to have had no claim in ownership of Bet. “The said Negro belongs to a 

gentleman of Maryland,” Clarke publicized. Clarke’s location was the sign of the Blue Ball on Chestnut Street.

12 Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona 

Judge (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017); Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom, 3; “Gradual Abolition Act of 1780,” 

www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/ digital-encyclopedia, accessed May 20, 2021; Max Grivno, 

Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of 

Illinois Press, 2011), 14.
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African American Life at Haberdeventure and in Charles County, Maryland, 1770–1790s

Maryland has been characterized as slavery’s “middle ground” between Virginia to 

its west and south and Pennsylvania to its north. Of the total black population in Maryland 

in 1776, less than 5 percent were legally free, and that number had remained static since 

1755, according to census information. Between 1790 and 1810, Maryland moved ahead of 

Virginia as the state with “the largest free black population in the country.” In 1810, 7 

percent of Virginia’s blacks were free, and that number would move modestly toward 10 

percent at the end of the antebellum period. Meanwhile, in Maryland, more than 20 

percent of blacks were free in 1810 and on “the eve of the Civil War the Maryland black 

population was nearly half free.”13

In Maryland, new influences came to the fore between the 1770s and 1790s that 

helped African Americans advance their claims to personal and legal freedom. Among 

these were natural rights philosophy, humanitarianism, egalitarianism, evangelicalism, and 

economic change, including a greater emphasis on grain and livestock farming and demand 

for wage labor in growing cities like Baltimore. Between the close of the war in 1783 and 

1800, “thousands of blacks” in Maryland became legally free through manumission and, 

directly and indirectly, as a result of freedom suits. Another untold number passed into 

freedom informally, as Bet did or attempted to do.14

Thomas Stone’s household was not insulated from these trends. About one out of 

three enslaved individuals named in Stone’s probate inventories (or nearly one out of every 

four persons known to have been held in bondage by Stone over his lifetime) achieved or 

sought freedom between Bet’s escape in 1776 and the 1790s. Nevertheless, free blacks in 

Charles County’s total population remained a distinct minority in the late eighteenth and 

nineteenth centuries. (Notably, Thomas Stone did not manumit any of the people he held 

in bondage.) In 1790, free blacks made up 1.9 percent of Charles County’s total population. 

That number rose to 5.6 percent by 1850, which was lower than Maryland as a whole (13 

percent of the total population). In 1790, Maryland’s free blacks were most populous on 

the state’s Eastern Shore, but that locus moved over the ensuing decades to Northern 

Maryland because of the growth of Baltimore. Meanwhile, an increasing proportion of the 

state’s enslaved population resided in the Southern Maryland counties of Anne Arundel, 

Calvert, Charles, Prince George’s, Montgomery, and St. Mary’s. In 1790, 47.3 percent of 

Maryland residents held in bondage lived in Southern Maryland; by 1850, that number 

grew to 52.9 percent of all of Maryland’s bondspeople living in Southern Maryland.15

13 Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 1 (quote); Richard S. Dunn, “Black Society in the Chesapeake, 

1776–1810,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, eds. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman 

(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 49–82 (quote 62).

14 Loren Schweninger, “Freedom Suits, African American Women, and the Genealogy of Slavery,” William and 

Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 71, no. 1 (January 2014): 40 (quote). Lee notes a dramatic increase in the number of 

runaway notices in Maryland newspapers in the 1780s and 1790s in Price of Nationhood, 216.

15 Fields, Slavery and Freedom, 6–12, including tables 1.4 and 1.6.
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African American Life at Haberdeventure and in Charles County, Maryland, 1770–1790s

This chapter will discuss a selection of tangible cultural resources at 

Haberdeventure in an effort to identify ways that the majority of the plantation’s residents 

exercised personal freedom within slavery. Historian Jessica Millward makes a helpful 

distinction between personal freedom, such as choosing a domestic partner or absenting 

oneself for several days, and legal freedom, which she describes as “the rights to move 

freely, get an education, choose one’s occupation, earn a living, own property, and pass on 

one’s assets to one’s children.” Millward reminds us, “Most enslaved people never realized 

such legal freedom before the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery, 

and the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared African Americans citizens” after the 

American Civil War. At Haberdeventure, the extant tenant house, corn crib, horse barn, 

and roads steer us away from the mansion house and provoke us to consider communities 

that centered themselves differently from their masters and mistresses.16

The African American Population at Haberdeventure 

Haberdeventure was larger than most plantations in Charles County in terms of its size, 

though area plantations were getting bigger towards the end of the eighteenth century. The 

Stones of Haberdeventure were among the top ten percent of slaveholding families with 

plantations of twenty or more slaves in Charles County in 1782. According to available tax 

data, one in four enslaved persons in the county lived on plantations of this size. A higher 

proportion of bondspeople in Charles County—45 percent—lived on “small” plantations 

with ten or fewer enslaved people. From the point of view of the enslaved, the implications 

of living on a larger plantation like Haberdeventure or Thomas Stone’s father’s estate at 

Poynton Manor, where more than 50 enslaved people lived in 1774, included better opportunities for community formation than at small plantations, though impediments 

remained.17

16 Jessica Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (Athens: University 

of Georgia Press, 2015), 2.

17 Lee, “Problem of Slave Community,” 340, 350. In 1782 a tax assessor recorded the presence of twenty-one 

enslaved individuals, including seven children ages fourteen and younger, and seven whites, at Haberdeventure. 

Another fourteen enslaved individuals lived at other property owned by Thomas Stone up to a mile to the east, 

made up of Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and Addition to May Day, with reportedly no white residents. (See 

Appendix 7, tax lists.) The count of enslaved people in the 1782 tax assessment cannot be compared to Thomas 

Stone’s 1788 Charles County probate inventory one-for-one because the 1782 tax list would have included not 

only hirelings but also other enslaved people for whom Stone paid taxes but did not legally own, such as the 

enslaved people held by his sister Grace. Thomas Stone’s 1788 probate inventories counted twenty enslaved 

individuals living on Stone’s property in Charles County plus another five in Annapolis. J. Richard Rivoire posits 

that there were a minimum of twenty enslaved individuals living at Haberdeventure “at any given time” and adds 

“this figure is possibly conservative given that it represents less than half of the slaves owned by those who made 

up the [white] Haberdeventure household during that period.” This author roughly agrees with Rivoire’s assessment, which maintains a ratio of between two and three black enslaved residents for every free white resident 

(Rivoire, “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 41, 87–90).
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African American Life at Haberdeventure and in Charles County, Maryland, 1770–1790s

At Haberdeventure in 1782, blacks outnumbered whites by a ratio of two to one, 

according to the tax list that year. Admittedly this number underrepresents transient 

whites—short- and long-term visitors, hired laborers, and indentured servants—and does 

not take into account the dispersal of work and living areas over two thousand acres. 

However, the numbers do suggest a small inversion of the Charles County population at 

large, where whites made up the majority of the population for most of the eighteenth 

century.18

In terms of demographics, one thing Haberdeventure’s enslaved population shared 

with the African American population of Charles County as a whole was that a high proportion of were native-born. Natural increase (that is, population increase by birth in 

America) among people of African descent started around 1730 in Maryland and Virginia. 

Though African captives continued to arrive in the region, their numbers made up a 

declining number of Chesapeake’s overall black population as the eighteenth century wore 

on. “It has been estimated that early in the [eighteenth] century half the blacks in the region 

had been born in Africa, but by 1750 their numbers had fallen to about one-quarter, and by 

1770 their numbers were under 10 percent.” The elder Clare who lived in Stone’s 

Annapolis household, for example, was a third-generation descendant of a late seventeenth-century couple in Charles County. (More on Clare’s family history shortly.)19

The height of the African slave trade to the Potomac River basin occurred between 

the 1730s and the 1760s. A latecomer to the trade was Barnes and Ridgate, a firm based in 

London and Port Tobacco, which advertised two shipments of African captives to 

Maryland in the summer of 1770. The firm intended to put up for sale “Men, Women, and 

Children,” Middle Passage survivors who boarded in Gambia (the northern part of Upper 

Guinea on the West Coast of Africa) and were carried on the London-based ship 

Providence, stopping at Lower Cedar Point and Nanjemoy in Charles County before 

moving north to Piscataway, near the border between Charles County and Prince George’s 

County, in July and August 1770. Barnes and Ridgate also invested in the commerce of 

human beings “just imported” from the Windward Coast (the southern end of Upper 

Guinea) on the Liverpool-based Peggy, which landed first in Virginia. The firm planned to 

sell these men, women, and children outside Charles County, at Georgetown on the 

18 Charles County’s black population had been growing at a faster rate than the white population for decades, but 

whites remained in the majority up to the American Revolution. The tax list of 1782, parts of which are missing 

for Charles County, counted 6,457 whites and 5,411 enslaved blacks in the county. With white outmigration after 

the war, the numbers of whites to blacks reached a 1 to 1 ratio by 1790. (Scholars do not cite the 1782 tax list to 

count free blacks, relying on the 1790 federal census instead.) In 1810, Southern Maryland as a whole had a 

black majority (57 percent) (Lee, “The Problem of Slave Community in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake,” 

348; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 22; Fields, Slavery and Freedom, 3, 11). In July 1770, an Irish indentured servant 

ran away from Thomas Stone, indicating that Stone did use indentured servant labor (see the series of runaway 

advertisements in Appendix 8).

19 Lorena S. Walsh, “Migration, Society, Economy, & Settlement: 1607–1830,” in The Chesapeake House: 

Architectural Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg, eds. Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury (Chapel Hill: 

University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 55.
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Potomac River and Nottingham on the Patuxent River, in late August. Barnes and Ridgate’s 

participation in the transatlantic slave trade is notable for this study because of Thomas 

Stone’s legal services for the firm and for Ridgate individually (see Chapter 5).20

The Upper Guinea origins of the slave traffic that Barnes and Ridgate invested in 

circa 1770 is consistent with recent research about the slave trade into the Chesapeake. As 

summarized by Lorena S. Walsh, the majority of captive Africans who were brought to the 

Potomac River and Maryland boarded on ships in a swath of West Africa between 

Senegambia and the Gold Coast. 

More than half the number of Africans brought to the Upper Chesapeake (the 

Virginia Potomac basin and Maryland) in the eighteenth century came from the 

upper parts of the West African coast, from Senegambia to the north, to a 

second region extending from the Cassamance River to Cape Mount (the region 

that today includes Sierra Leone in the center), then easterly along the Windward 

Coast (which encompasses Ivory Coast and Liberia) and ending on the Gold 

Coast (present-day Ghana).

Africans shipped to the “Lower Chesapeake,” defined as the York and Upper James river 

basins, came predominately from “more southerly parts of Africa, from the Bight of Biafra 

(now eastern Nigeria) or West Central Africa (the Congo and Angola).” Walsh continues, 

“Whether these differing forced migration steams had any effect on local slave cultures in 

the region is a strenuously debated topic.” Walsh favors a “considered assessment” that 

posits reduced “potential for cultural continuities with West Africa” in the Upper 

Chesapeake than in the Lower Chesapeake due to greater cultural diversity among forced 

African migrants in the former.21

Other aspects of the slave trade in the upper Chesapeake, in addition to the varied 

origins of the captives, hampered direct cultural transmission from Africa, including the 

small size of the lots in which slaves were purchased, predominantly male numbers (further 

reducing the likelihood of finding a mate with cultural affinities), and slaves’ geographic 

dispersal among plantations. Moreover, Africans met with the disregard, if not hostility, of 

the white European majority to their native cultures. British slaveholders “did not believe 

20 Donald M. Sweig, “The Importation of African Slaves to the Potomac River, 1732–1772,” William and Mary 

Quarterly, 3rd ser., 42 (1985): 507–24; advertisements by Barnes and Ridgate in Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), 

July 19 and August 23, 1770. Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Database (www.slavevoyages.org) confirms the 

travel of the snow Providence from Gambia to Maryland but lacks information on the number of enslaved people 

on board (voyage identification number 77170). The Peggy, according to slavevoyages.org, arrived at an 

unknown port in Virginia from the Windward Coast with 144 enslaved people (voyage identification number 

91463). For informative maps of the slave trade out of Upper Guinea circa 1770, see David Eltis and David 

Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), maps 56–64. 

Additional newspapers advertisements of sales of captive Africans in Charles County can be found in Edith 

Moore Sprouse, Along the Potomac River: Extracts from the Maryland Gazette 1728–1799 (Westminster, MD: 

Heritage Books, 2011). By state law, the transatlantic slave trade to Maryland ended in 1783.

21 Walsh, “Migration, Society, Economy, and Settlement,” 54–55. See also Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the 

Transatlantic Slave Trade, and www.slavevoyages.org for the results of voyage data analysis of European traffic 

in enslaved Africans to the Americas.
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themselves to be bound by any obligation to recognize the social and cultural lineages of 

the enslaved,” remarks Vincent Brown, a historian of Jamaica where over a million captive 

Africans landed between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Brown asks, in 

the midst of “violence, dislocation, and death,” how did the enslaved make sense of their 

lives? How did they honor their ancestors, mourn their dead, and create social bonds?22

Words like “syncretism,” “creolization,” “hybridization,” and “acculturation” 

pepper recent scholarship on the cultures created by Africans and their descendants in the 

British mainland colonies (later the United States) and the Caribbean. Archaeologist 

Michael T. Lucas, for example, discusses artifacts and artifact groupings intended “to 

harness the supernatural world” found in contexts in Prince George’s County from 1680 to 

1720 where Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans had close contact with one 

another. Excavated objects such as “pierced coins, a pierced stone disk, glass beads, cowrie 

shells,” and “carved stones” defied neat categorization by ethnicity or religion. 

Archaeologists Mark P. Leone and Elizabeth Pruitt also discuss a mixing of African, 

Caribbean, Native American, and European beliefs about the spiritual world and the 

exchange of knowledge about plants for the purposes of healing in specific contexts around 

Maryland. For instance, a circa 1865–80 deposit of at least six circles made of glass, iron, 

and other materials found beneath the floor of a tenant house on the Eastern Shore offers 

insight into the genesis of Afro-American Christianity. At other sites around Maryland, 

spirit bundles (nkisi) have been excavated in passageways, such as doors, windows, and 

chimneys. For “practitioners,” these bundles, typically made of “crystals, stones, pins, 

nails, buttons, coins, discs, white ceramics, glass, and beads,” offered a means of communicating with the spirit world and controlling one’s environment.23

22 Lee, “The Problem of Slave Community,” 342; Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study 

of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114 (2009): 1231–49 (quote 1248); Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the 

Transatlantic Slave Trade, 201. Jonathan Roberts documents “cultural chauvinism” of Europeans in coastal West 

Africa, even in matters of life and death, in “Medical Exchange on the Gold Coast During the Seventeenth and 

Eighteenth Centuries,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 45 (2011): 480–523. On the other hand, Michael T. 

Lucas came across a European who consulted an African and a Native American, in addition to a European 

healer, for a disease cure in 1690s Prince George’s County, Maryland (“Empowered Objects: Material 

Expressions of Spiritual Beliefs in the Colonial Chesapeake Region,” Historical Archaeology 48 [2014]: 106–24, 

esp. 109).

23 Lucas, “Empowered Objects,” 106 (“creolization and hybridization”); Mark P. Leone et al., “The Archaeology 

of Early African American Communities in Talbot County, Eastern Shore, Maryland, USA, and Their 

Relationship to Slavery,” Historical Archaeology 52 (2018): 753–72; Elizabeth Pruitt, Reordering the Landscape 

at Wye House: Nature, Spirituality, and Social Order (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), esp. chapter 3 

(quote, 44).
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Tangible Cultural Resources at Haberdeventure 

What are the tangible cultural resources at Haberdeventure today that can be analyzed for 

evidence of African American life and culture two and a half centuries ago? By first appearance, the answer is very little. The eighteenth-century kitchen, where enslaved people very 

likely slept, was replaced in the nineteenth century, its material evidence obscured by the 

brick west wing that stands in its place. No eighteenth-century outbuildings survive, and no 

burial sites of the enslaved have been confirmed. Archaeological excavations conducted in 

the park in the 1980s and 1990s were limited in scope and mostly performed for mitigation 

purposes to comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. 

Archaeologists identified American Indian artifacts from the Late Archaic period (3000–

2300 BCE). Indigenous occupation thereafter, in the Woodland and Contact periods, 

remains speculative. Indeed, any eighteenth-century residential sites in the 322-acre park, 

apart from the mansion house, have not been identified and excavated. And American 

Indian and African American cultural influences on the property as it existed in the 1770s 

and 1780s remain obscure. 24

Without additional archaeology at Haberdeventure, our knowledge of cultural 

beliefs and practices among the enslaved on the plantation is limited to what is visible 

aboveground and can be gleaned in documents and printed sources like newspapers. 

Information about other plantations and households helps fill in the gaps. We know, too, 

that the experiences of enslaved people varied tremendously. Urban life, for example, was 

different than rural life, and some proportion of Haberdeventure’s residents navigated 

both. The elder Clare, for instance, had moved to Stone’s Annapolis household by 1787–

1788, and the elder Jack ran errands between Haberdeventure and Annapolis.25

At the risk of not giving enough attention to the domestic servant experience, the 

following discussion of tangible cultural resources at Haberdeventure with regard to 

African American history will focus on structures that are some distance away from the 

mansion house. Scholars suggest that Africans and their descendants had greater freedom 

of expression in outlying areas away from the master’s house. What if a tour of 

24 Moyer, “Archaeological Overview and Assessment,” 22, 51–52. Moyer comments on a feeble effort in the 

mid-1980s to find evidence of occupation east of the nineteenth-century tenant house, a likely place to find 

enslaved housing. The 1987 report “has many errors and inconsistencies,” the maps are incomplete, and artifacts 

were not only left uncatalogued but left in boxes “severely overpacked and poorly labeled” (67). Admittedly, 

plantation archaeology in the American South with respect to African American life was a field in its infancy at 

the time. A 2017 Foundation Document for the Thomas Stone National Historic Site acknowledges the need to 

conduct archaeological surveys and catalogue collections (pp. 29–30). A National Register of Historic Places 

Registration Form for Habre de Venture, submitted in 1988, includes a 1984 “interview report” of a local African 

American resident’s testimony to his grandfather’s burial in an area east of the Stone family burial ground 

“reserved for Black servants and tenants.” James Cornelius Woodland died in the late nineteenth or early 

twentieth century. (The State of Maryland abolished slavery in 1864.)

25 Appendix 9, “Enslaved Persons in Thomas Stone’s Probate Inventories,” offers information on the elder Clare 

and the elder Jack.
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Haberdeventure started among the nineteenth-century dependencies, at the extant tenant 

house, corn crib, and horse barn? Though each of these structures postdate Thomas 

Stone’s lifetime, they offer starting points for discussing African American life on a large 

plantation (by Charles County standards) in the later eighteenth century.26

Mid-Nineteenth-Century Tenant House

No physical evidence of eighteenth-century slave housing survives aboveground at 

Haberdeventure. (See Chapter 1 for a discussion about work and living areas for enslaved 

domestic servants at the main house.) In the search for slave quarters, the mid-nineteenth-century tenant house offers a promising place to start. This structure, initially 

erected circa 1840–59, lies southwest and somewhat out of view of the main house. (See 

Figure 2.) It stands adjacent to a clearing that has the appearance of an arable field. Located 

about five hundred feet away from the main house, a ravine and stream serve as a natural 

barrier between the two residences.27

According to oral histories, “three one-room cabins, each with an outside brick 

chimney, were [at one time] located in a line off the southwest end of the existing tenant 

house.” While the presence of brick chimneys makes it unlikely that the three cabins 

recalled in oral history dated to the eighteenth century—brick was a more common local 

building material in the nineteenth century—it is possible that slave cabins with impermanent chimneys were located in this vicinity in the 1770s and 1780s, in addition to housing 

for slaves closer to the mansion house, if we extrapolate from a study of nearby La Grange 

plantation.28

La Grange, known as Strawberry Hill during its ownership by Dr. James Craik and 

his son William Craik between 1763 and 1798, stands less than three miles from 

Haberdeventure. (For the location of La Grange relative to Haberdeventure, see Figure 3.) 

The size of the enslaved population in the 1780s and 1790s, at more than twenty people, 

roughly matched that of Haberdeventure. Archaeological investigators found two areas of 

slave housing at La Grange dating to the second half of the eighteenth century and early 

26 A pioneer study of American plantation architecture that shifted the gaze away from mansion house is John 

Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1993). Dell Upton’s 1985 groundbreaking article “Black and White Landscapes in EighteenthCentury Virginia” identifies spaces where enslaved blacks could find more autonomy. On the greater freedom of 

cultural expression by blacks on outlying quarters compared to inside and adjacent to slaveholders’ houses in the 

colonial Chesapeake, see also Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 104–24, and passim.

27 The tenant house was apparently moved from its original location and enlarged in the mid-twentieth century 

(National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for Habre de Venture [1988], section 7, page 3). Moyer’s 

archaeological overview and assessment (2007) summarizes archaeological surveys conducted in the vicinity of 

the tenant house in the 1980s and 1990s.

28 CLR (1996) 43, citing oral histories at the Southern Maryland Studies Center, College of Southern Maryland, 

La Plata; Lounsbury, “Brickwork,” 257–58. 
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nineteenth century. A “quarter complex” made up of about three to six structures, occupied from the 1760s to the 1820s, stood about two hundred feet from the main house. The 

quarter complex was located on “less desirable ground” than the main house. The land “is 

not level,” the team observed, and “retains water.” Another eight or nine cabins, some 

occupied in the late eighteenth century, were found up to a thousand feet away from the 

main house; this latter grouping is more in keeping with the surviving tenant house at 

Haberdeventure, being greater removed from the main house, with more privacy.29

Another significant finding at La Grange is that patterns in slave housing changed 

over time. During the tenure of Francis Newman, an Englishman who acquired La Grange 

in 1798 and doubled the size of the slave force, the quarter complex closer to the main 

house expanded to accommodate more people. Then, when the Stonestreet family took 

over in the 1830s, the quarter complex fell out of use. A two-story brick kitchen, which 

could accommodate slaves, was erected, and other slave housing moved away from the 

vicinity of the main house.

As is the case at Haberdeventure, La Grange lacks documentary or other aboveground evidence for the location of slave quarters or cabins. The archaeologists used a 

prediction model for locating the housing. Variation in slave housing among eighteenth-century Chesapeake plantations defies easy patterning, though. From a review of 

other studies, the investigators concluded the following:

Slave quarters are just as likely to be located on poor soils and in marginal areas 

within a landscape as they are to be neatly arranged in a core area of outbuildings around the plantation house or overseer’s dwelling. On smaller plantations, it was not uncommon for slaves to sleep in detached kitchens or other 

outbuildings. On larger plantations, however, domestic slaves generally lived in 

the vicinity of the plantation house while field slaves were often quartered near 

the fields where they worked, sometimes on outlying or non-contiguous 

plantations.

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Charles County specifically, the archaeological team observed a general practice among slaveholders to hide slave and tenant 

housing from the view of the mansion house. The tenant house at Haberdeventure, and the 

reported cabins beyond it, fits this profile. That being said, we would expect to see accommodations for enslaved domestic servants and perhaps other skilled workers closer to the 

main house; this could be in a quarter complex within several hundred feet of the mansion 

such as at La Grange, or in outbuildings, such as the kitchen, that “served other purposes” 

29 1782 tax list, MSA; Rivoire, Homeplaces, 82; Webster, Frick, King, and Strickland, “In Search of Josiah 

Henson’s Birthplace,” iii, 17, 35, 103 (quote), 104–5. The 1782 tax assessment recorded twenty-two slaves at Dr. 

James Craik’s plantation, on a total of 495 acres. Newman held twenty-four people in bondage in 1798 and 

sixty-two by 1810. 
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and “may not fit prototypical archaeological signatures for slave housing.” Unfortunately, 

at Haberdeventure, the eighteenth-century kitchen building does not survive, depriving 

onlookers of a way to visualize the use of the kitchen as slave housing.30

Changing slaveholder preferences may further obscure the material record of slave 

housing at Haberdeventure. If the turn-of-the-nineteenth century occupant of La Grange, 

Francis Newman, preferred more oversight over the enslaved workforce, as the archaeological team suggests, and erected more slave housing near the mansion (a trend that his 

successor reversed), might Thomas Stone’s daughter and son-in-law, Margaret and Dr. 

John Moncure Daniel, have done the same in the 1790s? Also in the 1790s, George 

Washington and his agents demolished the “Quarters [or House] for Families,” a two-story 

frame building constructed in the 1760s near the mansion house at Mount Vernon, and 

replaced it with two brick wings on either side of a recently erected greenhouse. It is 

believed that the rooms at the Greenhouse Quarter had a dormitory-style layout, with 

bunks along the walls, and housed single adults, female-headed families, and conjugal 

pairs. According to a letter by Mount Vernon’s farm manager, one motivation for the new 

structure was to bring the enslaved at the Mansion House Farm under stricter regulation. 

Did slaveholder anxieties about African Americans’ claims to freedom in the 1780s and 

1790s find expression in tighter regulation over housing? 

Several residence patterns can overlap, of course, at any one time. At Mount 

Vernon’s Mansion House Farm, for instance, up to half of the enslaved residents of the 

home plantation lived in the communal housing of the Greenhouse Quarter in the 1790s, 

while others lived in different outbuildings or in single-family slave cabins not far from the 

main house. While Haberdeventure was only one-tenth the size of Mount Vernon in terms 

of the size of its enslaved population, we would still expect to see a variety of housing for 

bondspeople (and hired hands) within its boundaries.31

A notable development in the Chesapeake at the end of the eighteenth century and 

the beginning of the nineteenth century is a trend toward accommodating families in more 

private housing, the most common of which was the wooden slave cabin. A typical cabin 

measured between 150 and 250 square feet and housed between three and four people. (As 

a point of comparison, the center block of Haberdeventure measures 1,080 square feet.) 

Bondspeople constructed cabins themselves with logs and erected an earthen (wattle and 

daub) exterior chimney that could be knocked down in case of fire. Furnishings were 

30 Webster, Frick, King, and Strickland, “In Search of Josiah Henson’s Birthplace,” 34 (quote), 35, 36 (quote). 

On kitchen buildings as housing for the enslaved, see Chappell, “Housing Slavery,” 164–65. 

31 Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 162–67; Edward A. Chappell, “Housing Slavery,” in 

The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg, eds. Cary Carson and Carl R. 

Lounsbury (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 156–78, esp. 171. The Greenhouse Quarter 

at Mount Vernon accommodated about forty-five people in six hundred square feet. 
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spare. Doors and, at some cabins, door locks offered a measure of privacy, though slaveholders expected overseers to inspect slave quarters to confirm reports of illness and check 

for theft.32

Whereas poor whites were housed in cabins, too, the duplex, commonly dubbed a 

“quarter,” was a more distinct type of slave housing in the later eighteenth-century 

Chesapeake. With a brick chimney in the middle and rooms on either side, the duplex was 

visibly different from cabins with wooden chimneys and houses with brick-end chimneys. 

Duplexes were larger, at between 225 and 325 square feet, and required a greater outlay of 

material by the slaveholder, and thus might be considered an improvement over the slave 

cabin. But conditions were still crowded. The tax assessor for Charles County’s Fifth 

District in 1782, where Haberdeventure lay, did not use the word “quarter” to describe any 

property. His counterpart in the Sixth District, though, recorded quarters, including “two 

new quarters” at Charles Goodrick’s plantation, Goodrick’s Rest. Thomas Stone sold four 

enslaved people to Goodrick in 1779 and purchased “back” Bob, as noted elsewhere.33

For lack of evidence to the contrary, Thomas Stone and his agents at 

Haberdeventure, like many of their peers (George Washington being something of an 

exception), appear to have taken a hands-off approach to how their bondspeople were 

housed. Historian Philip Morgan asserts that in the colonial Chesapeake, while masters 

controlled the “size, materials, and location” of slave housing, the enslaved exercised a 

degree of creative control over construction and spatial arrangement, particularly on 

outlying plantations. One key feature was the yard, an important living space for cooking, 

socializing, playing, and working.34

Given the lack of documentation about slave housing at Haberdeventure in the 

1770s, ’80s, and ’90s, the extant nineteenth-century tenant house and recollections of other 

houses in its vicinity offers a tantalizing suggestion as to where bondspeople in the eighteenth century might have lived. However, rural properties in the eighteenth-century 

Chesapeake varied in accommodations for enslaved people. Domestic servants in a larger 

household like Haberdeventure, for example, had little space to call their own. 

Bondspeople exercised greater control over their domestic lives at a distance from slaveholders, on outlying plantations and in housing of their own construction. This control 

extended to food preparation and gardening, which will be addressed next.

32 Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 95, 106, 167, 171; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 

111–13; Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” 367; Forman, Early Manor and 

Plantation Houses of Maryland, 77. An apparent decline in “multiple” subfloor pits in slave quarters in Virginia 

at the turn of the nineteenth century has been interpreted as evidence of more families cohabitating (Chappell, 

“Housing Slavery,” 158).

33 Chappell, “Housing Slavery,” 159. The 1783 census of Charles Goodrick’s plantation unfortunately does not 

survive.

34 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 117–18, 121–23.
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1830s Corn Crib

The circa 1830s corn crib at Haberdeventure offers another opportunity to discuss agency 

in African American life on plantations of similar size in the later eighteenth century. 

Although the corn crib postdates Thomas Stone’s lifetime, its design would not be out of 

place in the late eighteenth century. Using it as a point of analysis for agency by the enslaved 

may seem counterintuitive: the contents of this structure would have been rationed to 

provide adequate sustenance to people and livestock. The corn crib, in this respect, was a 

symbol of slaveholder control over resources. However, in practice, bondspeople negotiated food provisions, exercised a degree of control over the food they raised and prepared 

for themselves, and obtained cash or credit by raising surplus for sale or exchange. The 

experience of food was much broader than slaveholder provisions.35

Corn was a critical part of the American Indian diet in the region prior to European 

colonization, and European and African inhabitants of the colonial Chesapeake incorporated the grain into their lives as well. Corn did not require as much time, labor, and skill to 

cultivate and harvest as wheat, and women and children could perform the work. In 

addition, the growing season complemented the tobacco cycle; the corn harvest in October 

followed the cutting of tobacco in September. Moreover, by the mid-eighteenth century, 

the decline of wild spaces and forage areas made corn was an important source of feed for 

livestock. To demonstrate the local importance of corn, in the South Carolina Lowcountry 

in the 1770s, where it was more profitable to raise rice than corn, an adult slave on average 

produced twenty-two bushels of corn a year; his or her counterpart in the Chesapeake 

raised five times as much annually. In Virginia and Maryland, corn sustained both people 

and livestock.36

Eighteenth-century Chesapeake slaves were more dependent on slaveholders for 

food than Lowcountry slaves. With free time constrained to Sundays (and additional time 

off at Christmas), Chesapeake slaves typically received allowances of corn and meat or fish 

for protein. They were expected to raise vegetables and fowl on their own time. Extra 

rations of meat were given at harvest and to skilled workers and drivers. “Food was an 

instrument of power on the plantation.” When Thomas Stone instructed his brother Walter 

to give allotments of pork to Violet and Ann, two sisters of higher status among the 

enslaved at Haberdeventure, in late 1785, he sought to bind the women to his household. If 

35 The corn crib at Haberdeventure dates to circa 1830–40 according to the National Register of Historic Places 

Registration Form for the property (1988). Architectural historian Orlando Ridout IV used a photo of the corn 

crib as an illustration for an article on agricultural buildings in the Chesapeake, calling it “a rare example of the 

larger, broader form used for corn storage in the eighteenth century, with the door centered in the long wall” (The 

Chesapeake House, eds. Carson and Lounsbury, figure 9.7).

36 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 48–50; Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 144–45, 336, 622; Lee, 

Price of Nationhood, 29–31. See also Chapter 4. 
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Violet and Ann accepted the offer of meat to feed their families, and perhaps to distribute 

to others as favors, they tacitly acknowledged Stone’s authority. Slaveholders also wielded 

the power to withhold food as punishment.37

While the corn crib is in one respect a symbol of external control over enslaved 

lives, given that its contents were apportioned, slaves found ways to exert their humanity. 

Mary V. Thompson writes in her history of enslaved persons at George Washington’s 

Mount Vernon: “While it is possible to see a good deal of oppression in the foodways of 

Mount Vernon slaves—in the very tedious and nutritionally inadequate rations, and the 

fact that people who were exhausted from working long days were expected to grow a good 

deal of their food in their few ‘free’ hours—it is also in their foodways that we see evidence 

of the African American community at Mount Vernon asserting its own values and fighting 

back.” In the preparation of meals, for example, using ingredients and cooking techniques 

that resonated with West African traditions, slaves resisted dehumanization. In stealing 

food, slaves asserted their own values. Charles County native Josiah Henson, for instance, 

tells a story of “running down a chicken” to offer to a woman “to whom it was at once food, 

luxury, and medicine.” With this transgression, Henson felt empowered as a male to help a 

person in need and thereby alleviate his “sorrow.”38

A similar dynamic undoubtedly played out in the herbal medicine gardens of 

Charles County, on estates large and small. Herbs could be used to heal or to poison. Jenny 

Shorter, an enslaved woman in St. Mary’s County in the mid-eighteenth century, was 

known for her cures for the flux. In 1781, an African American woman in Charles County 

known as Nan was convicted in a jury trial of attempting to poison her master’s family. 

Nan’s owner blamed “Negro Peter, who claimed” Nan as his wife. Peter had “very great 

influence over the Chief of his Colour in the neighborhood” and claimed to be “a parson 

37 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 136; Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 221, 227; Lindsay 

Bloch and Anna S. Agbe-Davies, “‘With Sundry Other Sorts of Small Ware Too Tedious to Mention’: Petty 

Consumerism on U.S. Plantations,” in Material Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity, 

eds. Barbara Heath, Eleanor E. Breen, and Lori A. Lee (New York: Routledge, 2017), 136 (quote). In a letter to 

Walter Stone of December 21, 1785, Thomas Stone directed, “Sell all the pork Ostro [the miller] has for me for 

cash except 800 [weight]—500 of which to be sent to Michael [,]of the rest 150 to be kept at the mill[,] 100 given 

to Ann for self and family[,] and 50 to Violet” (Stone Family Papers, LC).

38 Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 245; Josiah Henson, Father Henson’s Story of His 

Own Life (Boston: John P. Jewett and Co., 1858), 21–22.
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and a conjuror.” Here, then, is testimony to obeah or sorcery. “Herb doctors” attracted 

whites’ attention for their ability to inflict harm to the living, but they also offered relief to 

the enslaved who shunned European medicine.39

The accounts of poisoning, like those of theft, testify to the values and actions of 

African Americans outside of the dominant legal frameworks. Slaveholders set structures, 

such as food allowances, but African Americans exerted a measure of control over their 

own lives. Haberdeventure’s horse barn offers another opportunity to tell this story. 

1840s Horse Barn

Testimonies in 1790s freedom suits hint at a custom in Charles County of bondspeople 

raising horses for their own use and profit. Leonard Boarman, who came from a prominent 

slaveholding family, testified that an enslaved woman, Betty Mingo, sometime before her 

death around 1770, sold a horse belonging to her to pay for a lawyer while she lived at a 

plantation near the border with St. Mary’s County. A relative of the Stone family, Richard 

Robin Reeder, mentioned that David Stone allowed bondspeople on his plantation to raise 

horses, and Reeder cited this as an example of how David Stone was a “good master.”40

While we don’t know if Thomas Stone allowed his bondspeople to raise horses, it is 

evident that Stone prized horses as possessions. In his will, Thomas Stone bequeathed 

“carriage horses” and a “chair horse” to his daughters. His Charles County probate inventory lists nine horses, the most valuable of which were two nine-year-old Bay geldings, 

valued at £30 a piece. The other horses were valued at £10 or less. Who cared for these 

animals?41

Though the existing horse barn at Haberdeventure dates to the nineteenth century, 

very likely a shelter for horses existed during Thomas Stone’s ownership. Architectural 

historian Orlando Ridout V observed that in the colonial period, horses were more likely to 

be stabled than cattle and oxen. And residents used horses for a growing variety of tasks: 

39 See Chapter 1 on formal gardens in Charles County. On Jenny Shorter, see Chapter 4, note 35. Thomas Stone 

attested to the good name of the “plain country people” who defended Nan’s character and supported her release 

by the governor (Pardon Papers, Box 1, Folder 82, Governor and Council, 1781, MSA). I am grateful to Lee’s 

Price of Nationhood, 201–2, for bringing my attention to Nan’s pardon. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 610–31, 

discusses the persistence of conjuring in the early South. Pruitt considers African American appropriation of the 

garden and greenhouse at Wye House, Talbot County, Maryland, in Reordering the Landscape at Wye House, 

chapter 3 (“herb doctors,” p. 60). Breslaw discusses the power dynamics among enslaved healers, white physicians, and their patients in Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic, chapter 3. See also Thompson, “The Only 

Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” on health and medicine.

40 Transcriptions of depositions of Leonard Boarman and Richard Robin Reeder, May 22 and October 15, 1792, 

respectively, Robert Thomas v. Henry Pile, in Thomas et al., ed., O Say Can You See: Early Washington, DC, 

Law and Family, www.earlywashingtondc.org, accessed February 4, 2019. Indentured servants and slaves had to 

have the permission of their masters to “trade, barter” or “commerce” (Act Relating to Servants and Slaves, 

1715, Archives of Maryland, 30:286). 

41 Petravage, “Historic Furnishings Report,” pp. 11–14. For Thomas Stone’s probate inventory, see Appendix 4.
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“Through the first century or more of settlement, all but the wealthiest Chesapeake planters made do with a few draft animals and, if they could afford it, a riding horse or two. Over 

the course of the eighteenth century, numbers and diversity broadened to reflect increasing 

specialization and growing economic stability. A wealthy planter would own draft animals 

for farmwork, carriage horses to pull a chair, chaise, or carriage, ‘saddle horses’ for business and pleasure, and, among a small elite, racehorses for sport.” The size of stables varied 

by location; a plantation like Haberdeventure might have a stable to shelter “four to ten 

horses,” while a county seat like Port Tobacco, with its courthouse and taverns, could be 

expected to have stables to accommodate “thirty to sixty [horses] or more.”42

Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Chesapeake planters’ love affair with 

horses, and horse racing, is widely known. Less well-examined, though documented in art 

and writing of the period, are the African Americans who nurtured, trained, drove, and 

rode horses in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake. In a painting of George Washington by 

John Trumbull from 1780, an African American man, William Lee, is represented attending 

a horse on the right-hand side of the canvas. While the painting deifies Washington, not 

Lee, Lee was an accomplished horseman. Enslaved blacks used horses to travel, with and 

without slaveholders’ permission, and black jockeys were a familiar presence in later 

eighteenth-century horse races. Runaways to the British military during the American 

Revolution took horsemanship with them, riding as black jockeys in races in New York.43

Horses and horse riding, while offering freedom of movement, also had their 

dangers. A visitor’s horse kicked a postilion at Mount Vernon and gave him a broken jaw. 

Black horseback riders and carriage drivers were exposed to the same weather and bad 

road conditions that whites complained about. Thomas Stone wrote in a letter in the winter 

of 1782, after traveling from Philadelphia to Haberdeventure, “I have not been out of my 

room since I got home—the severity of the weather and roughness of the roads disordered 

me exceedingly—and I scarcely have strength to finish this scrawl.” Though he doesn’t 

comment on how anyone who may have accompanied him was feeling after this tiring trip, 

Stone did express concern about the safety of his carriage driver when he commissioned a 

42 Orlando Ridout V, “Agricultural Buildings,” in The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by 

Colonial Williamsburg, eds. Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 

Press, 2011), 198.

43 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 319–21, 416–17. For an example of unsanctioned horse use, see Rhys Isaac’s 

account of “Peter the plowman” who rode “plow horses in the night” in Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom, 26. 

On Lee, see “William (Billey) Lee,” www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/

william-billy-lee, accessed February 13, 2020; and Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 

passim. Cassandra Pybus mentions black jockeys in Revolutionary New York in “Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The 

Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 57 (April 

2005): 259–60.
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new carriage the following year. As noted in Chapter 1, Stone wanted the carriage to be 

outfitted for a postillion rather than a man perched up on a coach box, from which the 

coachman would be liable to be thrown on rural roads.44

Roads

Roads are a key feature of the landscape at Haberdeventure, as noted in Chapter 1. Lacking 

direct access to waterways, the plantation relied on overland transportation networks. 

Thomas Stone strategically located his home plantation at the nexus of two roads. Port 

Tobacco-Piscataway Road (now Rose Hill Road) continues to serve as a property boundary 

on the east side as Thomas Stone intended it to be. Another route, called Port TobaccoMattawoman Road (later Glymont Road and now abandoned), ran through the north side 

of the Haberdeventure estate. (See Figures 6–8.)45

How did the proximity of Haberdeventure to these roads impact the day-to-day life 

of the plantation from enslaved peoples’ points of view? In what ways did Port Tobacco’s 

location, at about a mile away, influence day-to-day life at Haberdeventure? And did 

enslaved residents at Haberdeventure attach any meaning to legal property boundaries?

In an essay published over thirty years ago, Jean B. Lee contended that, practically 

speaking, plantation boundaries did have power. While acknowledging accounts in slave 

narratives of the use of roads and paths to visit kin and distribute news across properties, 

Lee wrote, “we can be reasonably certain that most of the black laborers of the Chesapeake 

spent no more than a small part of their time en route to or visiting friends and relatives 

who were not housed in their own quarters. For most of their lives, slaves’ chances for 

social interactions were limited to the fields and meadows, the quarters and woods, of their 

home plantations.” Certainly, in terms of their daily work demands, most enslaved people 

in the Chesapeake had little free time or license to travel far. More recent scholarship 

emphasizes informal freedom.46

Philip Morgan, for instance, argued that colonial Chesapeake plantation boundaries were “porous” for a variety of reasons, including the dispersed settlement pattern and 

small plantation size (with eight to ten working hands on a subunit, or quarter, of a large 

plantation). “Eighteenth-century plantations might have aspired to self-sufficiency, but 

they were never self-contained.” Consistent with porous boundaries was the practice of 

hiring out of slaves to other masters and mistresses and self-hire, slaves sent on errands, 

44 Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 119; Thomas Stone to General William Smallwood, 

January 29, 1792, in Papers Relating Chiefly to the Maryland Line during the Revolution, ed. Balch, 168–70, 

reproduced in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology from Select Primary Sources.”

45 See CLR (1996) 24, Figure 17, for a depiction of Port Tobacco-Mattawoman Road cutting across the northern 

end of Haberdeventure in 1787.

46 Lee, “Problem of Slave Community,” 338 (quote).
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and the ubiquity of “abroad” marriages—marriages to persons off the plantation. Over 

time, kin networks spread out over space. “Social networks knit together slaves from many 

residences, so that bondspeople came to have a sense of place that extended beyond their 

home lots.” Enslaved people also took to roads and waterways to buy and sell goods, attend 

horse races, or attend a Sunday “Negro ball” like the one Englishman Nicholas Cresswell 

witnessed at Nanjemoy in 1774.47

Cresswell’s account of a dance assembly, with its description of a culture of music 

and physical movement different from his own, is widely cited. Nonetheless, it deserves 

repeating here because of the association between music, dance, and travel. 

Mr. Bayley and I went to see a Negro Ball, Sundays being the only days these 

poor Creatures have to themselves, they generally meet together and amuse 

themselves with Dancing to the Banjor. This Musical Instrument...is made of a 

Gourd...with...four strings.... Some of them sing to it which is very droll 

musick indeed, In their songs they generally relate the usage they have received 

from their Masters or Mistresses, in a very Satirical stile and manner.... Their 

Dancing is most violent exercise, but so irregular and Grotesque, I am not able 

to describe it. They all appear to be exceedingly happy at these merry makings 

and seem as if they had forgot or were not sensible of their miserable condition.

Cresswell did not say how many people gathered for the ball, but Nanjemoy may have been 

a local draw for music. In 1778, a banjo player named “Will Wage, or Will Crack,” of 

Piccawaxon Glebe near Lower Cedar Point and hired out to Richard Gambra, near 

Haberdeventure, was “last heard of about Nanjemoy.” “Well acquainted with all parts of 

the country,” Will had been on the move for two months (notably during harvest, when 

there was a demand for day laborers), and he likely entertained as he traveled. Josiah 

Henson, born into slavery at La Grange Plantation in or around 1789, recalled that his 

father’s banjo “was the life of the farm.”48

In the case of Haberdeventure during Thomas Stone’s lifetime, the evidence of 

enslaved people traveling is strongest for men conducting errands. For example, in 

December 1783, Jack, who was in his thirties, and a “servant” named Webster traveled 

from Haberdeventure to Annapolis to retrieve Thomas Stone’s carriage while Stone stayed 

at home. Jack carried letters to be delivered in the capitol and was entrusted with bringing 

47 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 44, 412, 476 (quote), 525 (quote); Nicholas Cresswell, diary entry dated May 

29, 1774, in A Man Apart: The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, eds. Gill and Curtis. 

48 Lee, The Price of Nationhood, 71, and Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 587, for treatments of Cresswell’s 

account of the Nanjemoy dance; runaway advertisement, Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser 

[Baltimore], October 20, 1778, cited in Lathan A. Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary 

History from the 1730s to 1790, 4 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 2:214; Father Henson’s Story of 

His Own Life, 6 (quote). A Maryland law of 1787 discouraged enslaved people from being “at large” and hiring 

themselves out “except ten days at harvest.” The law also made an exception for river pilots (Laws of Maryland, 

1787, Chapter 33, “An Act to Prevent the inconveniences arising from slaves being permitted to act as free”). 

Thomas Stone did not attend the legislative session that passed this law. 
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back for Stone clothes, medicine, and Jerry Small, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy in Stone’s 

household. Entries in Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book record Jack making the trip to 

Annapolis twice in 1779, so it is not inconceivable to imagine that Jack was an important 

lifeline between Haberdeventure and Annapolis, where Thomas Stone often traveled and 

eventually took up residence after the war. To give another example, an unnamed manservant delivered a letter from Thomas Stone at Haberdeventure to an attorney in 

Leonardtown, the seat of St. Mary’s County, in 1779.49

For other Haberdeventure residents, nearby Port Tobacco offered a venue for 

“petty consumerism,” small-scale exchanges that gave people without access to capital or 

credit a way of participating in markets. One example is Robin, an elderly man from the 

Stone family’s Pointon Manor plantation who sold fowl to Michael Jenifer Stone in 1779; 

Michael Jenifer Stone debited Thomas Stone’s account for the purchase. African 

Americans commonly sold chickens in local markets, in addition to garden produce and 

small craft items. Slaveholders sought to keep these exchanges confined to their plantations, offering barter and cash, but with limited effect. Slaves at George Washington’s 

Mount Vernon, for example, traveled as far as Alexandria, nine miles away, to sell food and 

wares.50

With their proceeds, enslaved people purchased “better clothing, extra food, and 

household goods,” as well as luxuries like sugar and coffee. Among the artifacts found in 

the late-eighteenth-to-early nineteenth-century quarter complex at La Grange were “two 

copper alloy buttons.” Buttons have been an object of interest among scholars because they 

are not an object that masters provided to slaves, and yet they appear in archaeological 

contexts and elsewhere, such as written and visual depictions of slave clothing. “Showy 

metal buttons” had particular appeal among African American young men, remarks Cary 

Carson, and around 1770 gold replaced silver as the fashionable color. The authors of the 

49 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, December 3, 1783, The Rosenbach, Philadelphia; Michael Jenifer Stone day 

book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 12; endorsement on Thomas Stone to Matthew Blair, February 17, 1779, 

Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, reproduced in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology from Selected 

Primary Sources.”

Enslaved men who traveled would have had to monitor for danger. On an August night in 1791, a white man 

fatally stabbed an enslaved man known as Benjamin on “Theobald’s Hill” while Benjamin was on his way from 

Port Tobacco to Haberdeventure. John Hoskins Stone, who claimed ownership of Benjamin, declared the attack 

an “inhuman act” (advertisement by John Hoskins Stone, Maryland Gazette [Annapolis], September 1, 1791).

Manservants had the uneasy position of holding trust and privilege in unequal, intimate relationships. In 

1790, an Anne Arundel County slaveholder advertised for help in locating a former waiting man and carriage 

driver named “Wat” who was “well acquainted with the roads to Baltimore-Town, George-Town, FrederickTown, and Hager’s-Town.” The enslaver praised Wat’s attractive appearance and knowledge of horses. But he 

also considered Wat “artful.” Two years prior, Wat had been punished for “misdeeds...when abroad” by being 

sent to field work. He wore an “iron collar” (advertisement in Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, Extra

[Baltimore], January 22, 1790, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 2:402).

50 Bloch and Agbe-Davies, “‘With Sundry Other Sorts of Small Ware’”; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 358–73; 

Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 197.
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La Grange study note that no buttons were found in an excavation of a quarter complex in 

St. Mary’s City in Southern Maryland. La Grange’s proximity to Port Tobacco may have 

meant better access to trade networks.

Enslaved people in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake, including Charles County, 

asserted their humanity and exercised personal freedoms. With little surviving first-hand 

testimony by the enslaved from this period and region, historians often have to rely on 

oblique evidence about their experiences. But one closely guarded tool of survival, among 

whites and blacks alike, was family. 

Histories and Identities of the Enslaved 

at Haberdeventure

When Bet left Stone’s Philadelphia household in October 1776, presumably she left a social 

network—or she may have been running to one. As is the case with the majority of people 

held in bondage by Thomas Stone and his wife, we do not know Bet’s place of birth (in 

Maryland, Pennsylvania, or elsewhere), nor who she considered family. As Frederick 

Douglass wrote, “Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families. Slavery has 

no use for either fathers or families and its laws do not recognize their existence in the 

social arrangements of the plantation.” In a testament to their resilience, enslaved Africans 

and their descendants formed “fragile communities” amidst trauma, dislocation, and 

alienation in the Americas. The girls and women who survived the Middle Passage were, in 

Vincent Brown’s evocative words, “the mothers of gasping new societies.” In subsequent 

generations, enslaved people traveled remarkable distances to search out spouses and 

relatives, continuing to forge the connections between the past and the present that made 

their lives meaningful.51

Family was “the key social network” for blacks in the eighteenth-century South, 

remarks Philip D. Morgan. For this reason, we are fortunate to have documentation on 

several people whose families can be traced to the estates of Thomas’s father and grandfather, David Stone (1709–73) and Thomas Stone (1677–1727), at Poynton Manor in Durham 

Parish, Charles County. The following section will discuss the division of enslaved people 

among David Stone’s heirs. It will also present evidence about the Thomas family, which 

intersected with the Stones. Lastly, the section will reflect on how African Americans 

responded to the challenges of maintaining social networks.52

51 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, quoted in Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk, 20; Brown, 

“Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” 1239 (quote), 1241 (quote).

52 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 497 (quote).
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Division of the Enslaved among David Stone’s Heirs in 1774–1778

David Stone’s plantation at Poynton Manor, with fifty-two enslaved residents in 1774, half 

of whom (twenty-six) were children below the age of eight, is an example of one of the 

relatively large, multigenerational plantations in Charles County that are believed to have 

offered the best chances for family and community formation. David Stone (1709–73) 

inherited his father’s plantation, married into slaveholding families, and lived a long life, all 

of which facilitated his accumulation of wealth in chattel slaves. Also, his estate was solvent, 

reducing the likelihood that enslaved people would be put up for auction. Furthermore, a 

formal division of David Stone’s personal estate did not occur until five years after his 

death and at least eighteen months after his widow’s death. Moreover, all the land he 

possessed descended to a single heir, David’s oldest son, Samuel Stone. These circumstances provided a measure of residential stability for Poynton Manor’s enslaved community until, eventually, in 1778, Thomas Stone and his brother John Hoskins Stone, as 

administrators of their parents’ estates, took charge of dividing their parents’ personal 

property, including enslaved people, equitably among heirs according to Maryland law and 

custom for intestate decedents.53

To some extent, the community and family ties forged among the enslaved on 

Poynton Manor were perpetuated at Haberdeventure through Thomas Stone’s role as a 

paterfamilias to his surviving siblings Michael Jenifer Stone, Walter Stone, Grace Stone, 

and Catherine Scott. When these siblings made Haberdeventure their home, they did not 

arrive alone. As occurred countless times across the colonial and early national 

Chesapeake, enslaved families had to meet challenges in maintaining kinship ties through 

forced relocations.54

The only documentation that survives of how the enslaved people on David Stone’s 

estate were divided among his heirs is a settlement of Michael Jenifer Stone’s portion from 

1778 (Appendix 6). According to this manuscript, Michael Jenifer Stone received personal 

property worth a total of £142.10.0 in Maryland currency, paid mostly in chattel slaves. 

53 Probate inventory of David Stone, 1774, Prerogative Court, Inventories Liber 117, f. 91–99, MSA (see 

Appendix 5 for a list of all enslaved individuals in this inventory); Lee, “Land and Labor: Parental Bequest 

Practices in Charles County,” 306–41; Elie Vallette, “Of Distribution,” in The Deputy Commissary’s Guide, 

113–17. On the association between plantation size and family and community life, see Lee, “The Problem of 

Slave Community,” and Kathleen Fawyer who expands upon Lee’s work in “The Black Family in the 

Chesapeake: New Evidence, New Perspectives,” in Debra Meyers and Melanie Perreault, eds., Colonial 

Chesapeake: New Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 51–80. Reasons for the delay of the 

division of David Stone’s estate include the survival of his widow, Elizabeth (Jenifer), and the outbreak of the 

Revolutionary War. See Chapter 5 for more detail about the chronology of the estate division.

54 John Hoskins Stone appears to have exercised greater financial independence from his brother Thomas than 

Michael Jenifer Stone and Walter Stone, though John’s and Thomas’s business interests did intertwine through 

Walter (see Chapter 4). Betty Ann’s marriage into the Eden family of St. Mary’s County gave her a measure of 

financial independence from the Haberdeventure estate, too, during Thomas’s lifetime. Her circumstances 

changed, however, after her husband died in late 1787, and she sought support from her siblings (see Chapter 2).
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Based on this, we can surmise that Thomas Stone and his siblings, those of full-blood and 

half-blood by the same father, claimed an equivalent amount of wealth, including in 

enslaved people, over their lifetimes.55

Beyond the surviving 1778 manuscript of Michael Jenifer Stone’s portion, it is 

difficult to determine, without documentation, how Thomas Stone and his brother Johns 

Hoskins Stone, as the administrators of their parents’ estate, distributed enslaved people 

among heirs. The composition of bondspeople by sex and age, for example, may have 

varied in the dispersal. The unmarried and landless Michael Jenifer Stone acquired six 

bondspeople, with a heavy emphasis on youth: out of seven total people, three were 

between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, and three were below the age of ten. Thomas 

Stone, who was already eight years into his ownership of Haberdeventure, may have sought 

more mature bondspeople, if his purchasing patterns are any indication: in his only documented purchase prior to his parents’ estate division, he acquired two enslaved men, Peter 

and Bob, from local sources.56

Who came to Haberdeventure from David Stone’s Poynton Manor plantation? 

Only a handful of enslaved residents at Haberdeventure are known with a strong degree of 

certainty to have had personal ties to the Stone plantation at Nanjemoy. Based on an 

analysis of Stone family inventories and other documentation, it is evident that a woman 

known as Clare and most, if not all, of her daughters or dependents—Violet, Ann, Heth, 

Harmer, Clare, and possibly Nan (who was distributed to Michael Jenifer Stone)—moved 

onto Thomas Stone’s properties from Poynton Manor. Also Gustavus Thomas (Gus, 

Gusty), the son of Monica on David Stone’s estate, passed into Thomas Stone’s 

slaveholdings.57

Former Poynton Manor residents also maintained contact through David Stone’s 

heirs. For example, Jesse, a son of Hannah on David Stone’s estate allotted to Michael 

Jenifer Stone, had a brother, Will, who, it appears, passed to Grace Stone. Their chances to 

maintain a connection improved when Michael Jenifer Stone and Grace Stone co-resided 

at Haberdeventure. In 1797, however, Michael Jenifer Stone advertised for Jesse’s sale, 

55 For a list of David Stone’s children, see Appendix 2.

56 For Thomas Stone’s purchase of Peter and Bob, see Charles County Land Records S#3:523–24, 533, MSA. In 

his day book, Michael Jenifer Stone recorded hiring out the enslaved boy Jesse (age twelve) to Gustavus Richard 

Brown in 1776, two years prior to the settlement in which Jesse formally came into his possession (Kremer 

Collection, SMSC, p. 4). Therefore, Thomas Stone, too, may have taken possession of slaves from his parents’ 

estate before the formal division of 1778.

57 Clare’s family did suffer two losses after 1774. Clare’s daughter Harmer, age two in 1774, does not appear in 

documentation after David Stone’s inventory was taken. Nan, who was seven years older than her next daughter 

Violet, was part of Michael Jenifer’s distribution and sold at auction in 1785 (as discussed later).
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preferably “to some gentleman in or near Annapolis” who would honor Jesse’s agreement 

to “be made free” after “a term of years” and take in his wife and child. Will, it seems, 

remained with Grace Stone, appearing in her probate inventory of 1811.58

The enslaved people whom Grace Stone inherited have an understudied role in the 

life of Haberdeventure, if any resided there. Grace Stone moved to her elder brother 

Thomas’s plantation after her widowed mother died between 1773 and 1776, and thereafter she remained in the care and protection of her brother, Michael Jenifer Stone, who 

stayed at Haberdeventure until 1793. (See Chapter 2.) At the end of her life, in 1809, five 

enslaved adults and three enslaved juveniles were her legal property. Did the people she 

held in bondage live at Haberdeventure or in its vicinity? How many were hired out at any 

one time? As noted in Chapter 2, documents from after Thomas Stone’s death show that 

Grace’s other brothers Michael Jenifer, John Hoskins, and Walter Stone hired out men 

(Basil, Will, and Bill/Billy) in Grace’s legal possession to other householders. Likely 

Thomas did the same while he was alive, to offset the costs of boarding Grace and retaining 

the enslaved people who were, for Grace, a means of personal wealth and status. The 1996 

Cultural Landscape Report cites a letter from 1791 in which Grace asked her brother 

Walter to sell, in the words of the report, “all her slaves,” except Billy and two “house 

servants,” Luce and Sall. It is not known at present if Walter acted on her request, though it 

makes sense that several years after the passing of Thomas Stone, Grace’s financial situation was more precarious. How much more unstable were the lives of the people whom she 

held in bondage?59

Sall’s origins are unknown, but Luce, like Will, came from David and Elizabeth 

Stone’s estate. Luce was already at the advanced age of forty-five, when (it is speculated 

here) she passed into Grace’s legal possession in or around 1778. If she left her possibly 

58 The age given for Will, son of Hannah, in David Stone’s probate inventory of 1774 (age eight in 1774, born 

circa 1766) matches with Will, about age forty-five, in Grace Stone’s probate inventory of 1811 (Charles County 

Register of Wills, I&A 1808–1812:416, MSA). Michael Jenifer Stone advertised for Jesse’s sale in the Maryland 

Gazette (Annapolis), “Lands in Charles county for sale,” June 15, 1797. Catherine Scott also held a male named 

Will in bondage.

59 CLR (1996) 39, citing a letter in Box 1, Stone Family Papers, MS 406, MdHS. The five adults attached to 

Grace Stone’s estate at the end of her life were the following: Winny and Will, who both came from David 

Stone’s estate; an elderly woman named Luce who likely also came from Poynton Manor; Harry; and Billy, 

whom she manumitted in her will when he was about the age of thirty-one (will of Grace Stone, 1809, Charles 

County Wills Liber HBBH #13, ff. 51–52, MSA, a transcription of which is available in Petravage, “Historic 

Furnishings Report,” 36; certificate of freedom for Billy, 1828, “about fifty years” old, Charles County 

Certificates of Freedom, 1826–1860, p. 4, MSA). Grace in her will also manumitted “Lucy,” who may or may 

not be the elderly woman recorded with the name Luce in the probate inventory (with a null valuation). Ann, 

Charles, and Basil were between the ages of ten and fourteen when Grace died in 1809 (probate inventory of 

Grace Stone, Charles County Register of Wills, I&A 1808–1812:416, MSA). The following three people do not 

appear in Grace Stone’s probate inventory: Basil, whom Michael Jenifer Stone hired out in 1794, and Sall and 

Jim, whom Grace made purchases for in 1790–1791 (George Clements in account with Michael Jenifer Stone, 

January 1794–1795, and Grace Stone in account with John and Walter Stone, November 1790–September 1791, 

both in the William Briscoe Stone Papers, Duke University, transcribed in Appendix 16). Lastly, Walter Stone 

bequeathed to his sister Grace “negroe Jane and her children,” but it is not known if Walter’s wish was fulfilled 

(will of Walter Stone, codicil A, certified Oct. 14, 1791, Charles County Wills 1791–1801, p. 50, MSA). 
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lifelong residence at Poynton Manor for Haberdeventure during the war, she may have 

moved without her two children, Luce and George, compounding her alienation. Young 

Luce, then fourteen years of age, was part of Michael Jenifer Stone’s distribution. Because 

Grace and Michael Jenifer Stone were both dependents of Haberdeventure, however, it is 

possible that the elder and younger Luce remained in contact through Haberdeventure’s 

social network. Luce’s other child, George, age seventeen in 1778, very likely became the 

man named George whom John Hoskins Stone entrusted with errands between Annapolis 

and Port Tobacco in the mid-1780s. The elder Luce lived until at least 1811, when she was 

in her late seventies.60

Did Luce, as a woman in her forties in 1778, help Winny, then age nine, and 

Winny’s younger brother Basil, age seven, adjust to life outside of Pointon Manor, possibly 

at Haberdeventure? Winny and Basil were two of four children of Rose on David and 

Elizabeth Stone’s estate, and they both appear in surviving accounts of Grace Stone from 

the 1790s. Winny stayed with Grace or otherwise remained a part of Grace’s estate until 

Grace’s death. Basil appears in a 1790–91 purchase account (Appendix 16) and a 1794 

document of his hire by Port Tobacco merchant George Clements. But this Basil, who had 

reached adulthood while in Grace’s possession, did not stay or survive until the time that 

Grace’s inventory was taken in 1811. Basil’s memory was maintained by a boy, age twelve, 

who bore his name in the inventory.61

With the benefit of the Stone family probate inventories and surviving correspondence from the Stone family, we can discern fragments of enslaved family ties that were 

maintained through continued co-residence of Stone family members. At this time, no 

comparable information survives from the estate of the family that Thomas Stone married 

into, the Browns. Dr. Gustavus Brown (1689–1762), like David Stone, accumulated slaves 

over decades. A Scottish emigrant, he built his estate with the help of two marriages. Dr. 

Brown, who died several years before his youngest daughter, Margaret, married Thomas 

Stone, bequeathed to Margaret an enslaved woman named Elenor or Nell, whom Brown 

60 The surviving documentation of David Stone’s estate division, transcribed in Appendix 6, shows that the 

administrators intended Luce’s daughter Luce to pass into the ownership of Michael Jenifer Stone. George’s 

distribution to John Hoskins Stone is speculative. In letters, John Hoskins Stone refers to an enslaved man named 

George who ran errands for him between Annapolis and Port Tobacco in 1785 and 1786 and was entrusted with 

access to store goods and a key (John Hoskins Stone to Walter Stone, October 30, 1785, and October 27, 1786, 

Stone Family Papers, MS 406, MdHS). The younger Luce and George may have been the children of George, an 

enslaved man on David Stone’s estate who was forty-five years of age in 1774; Luce and George were ages ten 

and thirteen, respectively, at that time. 

61 Grace Stone paid for tea, sugar, rolls (linen cloth), and a midwife’s fee for Winny in 1791. She also paid for 

thread and osnaburg cloth for Basil to make and repair clothes on his own (Grace Stone in account with John and 

Walter Stone, November 1790–September 1791, William Briscoe Stone Papers, Duke University, transcribed in 

Appendix 16). If Winny bore living children, then she may be the mother of the three juveniles in Grace Stone’s 

inventory, Ann, Charles, and Basil (and the year-old infant?). In 1794, a Port Tobacco merchant hired Basil for a 

year (George Clements in account with Michael Jenifer Stone, January 1794–January 1795, William Briscoe 

Stone Papers, Duke University). Winny and Basil’s mother Rose had two other children in 1774, Mary, age 

seven, and an unnamed infant (Appendix 5, “Partial Transcription of David Stone’s Probate Inventory, 1774”).
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“recovered from a debt of John Pen.” Dr. Brown also intended Margaret to inherit the child 

whom Elenor bore while in Dr. Brown’s “possession” and any future children. No one of 

the name Elenor or Nell appears on Thomas Stone’s inventories of early 1788. A young 

man in Thomas Stone’s estate, though, with the unusual name of Ausmin (spelled variously 

as Osmin and Ozman), did come from Dr. Brown’s estate. Ausmin was two when Dr. 

Brown died; perhaps he was the child of Elenor whom Dr. Brown referred to.62

Generations of Resistance: The Mingo/Thomas Family

Setting aside, for the moment, the enslaved people held in bondage by Thomas Stone’s 

various siblings and his wife’s father, attention will now be paid to the family backgrounds 

and experiences of one family group inherited by Thomas Stone, Clare (b. ca. 1728) and 

her daughters. As will be demonstrated over the course of this discussion, Clare was part of 

the Thomas family (also referred to as the Mingo family) whose members in the late eighteenth century successfully, and unsuccessfully, sued for their legal freedom on the basis of 

descent in the maternal line from a freeborn white woman.

Surviving documents strongly suggest that Clare and her daughters held more 

privileges than common field hands. First, they were able to move as a group to Thomas 

Stone’s estate. Whereas other children were separated from their mothers, and siblings 

separated from siblings, in the division of David and Elizabeth Stone’s personal property, 

all but two of the children listed with Clare in David Stone’s probate inventory in 1774—

Nan, age fourteen, Violette (Violet), age seven, Ann, age five, Heth, age four, Harmer, age 

two, and Clare, infant—appear in documentation of Thomas Stone’s properties. Nan was 

allotted to Michael Jenifer Stone; though she bore a common name, it was likely this Nan 

62 Gustavus Brown’s life dates are from “Thomas Stone,” Papenfuse, BDML, 2:787. His will is transcribed in 

“The Will of Dr. Gustavus Brown,” Sons of the Revolution in the State of Virginia Quarterly Magazine 2 (January 

1923): 24–41, in which the reference to Elenor appears on p. 40.
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who was sold at auction by Michael Jenifer Stone (with payment owed to Thomas Stone) in 

or shortly before 1785. Of the five other children listed with Clare on David Stone’s probate 

inventory of 1774, Harmer’s name falls out of the record, but the others remain visible.63

At some point before 1788, the elder Clare left her daughters at Haberdeventure to 

join Thomas and Margaret Stone’s household in Annapolis, perhaps to serve as a housekeeper; appraisers of Thomas’s estate encountered Clare in Annapolis and considered her 

“old” at around the age of sixty. In late 1785, when Thomas Stone continued to express his 

interest in selling slaves to meet his postwar financial needs, he instructed his agent, “The 

children of Clare I would not sell.” Stone’s instruction hints that Clare’s remaining daughters were to be treated differently than other families. In December 1785, Stone asked for 

Violette and Heth to be hired out “at some proper place,” perhaps meaning a genteel 

household that made use of their skills (likely in domestic work) and did not offend their 

privileged status. A month later, he wanted Heth or another young woman, Sall, to join his 

Annapolis staff. In one additional indication of Clare’s daughters’ higher profile at 

Haberdeventure, Thomas Stone appears to have recognized Ann and Violette as heads of 

their own households. In instructions for the distribution of pork raised at his mill, Stone 

asked for five hundred pounds to go to Michael Jenifer Stone, who was living at 

Haberdeventure at the time, one hundred pounds to go to Ann “for herself and her family,” 

and fifty pounds to Violette. Stone’s provision of meat to Ann and Violette underscored 

their dependence on him; in exchange, Stone recognized their semi-autonomous status as 

heads of households.64

More of the elder Clare’s family history emerges after Thomas and Margaret Stone 

died in 1787. Depositions taken during freedom suits in the 1790s, in particular Robert 

Thomas v. The Reverend Henry Pile in the General Court of the Western Shore, attested to 

Clare’s descent from a woman of mixed race, Betty Mingo. (See Appendices 11 through 14.) 

63 Thomas Stone advertised for two public sales of enslaved people in 1784 and 1785 (Maryland Gazette

[Annapolis], October 14, 1784, and June 9, 1785). One sale was to take place on November 8 at Thomas Stone’s 

mill; the other was a court day sale to take place on June 15, 1785. According to a letter from Thomas Stone to 

his brothers, Michael Jenifer “or” Walter, from December 21, 1785 (several months after both sales), a Mr. 

Clarke claimed that he was not aware at the time of sale that Nan was “subject to fits” and wanted to return Nan. 

Thomas countered that it was his belief that Michael disclosed Nan’s condition at the sale. Thomas wrote to 

Walter, “Michael told me he had informed the Bidders (as I desired him) that Nan had been subject to fits and 

that the sale was made on this information publicly given. If Clarke has any objection to make let any honest man 

determine whether the sale was not upon fair and full information and if not I would not desire him to abide by it, 

but if fair which I am sure was the case I will not be trifled with.” Thomas instructed his brother Walter to issue a 

writ on Clarke if Clarke had not paid the interest due on the bond for Nan’s purchase (Stone Family Papers, LC). 

To date, no deeds in Charles County land records (which document the sale of enslaved people) have been tied to 

Thomas Stone’s public sales of November 1784 and June 1785. Charles County court records of the 1780s are 

missing. If the Nan who was put up for sale in 1785 was indeed Clare’s daughter, she would have been twenty-five years old at the time. Nan was seven years older than Clare’s next oldest daughter, a hint that she may 

have had a different father than Clare’s other daughters and thus might have been seen in a different light by 

Thomas Stone.

64 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, November 24, 1785, Thomas Stone to Walter Stone and Michael Jenifer Stone, 

December 21, 1785, and Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, January 15, 1786, Stone Family Papers, LC.
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Thomas v. Pile, a suit initiated in 1791 and ruled in favor of Robert Thomas in October 

1794, granting him freedom, generated nearly thirty depositions which have been transcribed and published online on the website O Say Can You See: Early Washington, DC, 

Law and Family.

65

Drawing on these depositions and Charles County records, two scholars, Thomas 

F. Brown and Leah C. Sims, traced Betty Mingo’s family history. Brown and Sims determined that Betty, who died within living memory of deponents (“around 1772”), was one

of several children of an “African slave” named Joseph Mingo and a freeborn “Welsh

woman” named Elizabeth Thomas. According to testimony in an earlier court case brought

by Betty Mingo’s elder brother Lewis, their parents, Joseph Mingo and Elizabeth Thomas,

were married in the Church of England prior to the 1681 repeal of a 1664 act that enslaved

the children of any freeborn woman who married an enslaved Negro man. Lewis failed to

prove that he was born after the repeal took effect. Not only did Lewis sue for his freedom,

but his father did, too, about ten years earlier in 1702. Joseph Mingo asserted in court that

his former master, since deceased, had promised Mingo his freedom after seven years of

service. Though unsuccessful in court, the family, in Brown and Sims’s words, “refused [to]

give up their quest for freedom” over the next century.66

65 Robert Thomas v. Henry Pile, http://earlywashingtondc.org/cases/oscys.caseid.0342, accessed February 4, 

2019. The depositions touch on a number of Thomas family members because they were to be “read in evidence 

in all the cases of petitioning Negroes under the name of Thomas claiming their Freedom as descendants of a 

certain Betty Mingo otherwise called Betty Thomas.” Gabriel Duvall represented the petitioner and Philip Barton 

Key represented the defendant in 1792 (agreement transcription, November 22, 1792, in ibid.). William G. 

Thomas III’s recent book, A Question of Freedom (2020), offers important legal history background to the 

freedom suits in post-revolutionary Maryland.

66 Brown and Sims, “‘To Swear Him Free’: Ethnic Memory as Social Capital in Eighteenth-Century Freedom 

Petitions,” in Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives, eds. Debra Meyers and Melanie Perreault (Lanham, MD: 

Lexington Books, 2006), 81–105, quotes p. 97, 98. A 1664 act of Maryland required that any “freeborne English” 

woman who married an enslaved Negro man was to serve her husband’s master for the duration of her husband’s 

life, and the children of such unions were enslaved for life (the children’s status following their father’s). Any 

children born in these unions before 1664 were to be free at the age of thirty-one. In 1681, Maryland’s legislature 

repealed the act of 1664, citing abuse of the earlier act by masters and mistresses. Henceforward the children of 

“freeborn English or white” women married to “Negroes and Slaves” (i.e., free and unfree blacks and enslaved 

American Indians) were free upon birth. Their mothers, upon their marriages, maintained their free status or, if 

indentured, regained their freedom “instantly.” This law stood for a mere eleven years before the legislature 

increased penalties on freeborn white women who had children with a free or enslaved black men or enslaved 

American Indian. These women were penalized with a seven-year term of service, and the government restored 

limited terms of service for the offspring. If the parents were married, the children were to serve for twenty-one 

years. If the parents were unmarried, the children were to serve for thirty-one years (Archives of Maryland, 

1:533–34 [Act of 1664], 7:203–5 [Act of 1681], 13:546–49 [Act of 1692]).

Betty Mingo’s birth record is provided in “Elizabeth Mingoe (1689–?),” Early Colonial Settlers of Southern 

Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us. A 1697 deed of gift from Joshua 

Doyne to his son Dennis records Elizabeth (Betty) Mingo living with her parents, Joseph Mingo and Elizabeth 

Mingo (serving “for her husband’s lifetime”), and siblings on two hundred acres on Nanjemoy Creek (Charles 

County Land Records, Liber C#2:239, MSA). Her brothers Lewis, age seventeen, and Charles, age twelve, were 

elsewhere. Later in life, Charles had a child with a white servant woman out of wedlock (Brown and Sims, “‘To 

Swear Him Free,’” 98).
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As of 1697, Betty was with her parents in Nanjemoy on land owned by a native of 

Ireland, Joshua Doyne. By the 1710s or 1720s, she was living in the Nanjemoy household of 

Thomas Stone (1677–1727), grandfather of the builder of Haberdeventure, and his second 

wife, Catherine (1676–1750). Reportedly, Betty and Catherine did not get along, and Betty 

was exchanged for a woman from the household of Henry Wharton of St. Mary’s County. 

Betty thereafter lived with Wharton’s daughter, Elizabeth, who married Joseph Pile (1712–

58), master of Sarum, a large plantation near the border of Charles and St. Mary’s counties, 

and lived there as a widow until 1781. (The mansion house at Sarum is renowned as one of 

the oldest surviving houses in Maryland.) Deponents in Thomas v. Pile remembered Betty 

Mingo as a woman with “yellow” and “bright” skin and long hair who kept house and 

cooked for Mrs. Pile.67

By several accounts, Betty did not stay quiet about her family’s claims to freedom. 

When Sarah Boarman asked Elizabeth Pile if Betty was due her freedom, Mrs. Pile reportedly responded, “Betty says so.” A former overseer at Sarum testified that Betty “sold a 

Horse belonging to her and gave a hogshead of tobacco to a lawyer who visited at Mrs. Piles 

to plead for her Freedom.”68

Unfortunately, we cannot be certain about the date of Betty’s consultation with a 

lawyer (though a search in local court records might reveal evidence). The overseer and 

others deposed that Betty and others in her family pressed their claims for freedom at the 

time of William and Mary Butler v. Richard Boarman, the high-profile freedom suit of 

pre-revolutionary Maryland, but we must be cautious about this memory. In 1770, 

Maryland’s Provincial Court, drawing on testimony collected in Charles County as well as 

St. Mary’s County, ruled that William and Mary Butler, descendants of Eleanor “Irish Nell” 

Butler, were free. The defendant appealed, and in 1771 Maryland’s Court of Appeals 

overturned the decision. At the time that depositions were taken for Thomas v. Pile in 1792 

and 1793, a related freedom suit, Mary Butler v. Adam Craig, had recently ended in Butler’s 

favor in Maryland’s Court of Appeals. Historian William G. Thomas III, who studied 

Maryland’s freedom suits, found a deponent making the same claim about the descendants 

of Elizabeth Shorter in St. Mary’s County that deponents in Thomas v. Pile asserted about 

the Mingo/Thomas family: “that none of the Shorters ever said anything about their 

freedom until the Butler family began winning their freedom suits in the general court.” 

67 Transcribed depositions of Richard Robin Reeder, Charles Ray, Mary Stone, Sarah Fowke, and Leonard 

Boarman in Thomas v. Pile, in Thomas et al, eds., O Say Can You See: Early Washington, DC, Law and Family, 

http://earlywashingtondc.org/cases/oscys.caseid.0342; “Henry Wharton (ca. 1674–1746)” and “Elizabeth 

Wharton (ca. 1712–1781)” in Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck, www.

colonial-settlers-md-va.us. For a description of the mansion house at Sarum, see Rivoire, Homeplaces, 36–41. 

Judging from the 1783 tax list, Sarum was a larger operation than Haberdeventure with “four tobacco houses, 

five quarters, an old store house, five small houses, and a new...stable” in addition to the “‘large dwelling 

house’” and kitchen (ibid., 40). 

68 Transcribed depositions of Sarah Boarman and Leonard Boarman in Thomas v. Pile, O Say Can You See: 

Early Washington, DC, Law and Family, http://earlywashingtondc.org.
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Thanks to Brown and Sims’s research in early Charles County court records, we can trace 

the Mingo/Thomas claims to freedom to the turn of the eighteenth century, decades before 

the Butler case. However, as with the Butlers, it was not until after the Revolutionary War 

that Thomas’s family claims to legal freedom advanced in a court of law.69

To return to Betty Mingo’s personal history, when Wharton removed Betty to 

Sarum in the mid-eighteenth century, Betty left behind at Poynton Manor two children 

who passed into David Stone’s slaveholdings: Robin, who survived David Stone and sold 

fowl to Michael Jenifer Stone as mentioned above, and Peg, widely known in the greater 

Port Tobacco neighborhood as “Semple’s Peg,” a housekeeper and cook to John Semple. 

Semple was a Scottish merchant active in Port Tobacco in the 1750s and 1760s (and the 

former owner of the land that became La Grange at the turn of the nineteenth century). 

Semple is a colorful character, and Peg appears to have been, too, though her life was much 

more circumscribed. Peg had a reputation as a “high spirited, impudent, talking woman 

but a very good servant.” She was born into a family of “valuable house servants and 

cooks” so distinctive as to be called a “race” unto themselves. Peg was the mother of Clare 

(b. ca. 1728), who was a member of Thomas and Margaret Stone’s household in Annapolis 

and whose daughters resided at Haberdeventure.70

Betty had at least two other daughters with her on the Pile estate at Sarum: Sophia 

(also known as Phia) and Nan or Nanny. After Elizabeth (Wharton) Pile died, her son, a 

Catholic priest named Henry Pile (1743–1813), took over the plantation after returning 

69 Transcribed depositions of William Simms, Richard Robin Reeder, and Mary McCoy, who associated Betty’s 

claims with the Butler case, in Thomas v. Pile, Thomas et al., eds., O Say Can You See: Early Washington, DC, 

Law and Family, http://earlywashingtondc.org. In 1791, Maryland’s Court of Appeals upheld the General Court’s 

decision in favor of freedom for Mary Butler in Mary Butler v. Adam Craig (October 1787) (Thomas Harris and 

John McHenry, Maryland Reports...from May, 1780 to May, 1790 [New York, 1812]: 214–36). On the Butler 

case, see Thomas, A Question of Freedom, 24–27; Schweninger, “Freedom Suits, African American Women, and 

the Genealogy of Slavery,” 42; and William and Mary Butler v. Richard Boarman (September 1770), Harris and 

McHenry, Maryland Reports, 371–84. The quote about the Shorters is from Thomas, A Question of Freedom, 70. 

Notably, Butler v. Craig admitted as evidence depositions taken in Charles County in the 1760s for Butler v. 

Boarman. For another perspective on the Butler family history, see Skylar A. Bauer, Julia A. King, and Scott M. 

Strickland, “Archaeological Investigations at Notley Hall Near Chaptico, Maryland,” St. Mary’s College of 

Maryland, St. Mary’s City, Maryland, 2013, pp. 19–21. 

70 Robin and Peg appear in the probate inventory of Thomas Stone’s grandfather, Thomas Stone (d. 1727). Their 

ages are not given, but they were referred to as a “man” and “woman,” respectively. Peg had a child “about 12 

hours old” (Prerogative Court, Inventories 1727–29, Liber 13, f. 314–17, taken January 9, 1727 [i.e., 1728]). In 

David Stone’s probate inventory, Robin is listed as a sixty-eight-year-old man, which would make his birth year 

1706 (Appendix 5). On John Semple, see Chapter 1. Deponents Sophia Leigh, Charles Ray, and Leonard 

Boarman in Thomas v. Pile recalled Peg’s character and occupation (Thomas et al., eds., O Say Can You See: 

Early Washington, DC, Law and Family, http://earlywashingtondc.org/cases/oscys.caseid.0342). Jannett 

McClaron, age eighty-nine or thereabouts, referred to the “race of Peg,” and Richard Robin Reeder, about the age 

of seventy, used the phrase “Betty Mingo and her race.” While Betty Mingo’s descent from a white woman in the 

maternal line was common knowledge in Charles County, deponent Henrietta Wheeler certainly was not alone in 

the community for espousing the belief that because the ancestor “had married a Negro, the law enslaved” the 

descendants. 
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from Europe in 1784. It was Sophia’s grandson, Robert Thomas, who petitioned the 

General Court of the Western Shore for his freedom based on descent from a white woman 

and won his suit against Reverend Pile in October 1794.71

The verdict for freedom in Thomas v. Pile had a wide array of implications for 

members of the Thomas family. While the verdict helped some individuals acquire legal 

freedom, others struggled to have their claims recognized by influence makers. In 1798, 

Gustavus Thomas won a suit for his freedom from the executors of Thomas Stone’s estate. 

The ruling cited as evidence a deposition made in the suit for another Thomas family 

member in 1795. At about that same time, Violette Thomas, whom Thomas Stone had also 

claimed ownership of, worked through the courts to secure her liberty from Stone’s sonin-law. Jack, who formerly worked for Stone’s household in Annapolis and apparently 

identified as a member of the Thomas family, fled the Virginia home of another Stone 

son-in-law in 1797. These events will be discussed in more detail shortly, and not all 

Thomas family suits were successful. The point being stressed here is that Maryland’s legal 

environment had shifted after the Revolutionary War to be more receptive to freedom 

suits.72

Petitions for freedom, both before and after the war, exploited the complexities of 

the English legal tradition. Legal historian William G. Thomas III provides a helpful explanation: “It is natural to wonder how an enslaved person could have the standing to sue in 

an American court. The simple answer is that these cases were in the first instance civil 

(that is, private) matters and drew on a long tradition of common-law precedent that no 

person could be deprived of his or her liberty without cause. Another body of AngloAmerican law treated freedom suits like habeas corpus actions, asking the court to determine whether the person was being unjustly detained in bondage.” In the case of term 

slavery (that is, enslavement for a fixed term), if an agreement to free a person at the end of 

the term was not honored, whether that agreement was “recorded in court or not,” the 

enslaved person filing a freedom suit could ask the court to treat “the dispute as a breach of 

contract.”73

71 Rivoire notes Rev. Pile’s assumption of ownership in 1784 in Homeplaces, 40. 

72 Gustavus Thomas v. Thomas Stone’s executors, General Court of the Western Shore, May 1798, JG 39:653–

59, MSA. In ruling in Gustavus Thomas’s favor in Thomas v. Stone’s executors, the court cited the deposition of 

Richard Tuson of Charles County, who said that “Gusta, who has petitioned against Thomas Stone’s executors...

is son of Monica, daughter of Peg called Semple’s Peg, daughter of Betty Mingo who belonged to Widow Pile” 

(Gustavus Thomas v. Lancelot [Lott] Mason, May 10, 1795, Judgment Records of the General Court of the 

Western Shore, JG 31:67, MSA). Court records Walter Thomas and Dennis Thomas v. Alexander Scott, a suit 

filed in the District of Columbia in 1810, refer to unsuccessful petitions by Thomas family members in Charles 

and St. Mary’s Counties in the 1790 (Thomas et al., eds., O Say Can You See: Early Washington, DC, Law and 

Family, http://earlywashingtondc.org/cases/oscys.caseid.0260). See also Thomas, A Question of Freedom, 153.

73 Thomas, A Question of Freedom, 7 (quote). Paul Halliday’s book, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire

(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), offers a perspective on laws on slavery.
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One of the most significant changes in Maryland’s courts after the war was the 

willingness of justices to allow hearsay evidence to prove lineage. Rules of evidence became 

stricter in the early nineteenth century, though, hobbling claimants. In a landmark case, 

Queen v. Hepburn, in 1813, US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall ruled that hearsay 

evidence could not be used in petitions for freedom. Historian Jessica Millward cautions 

about late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Maryland, “any space in which a slave 

could gain freedom was a loophole, not an open door.” After the Queen v. Hepburn decision, that loophole closed a little further.74

Kinship and Community

Freedom suits of the late eighteenth century form part of a large corpus of evidence of 

African Americans asserting their family ties. Certainly, African American family networks 

were up against formidable obstacles; in Thomas Stone’s personal history alone, there are 

ample examples of enslaved families being dispersed through financial exchanges of one 

kind or another, including inheritance, sale, seizure for debt, and hiring out. Thomas 

Stone, as co-administrator of his father’s estate with his brother John Hoskins Stone, 

oversaw the division of enslaved families among his siblings, for example. To offer other 

cases, Thomas Stone in 1774 purchased two single men from different local sources, 

probably to meet labor demands at Haberdeventure during the early part of his tenure 

there. In 1782, Stone took advantage of wartime confiscations to purchase a single woman, 

Jeane, from the estate of Loyalist Lloyd Dulaney, severing her from connections in 

Dulaney’s household. (Dulaney had a large house in Annapolis and property on the 

Eastern Shore.) Thomas Stone put up for sale an unknown number of men, women, and 

children in 1784 and 1785, to meet his debts, and when he threatened legal action against 

74 Thomas, A Question of Freedom, 7, 157–94; Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk, 25 (quote).
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his brother Walter for debt, Walter considered selling an enslaved man, Ben, and other 

unnamed bondspeople to meet the demand. Furthermore, Stone appears to have had little 

personal objection about separating couples in hiring arrangements.75

At the same time, the evidence about Thomas Stone’s slaveholding can be mined 

for hints of African Americans resisting the breaking up of families or for other reasons 

exerting a measure of control over their situations. The elder Clare (Thomas), a descendent 

of Betty Mingo, for instance, managed to keep most of her children with her when she 

moved from Poynton Manor to Haberdeventure. A more obscure example is the Goodrick 

family’s unexplained decision to “sell back” to Thomas Stone an enslaved man named Bob. 

Did Bob ask to return to Haberdeventure? Questions can be raised, too, about the decision 

of Thomas Stone’s executors to sell, as a group to a single slaveholder, an enslaved family 

composed of Ann, her husband, Tom Triplet, and their four children. Did Ann and Tom, 

seeking to make the best of their situation, negotiate to stay together as a family?76

As Jean B. Lee observed, later eighteenth-century Charles County plantations, even 

the relatively large ones, were not large enough to offer security for enslaved families 

against sale or displacement. Memories of ancestral ties survived, though. In late-eighteenth-century Maryland, claims of lineage from a white female ancestor proved to be a 

useful strategy for obtaining legal freedom for a small but significant number of African 

Americans. Other enslaved African Americans fought for recognition of spousal ties, as 

75 Purchase of Peter, age twenty-five or under, from William Barnes and Thomas Smoot of Charles County, 

Charles County Land Records, S#3:523–24, MSA; purchase of Bob from Francis Meek of Charles County, 1774, 

Charles County Land Records, S#3:533, MSA. The information on Jeane and Dulaney’s estate is from Charles 

County Land Records, V#3:591–92, Maryland State Archives, and “AA-437, Lloyd Dulaney House,” Maryland 

Historical Trust, https://mht.maryland.gov/secure/medusa/PDF/AnneArundel/AA-437.pdf, p. 3. In a letter to 

Walter Stone from November 1783, Michael Jenifer Stone, a lawyer, counseled his brother, “if a fieri facias had 

been issued against you by T. Stone,” a venditioni exponas (a writ requiring sale) would follow. Michael Jenifer 

Stone then discusses Walter’s intentions to sell Ben and unnamed others (Stone Family Papers, MS 406, MdHS). 

Unfortunately, Charles County court records from the 1780s do not survive to tell us if Thomas Stone sustained 

legal action against his brother. On the last point, about Thomas Stone’s willingness to separate couples, consider, 

for example, Thomas Stone’s desire to hire out Ann, who was Tom Triplet’s spouse, and to hire out Violette and 

her child. (See Appendix 9 for more information about these individuals.) Stone, like other slaveholders of his 

day, divided enslaved families when it served his interests. On non-cohabitating couples and families, see 

Thompson, “Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 132–35; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, chapter 9; Millward, 

Charity’s Folk, 44–45; and Fawyer, “The Black Family in the Chesapeake.”

76 Charles Goodrick’s siblings “sell back” Bob to Thomas Stone in 1782 for 17,000 pounds of crop tobacco 

(Charles County Land Records, V#3:563, MSA). Stone’s payment in crop tobacco, rather than coin, is unusual 

among his land record transactions. Thomas Stone’s original sale of Bob to Charles Goodrick, prior to 1782, is 

not documented in the Charles County Land Records. In 1779, Thomas Stone had purchased 120 acres of land 

(Addition to May Day) from Charles Goodrick and made payment with coin and four bondspeople (Harry, his 

wife Nan, Joe, and Clem) (Charles County Land Records V#3:402–3, MSA). The 1790 sale of Ann, Tom Triplet, 

and their four children to Joseph Edelin of Prince George’s County is recorded in Charles County Land Records, 

K#4:114, MSA.
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Ann and Tom Triplet may have done when they were sold with their children to a single 

slaveholder in 1790. Still others, like Bet in Philadelphia, had to make community where 

they were in the present moment.77

Slavery, Freedom, Kinship, and the Law 

If Bet came from Stone’s household in Charles County, she likely had heard the 

stories about Betty Mingo and others who claimed legal freedom based on descent from a 

white woman in the maternal line, but she faced long odds. Even if she too could make a 

claim based on her bloodline, the prospects were not good in the early 1770s; as noted 

previously, in 1771 Maryland’s Court of Appeals reversed the Provincial Court’s verdict of 

freedom for two descendants of a white woman in the maternal line in Butler v. Boarman. 

This is how the Maryland courts stood when Bet fled from Stone’s Philadelphia 

household.78

Nor does it appear that Bet had any hope of negotiating a manumission from 

Thomas Stone or his wife. Stone did not grant freedom to a slave in his lifetime, at least 

formally. And he made no manumissions in his will, as it was barred by law at the time. 

77 Lee, “The Problem of Slave Community”; Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old 

South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

78 Schweninger, “Freedom Suits.” The impact and significance of the Somerset decision in England in 1772 is a 

matter of debate; whether or not it reflected conditions already on the ground in favor of freedom for African 

Americans, the decision marks an important moment in legal history. Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King’s 

Bench, ruled in Somerset v. Stewart that English common law did not recognize chattel slavery, and that slavery 

could only exist in Britain’s colonies by positive law (Thomas, A Question of Freedom, 30–34; Paul Finkelman, 

“‘Let Justice Be Done, Though the Heavens May Fall’: The Law of Freedom,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 70 

[1994]: 325–68, esp. 325–26; Eric R. Papenfuse, “From Recompense to Revolution: Mahoney v. Ashton and the 

Transfiguration of Maryland Culture, 1791–1802,” Slavery and Abolition 15, no. 3 [December 1994]: 38–62, esp. 

43). A young man held in bondage by John Barnes, a legal client of Thomas Stone’s, acquired his freedom in 

England in the wake of the Somerset decision (manumission of William Thomas, age twenty-one, “a Subject of 

Great Britain,” 1774, recorded in Charles County Land Records, V#3:52–54 [1775], MSA). The manumission 

deed includes a record of his baptism at St. Mary White Chapel, London. Lee interprets the manumission’s entry 

in the Charles County Land Records in 1775 as evidence that Thomas returned to Maryland by that date (Price of 

Nationhood, 125–26). See also White and White, “Slave Clothing and African-American Culture,” 155. 
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Certainly one reason for this stance, we can assume, is that he intended to pass on his 

property to his three children. He also was deeply concerned about his financial solvency 

(as discussed in Chapter 4).79

If we broaden the timespan to include the decade or so after Thomas and 

Margaret’s passing, however, and widen the scope to add people held in bondage by 

Thomas Stone’s siblings (a considerable number of whom were related to Thomas’s slaves), 

we see a greater variety of negotiated settlements between slave and slaveholder, including 

manumission, in the 1790s. How many of these negotiated settlements were, in fact, initiated during Thomas and Margaret Stone’s lifetimes and carried out after their deaths is an 

open question. 

From Dunmore’s Proclamation to Thomas v. Stone’s executors

(1798)

Between 1775 and 1781, the presence of the British Army and Navy around the Chesapeake 

Bay offered the single greatest opportunity for enslaved people in the region to either flee 

or negotiate with slaveholders and slave managers in exchange for their loyalty. Lord 

Dunmore’s Proclamation of November 1775, issued from the coast of Virginia, declaring 

freedom to male indentured servants and slaves who took up arms against American 

forces, was a practical, wartime measure, not an antislavery manifesto, and the female sex 

was not the proclamation’s intended audience. 

Arguably of far greater impact for enslaved Charles County residents was a later 

stage of the war, the British blockade of the Chesapeake Bay from 1777 to 1781. We don’t 

know how many, if any, bondspeople from Haberdeventure fled to British ships along the 

79 For all but the earliest years of Stone’s life, Maryland law allowed manumission by deed but not by last will 

and testament. In 1797, some years after the deaths of Thomas and Margaret Stone, the state again allowed 

manumission by last will and testament. On the changing law on manumission by last will and testament, see 

Jean B. Russo and J. Elliott Russo, Planting an Empire: The Early Chesapeake in British North America

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 189, and William L. Calderhead, “Slavery in Maryland in the 

Age of Revolution, 1775–1790,” Maryland Historical Magazine 98 (Fall 2003): 303–24. Interestingly, Catherine 

Stone (d. 1750), the surviving wife of Thomas Stone’s grandfather, whom Thomas would have known in his 

youth at Poynton Manor, manumitted two enslaved men, Fortune and Falmouth, in her will, prior to the passage 

of the 1752 prohibition. Was Catherine influenced by the Great Awakening? Did Fortune and Falmouth become 

Christians, perhaps under her tutelage? Catherine Stone was “very religious,” deposed a kinswoman, Mary Stone 

(deposition of Mary Stone, Thomas v. Pile, 1793, in Thomas et al., eds., O Say Can You See: Early Washington, 

DC, Law & Family, www.earlywashingtondc.org). Susan Juster downplays the possibility of slave conversions to 

Christianity during the First Great Awakening in “The Evangelical Ascendency in Revolutionary America,” in 

The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, eds. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 2013), 407–26. On the other hand, English law was unclear about enslaving Christians; see 

Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of 

Georgia Press, 1987), chapter 2, and Konig and Zuckert, eds., Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book, entry 230 

and notes, pp. 133–35. In light of this ambiguity, a Maryland law of 1671 explicitly stated that “any Negro...

Slave” who becomes Christian or receives the sacrament of baptism remains “in servitude and bondage” 

(Archives of Maryland, 2:272). Maryland’s government affirmed the law in 1692 (Archives of Maryland, 13: 

505–6).
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Potomac River or were taken in raids. But for a man who often traveled away from home, 

Stone’s choice to stay in residence at Haberdeventure in December 1777 and April 1781, 

while British ships passed nearby on the Potomac, is noticeable. He must have sought to 

discourage defections with his presence. According to one estimation, about six thousand 

enslaved men, women, and children from Maryland and Virginia took refuge with the 

British military during the war.80

Did any bondspeople on Stone’s properties pledge their loyalty to the Stone family 

in exchange for freedom or conditions on their continued service? This, it would seem, is 

unknowable. Nonetheless, after the war, and more specifically after the deaths of Thomas 

and Margaret Stone, negotiated terms of service between slaves and slaveholders are more 

evident in records of the Stone family. This took the form of manumissions, term limits to 

enslavement, and self-hire with the promise of self-purchase. 

In 1793, within months of the death of Thomas Stone’s only son, Frederick, Stone’s 

surviving children Margaret and Mildred Stone emancipated John, Henry Semple, his wife 

Ibe, and Henry and Ibe’s two young daughters. The formalaic language of the deeds reveals 

little about the sisters’ motivations, though there are some clues about the relationships 

between slave and slaveholder. According to the deeds, Margaret and Mildred freed the 

five people as representatives of their late father and brother, which indicates that they had 

been with the Stone family for some amount of time. The sisters granted John his freedom 

“in consideration of” his “obedience and fidelity,” which suggests that John made a personal sacrifice while remaining in his position. John may be Jack, listed in Thomas Stone’s 

probate inventory in Charles County as a man of forty years of age in early 1788. About 

Henry Semple, Margaret and Mildred attested that he had performed “faithful Services” to 

their parents and their brother, and they set Henry Semple and his family free “from a 

sentiment of fond reverence” for their deceased parents and brother. According to recent 

scholarship, the manumission of two-parent households and the immediate emancipation 

of children were rare at this time in Maryland. The fact that Henry, Ibe, and their two 

daughters were set free all at once would seem to indicate that the parents were capable of 

supporting the children financially; Maryland law required freed people to have “sufficient 

80 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), Chapter 2; 

Philip D. Morgan, “‘To Get Quit of Negroes’: George Washington and Slavery,” Journal of American Studies 39 

(2005): 415n19; Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ: 

Princeton University Press, 1991); Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math.” In December 1777, Thomas Stone reported 

on “fugitive negroes” from an unspecified estate while the “King’s ships” were on the Potomac and moving past 

Cedar point. The geography hindered defenses; “the country is so cut of Water that the [enemy] Ships can sail to 

any point much sooner than” men in arms “can reach...by marching” (Thomas Stone to Gov. Thomas Johnson, 

December 9, 1777, Red Book IV, Part 1, f. 81, MSA, transcription in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology 

from Select Primary Sources”). In April 1781, Stone relayed news of “plunder” at Port Tobacco and remarked 

that residents were pulling back from the shoreline, likely a tactic meant to reduce the loss of slaves to the British 

(Thomas Stone to Gov. Thomas Sim Lee, April 8, 1781, Roberts Collection, Haverford College, transcription in 

Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology from Select Primary Sources”). A month earlier, in March 1781, 

twenty-five African Americans had fled St. Mary’s County for the British (Frey, Water from the Rock, 161). 
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maintenance and livelihood” to avoid becoming wards of the state. Henry and Ibe were 

also at liberty to take their children with them if they had plans to move out of Charles 

County.81

Besides their sentimental reasons, were Stone’s daughters motivated to liberate 

these five people to spare legal costs from freedom suits? Gustavus Thomas initiated his suit 

against Thomas Stone’s executors in the General Court of the Western Shore in 1791 (and 

eventually won in 1798). Robert Thomas also filed his petition against Rev. Henry Pile of 

Sarum that year. According to an online source, twenty-nine persons of the surname 

Thomas petitioned for freedom in Maryland in 1791 and 1792, and more followed in the 

years to come. The fees for mounting a legal defense were considerable. “Most of the 

defendants could easily afford to lose a few slaves, but there were costs associated with 

hiring lawyers, deposing witnesses, copying court records, and traveling to Annapolis” to 

attend the General Court, writes Loren Schweninger in a study of freedom suits in 

Maryland in the 1790s. “Fines and court costs could run to hundreds of dollars and sometimes even several thousands.” Given that Thomas Stone’s executors were unable to summon enough cash to pay the daughter’s legacies (£2,000 current money each), the Stone 

family may have taken the moral “high road” to spare court costs.82

A runaway advertisement submitted by Mildred Stone’s husband, Travers Daniel 

Jr., in 1797 hints at the ripple effects of the Thomas family freedom suits. “Ran away from 

the subscriber, living near Stafford court-house,” in Virginia, “a negro fellow named 

Jack...this negro lately belonged to the estate of Mr. THOMAS STONE, in Charles County, 

Maryland, and may pass himself for one of the Thomas family of negroes belonging to the 

said estate, who make pretension to their freedom.” We know about Violette Thomas and 

Gustavus Thomas; were there others who made claims, in or out of court? Daniel continued, “the fallacy of the attempt” to pass as a Thomas family member “may be easily 

81 Deed of manumission for Henry Semple, Ibe, Kitty, and Nancy, October 18, 1793, Charles County Land 

Records, N#4:165, MSA; deed of manumission for John, November 30, 1793, Charles County Land Records, 

N#4: 178, MSA; Fawyer, “The Black Family in the Chesapeake”; Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk, 10–11 

(quote); Sean Condon, “The Significance of Group Manumissions in Post-Revolutionary Rural Maryland,”

Slavery and Abolition, 32, no. 1 (March 2011): 75–89. Frederick Stone died in September 1793 (“Frederick A. 

Stone,” in Princetonians, 1791–1794, eds. Looney and Woodward, 112–13]; Maryland Gazette [Annapolis], 

September 26, 1793). Henry Semple does not appear by that name in Thomas Stone’s probate inventories. Was 

he “Harry,” age twenty-five, in the early 1788 Charles County inventory? Ibe appears in the Charles County 

inventory as twenty-five-year-old woman. The name Semple is not common in Charles County; he may have 

been identified or identified himself with the household of John Semple (1720–83). See Chapter 1 for information on John Semple. 

82 Schweninger, “Freedom Suit,” quotations on pp. 53, 55; “The Thomas Family,” in Thomas et al., eds., O Say 

Can You See: Early Washington, DC, Law and Family Project, http://earlywashingtondc.org/family-guides/

Thomas.pdf (Appendix 14). In a written statement submitted to the Chancery Court in a suit filed by Alexander 

Scott, Michael Jenifer Stone reflected on the difficulties he and Gustavus Richard Brown, as executors of 

Thomas Stone, had with collecting on debts owed to the estate and paying debts. “Hence it has come to pass that 

although the legacies to his daughters were never paid...” (December 16, 1807, Chancery Court, Chancery 

Papers, case number 4647, Scott v. M. J. Stone et al., MSA). Christopher Leslie Brown explores the moral 

component of antislavery in Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of 

North Carolina Press, 2006).
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detected, as he is quite black, whereas the Thomas family are all of the mulatto color.” 

Daniel suspected that Jack went to Annapolis or to Baltimore, where his mother, Rachael, 

“also a runaway,” was currently living. With this last piece of information, we can link Jack 

to Thomas Stone’s Annapolis household, where he lived as a boy with his mother Rachael 

(and perhaps a sister, a girl named Betty). After Stone’s death, Rachael was hired out to 

different masters in Annapolis; by then in her mid-forties, it is not surprising that the Stone 

family allowed her to have her freedom informally to spare themselves from maintaining 

her or selling her for a low price. Evidently, the Stone family was aware that she moved to 

Baltimore but made no effort to claim her.83

Jack, like Bet and his mother Rachael, took the risk of extralegal self-emancipation; 

Mildred Stone’s removal to Virginia considerably diminished his chances for joining a 

freedom suit. (Manumission rates in Virginia in the early national period were lower than 

in Maryland.) Violette Thomas, a daughter of Clare, fared better with Margaret Stone’s 

husband, John Moncure Daniel; Margaret and John Moncure Daniel stayed in the Port 

Tobacco neighborhood after their marriage in 1793 until at least 1798. With some reluctance, in 1797, John Moncure Daniel pledged to manumit Violette in two years. Violette 

laid the groundwork in 1796, obtaining a certificate from Robert Thomas’s lawyer, Gabriel 

Duvall, attesting to her belonging to “the Thomas family who obtained their freedom” in 

Thomas v. Pile. (For the entire text of Violette Thomas’s certificate of freedom, see 

Appendix 14.)84

Delayed manumissions, also referred to as term slavery, for other enslaved individuals in households of the extended Stone family evoke a tug of war between slaveholders 

seeking to maintain the privileges of slaveholding and people in bondage exerting new 

pressures to break free of chattel slavery. Michael Jenifer Stone emancipated Hendly (or 

Henly), a personal servant of Walter Stone, six years after Walter’s death, as Walter had 

directed in his will. Jesse, whom Michael Jenifer Stone assumed ownership of from his 

father’s estate as early as 1776, when Jesse was twelve, learned how to be a blacksmith. (But 

one is left to wonder who exactly taught Jesse the trade.) Michael Jenifer Stone had an 

interest in employing Jesse in his blacksmithing shop in Port Tobacco. Jesse, for his part, 

seized an opportunity to not only acquire a trade in which he could hire himself out, but 

also attain a high social status in African American communities as an iron worker. From 

83 Runaway advertisement, dated October 28, 1797, Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), January 11, 1798 (Appendix 

8); account of Michael Jenifer Stone with Robert Couden, November 6, 1787–October 15, 1791, William Briscoe 

Stone Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University; Michael Jenifer Stone to Walter Stone, June 24, 1790, Stone 

Family Papers, LC.

84 Dunn, “Black Society in the Chesapeake, 1776–1810.”
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Michael Jenifer Stone’s advertisement for Jesse’s sale in 1797, we learn that Jesse was a term 

slave, meaning he was to be freed within a certain number of years, though the advertisement does not disclose the freedom date.85

Hiring oneself out with the promise of self-purchase also gained more currency in 

Maryland after the Revolutionary War, though slaves lacked legal redress when slaveholders did not fulfill their end of the bargain. And death cut agreements short. Ben was an 

enslaved man in his prime, in his late twenties, at David Stone’s Nanjemoy plantation when 

David Stone passed away in 1773. Ten years later, in 1783, Walter Stone expressed to 

Michael Jenifer Stone a desire to sell Ben, now nearing the less-desirable age of forty, along 

with an unspecified number of other slaves to pay off a debt to his brother, Thomas Stone. 

Michael Jenifer Stone lamented that he did not have the money to purchase Ben so that he 

“might remain in the family.” Apparently, John Hoskins Stone stepped in and purchased 

Ben, because seven years later, the colonel wrote to Walter in Port Tobacco that he was 

“very sorry” to hear of Ben’s death. “I intended in the course of this”—here John Hoskins 

struck out the word “this” and replaced it with “next”—“next year to have given him his 

liberty—as he had nearly paid for himself.” John Hoskins Stone’s language brings into 

question whether he ever expressed out loud to Ben his intentions to free him in this 

world.86

Historians debate whether the American Revolution was a transformative event in 

the history of slavery and antislavery around the Atlantic world. In the short term, thousands of enslaved African Americans took advantage of the war to flee, some traveling as 

far as Nova Scotia, and from there to Sierra Leone, to live in free black settlements. Armed 

black men in military service during the war challenged narrow views about their abilities. 

In the longer term, after American independence removed the oversight of the British 

crown, a sectional divide emerged between the northern and southern states on the issue of 

slavery. While the number of enslaved people remained relatively few in number along the 

northern seaboard, land-hungry settlers expanded the geography of slavery in the west. 

Antislavery supporters invoked the language of the Declaration of Independence—that “all 

85 Will of Walter Stone, 1790–91, in (Appendix 8) Petravage, “Historic Furnishings Report,” 34–35; manumission of Hendly by Michael Jenifer Stone, 1797, Charles County Land Records, IB#2:281, MSA. On Jesse’s 

background, see notes to Appendix 6. On the high social status of African American iron workers in Chesapeake 

society, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 232, 347, and Leone et al., “The Archaeology of Early African 

American Communities.” The Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), June 15, 1797, carried the advertisement for 

Jesse’s sale. Loren Schweninger’s book, Appealing for Liberty: Freedom Suits in the South, has an illuminating 

chapter on term slaves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 

86 Michael Jenifer Stone to Walter Stone, November 1783, MS 406, MdHS; John Hoskins Stone to Walter Stone, 

November 27, 1790, Stone Family Papers, LC.
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Men are created equal”—to advance their cause. The Haitian Revolution that erupted in 

violence in 1791, however, stoked white fears of blacks as an internal enemy in the United 

States.87

Maryland occupied a middle ground on slavery, as scholar Barbara Fields pointed 

out in her landmark book. Chattel slavery remained legal in the state. Meanwhile, 

Maryland’s free black population grew earlier and at a substantially faster rate than in the 

neighboring state of Virginia. An untold number of other people sought freedom informally, outside of legal channels. Slaveholders expanded their methods to retain control 

over the people who they claimed as property by hiring them out or by offering freedom 

after a term of service.88

The history of Haberdeventure upholds this mixed record on African Americans’ 

access to legal freedom in the late eighteenth century. Thomas Stone never signed a deed of 

manumission. Remarkably, about one-third of the enslaved people listed in Thomas 

Stone’s probate inventories are known to have obtained, or attempted to obtain, their 

liberty by formal or informal means between 1776 and the 1790s. Bet’s experience was 

more typical for her pursuit of extralegal freedom.

Brutality “on a man; there hinges the whole,” comments Charles County native 

Josiah Henson, born into slavery near Haberdeventure in 1789. Interspersed with accounts 

of cruelty inflicted by whites, Henson in his autobiography describes personal freedoms he 

and others exercised within slavery in Maryland—stealing chickens to feed and care for 

loved ones, playing and dancing to a banjo, visiting fruit orchards at midnight. Often these 

freedoms were exercised outside of a legal framework, but they were no less empowering.89

Bet, the urban domestic servant who absconded from Thomas Stone’s Philadelphia 

household in October 1776, likely gained some personal freedoms in the city, such as 

enjoying various forms of entertainment in her spare time off. In legal terms, however, she 

lacked personhood outside the Stone household. And she may have thought that her 

chances for freedom were better if she stayed north of Maryland. 

87 Early examples of the Declaration of Independence being cited in support of equality between blacks and 

whites in American society are Benjamin Banneker’s letter to Thomas Jefferson, August 19, 1791 (Papers of 

Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, 22:49), and Richard Ridgely’s arguments in Mahoney v. Ashton (May 1799), 

from Harris and McHenry, Maryland Reports...From May 1797, to the End of 1799 (Annapolis, 1818), 297. In 

Thomas’s view, Ridgely articulated the arguments of his client Charles Mahoney to make a case for the incompatibility of slavery with natural law (A Question of Freedom, 97–98). Alan Taylor offers a useful summary of 

the debate over whether the American Revolution was “transformative” (and leans toward a conclusion that the 

war was a watershed in American history) in “Introduction: Expand or Die: The Revolution’s New Empire,” 

William and Mary Quarterly 74, joint issue with the Journal of the Early Republic (October 2017): 619–32. Eric 

R. Papenfuse highlights the effects of the Haitian Revolution in Maryland in turning back the “liberalizing forces 

of the American Revolution” in “From Recompense to Revolution” (quote 43). Morgan contends that black 

military service influenced George Washington’s views on slavery in “‘To Get Quit of Negroes’: George 

Washington and Slavery.”

88 Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground; Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk, 26.

89 Henson, Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life, 5 (quote), 20.
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In rural Charles County, physical distance from a master’s household increased 

opportunities for exercising a measure of personal freedom. Bondspeople found creative 

expression in the construction of their own cabins, the preparation of their food, and care 

for the plants and animals that gave them health and sustenance. 

On the other hand, enslaved people who lived intimately with Thomas Stone’s 

family had the best chances for legal freedom. Thomas Stone’s daughters emancipated two 

men, John and Henry Semple, and Semple’s wife and daughters on account of the men’s 

“obedience” to the Stone family. A son-in-law manumitted Violette Thomas, who attended 

the Daniel family; her family had been enslaved by the Stone family for four generations. 

The language of freedom and liberty during the Revolutionary era found fertile 

ground at Haberdeventure. The enslaved residents who absented themselves from a slaveholder’s residence or used the courts to exert influence over their legal status were not 

alone; thousands of African Americans in Maryland took advantage of wartime and postwar opportunities to emancipate themselves or acquire legal personhood.

157

CHAPTER FOUR

Agriculture and Domestic Production

at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

I

n September 1776, while Thomas Stone attended the Continental Congress in 

Philadelphia, a bright investment opportunity availed itself close to Haberdeventure. 

That month, Charles County resident Henry Smith began to advertise the sale of 430 

acres of land within a mile of Port Tobacco containing “a great deal of excellent meadow 

ground” and a leased water mill. On October 22, the advertisement appeared in the 

Philadelphia newspaper Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet (two pages before Stone’s runaway 

notice for Bet in the same issue). Did Henry Smith’s advertisement catch the eye of Thomas 

Stone as he left town to return to Maryland? Regardless of how the news reached him, 

either through public notices or by word of mouth, Stone looked favorably on the 

opportunity; among other factors, current markets favored wheat, flour, and meat exports 

to the West Indies. Within three months, Stone rented the land along with two enslaved 

women, Rachel and Luce, who were members of an enslaved family on the property. 

Through a confluence of opportunities in 1776, Stone started the process of acquiring what 

would be his most valuable arable land, and his possession of a mill placed him in the top 

stratum of county society.1

This chapter will contextualize Stone’s decision to invest in grain and livestock 

farming and a mill while continuing to raise tobacco. After reviewing the state of knowledge about agriculture at Haberdeventure prior to this supplemental Historic Resource 

Study, the chapter will present a brief overview of the history of agriculture on Maryland’s 

Lower Western Shore, and in the vicinity of Port Tobacco specifically, during the long 

eighteenth century. Next, the chapter will explore Stone’s strategies for making a profit 

from his land ownership and slave holding. Particular emphasis will be placed on 

Haberdeventure’s management structure, the history of Stone’s mill, and domestic production. Though a measure of plantation self-sufficiency was a goal, especially during nonimportation and the Revolutionary War, the assertion in the 1988 Historic Resource Study of 

Thomas Stone National Historic Site (hereafter abbreviated as HRS) and the park’s 1996 

Cultural Landscape Report (hereafter CLR) that Haberdeventure achieved little more than 

subsistence agriculture diminishes Stone’s investment in enslaved labor, minimizes the 

1 Smith’s advertisement, dated September 5, 1776, appeared in Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet or, The General 

Advertiser (Philadelphia), on October 22, 1776. Stone was in Philadelphia from July to October 1776. He is 

believed to have left Philadelphia between October 22 and 24 (Burnett, Letters of Members of the Continental 

Congress, 2: l–li). 
Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

158

contributions of African Americans, and blinds us to Stone’s commercial interests and 

connections. Though questions remain about Stone’s wish to reduce his enslaved labor 

force in 1784 and 1785, Stone remained committed to bequeathing a large landed estate 

with enslaved labor and an impressive portfolio of assets to his heirs. 

Land Use

The 1988 HRS and 1996 CLR raised questions about how the land at Haberdeventure was 

used, particularly in light of the fact that the Chandlers Hill and Welcome tracts that Stone 

acquired from the Smith family were better farmland. John Wearmouth identifies Hanson’s 

Plains, which was part of Stone’s original 1770 purchase, as the “productive agricultural 

heart” of Haberdeventure. The topographical maps in the CLR show Hanson’s Plains as 

largely level—level land was preferred for plowing—whereas much of the remainder of the 

property has gullies and ravines that make it subject to erosion. “The steep terrain of the 

forested valleys, gullies, and ravines that defines the area surrounding Thomas Stone 

National Historic Site is prone to several mass wasting hazards including landslides, 

slumps, and slope creep.” As noted in Chapter 1, the terracing of the formal garden at 

Haberdeventure helped to mitigate erosion.2

The “barren” soil at Haberdeventure—so described in the 1783 tax list—contrasted 

with the “light gravelly” soil at Chandlers Hills and Welcome, which lay one-half mile 

further east in what is referred to today as the Port Tobacco Valley. Wearmouth describes 

the Chandlers Hills and Welcome tracts as “more...easily worked bottomland” or lowland 

and points out its higher valuation in the 1820s. Stone’s choice of the name Plenty for his 

resurvey and patent of Chandlers Hills and Welcome affirms the land’s agricultural 

productivity.3

Given the relatively poor soil quality at Haberdeventure, the 1996 CLR suggested 

that Haberdeventure was “used primarily for livestock and subsistence farming rather than 

growing cash crops.” A lack of specifics about the nine outbuildings on the property in the 

1783 tax list, and the absence of surviving plantation account books to tell us how the land 

was used and who was in charge, no doubt factored into the CLR’s misguided appraisal 

2 Wearmouth HRS (1988), part 2, pp. 4–5, 20 (quote); CLR (1996) 19, 22; “Geological Resources Inventory 

Report” for George Washington Birthplace National Monument and Thomas Stone National Historic Site, 

Natural Resource Report NPS/NRPC/GRD/NRR 2009/127), 3 (quote). The previous owner of Haberdeventure, 

Daniel Jenifer, combined 150 acres of Haberdeventure and 86 acres of Hanson’s Plains with a vacancy of 206 

acres to create by patent in 1768 Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains Enlarged (Patent Records BC & GS 37:94, 

MSA S1195–481).

3 Wearmouth HRS (1988), part 2, pp. 10–13 (quote, 12); CLR (1996) 27; Appendix 7, “Thomas Stone in Tax 

Lists.” Haberdeventure was a mile or less from the Chandlers Hill and Welcome tracts (Figure 5, “Map of 

Charles County Land Owned by Thomas Stone and His Heirs”).
159

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

that Stone intended to use Haberdeventure “as a home, rather than as an income-producing investment.” Stone’s commitment to his law practice and to public service also have led 

analysts to downplay his planter credentials.4

A more holistic approach is needed. Haberdeventure was one part of a network of 

properties; one has to see the whole in order to understand the center. A focus on 

Haberdeventure’s current boundaries (the 328 acres that make up Thomas Stone National 

Historic Site) runs the risk of obscuring the contributions of the other 749 acres that made 

up the 1,077-acre parcel that Stone resurveyed and patented as Haberdeventure shortly 

before his death. This risk comes easily because of the lack of plantation records to show 

how each of the eight properties that Stone acquired to make up an enlarged 

Haberdeventure related to each other. Furthermore, Stone owned over eight hundred acres 

on the other side of Port Tobacco Creek, including the 510-acre Plenty tract made up of 

Chandlers Hills and Welcome, a 120-acre tract called Addition to May Day which also had 

“light gravelly soil,” and the mill seat. Thomas Stone’s initial purchase of 442 acres of 

Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains Enlarged in 1770 anchored a campaign, conducted in 

partnership with Gustavus Richard Brown, to control land at the head of Port Tobacco 

River.5

Turning our attention to the home plantation, which is the principal subject of 

inquiry for this Historic Resource Study, the commercial and noncommercial uses of the 

1,077 acres that made up Haberdeventure remain elusive. But the presence of enslaved 

people is the single greatest reason to challenge the description of agriculture at 

Haberdeventure as little more than subsistence farming. Generally speaking, in rural areas 

of the colonial and early national Chesapeake, the presence of people in bondage indicates 

cash crop production. Table 1 shows the number of enslaved persons for whom Thomas 

Stone paid taxes in 1783 in Charles County’s Fifth District, where Haberdeventure and 

Hanson’s Plains Enlarged was situated. In 1783, Stone owned five other tracts in the Fifth 

District (Bridget’s Delight, Simpson’s Delight, Pryor’s Beginning, St. Nicholas, and 

Distrest), which added 445 acres to his original 442-acre parcel.

4 CLR (1996) 33 (quote), 34 (quote). At one time an account book existed. In 1807, Michael Jenifer Stone 

recalled that Thomas Stone kept a book of accounts “in his own Hand” from 1773 to 1785. Michael Jenifer Stone 

believed the book was with Travers Daniel, who had married Thomas’s daughter Mildred (statement by Michael 

Jenifer Stone, December 16, 1807, in Alexander Scott v. Michael Jenifer Stone et al., Chancery Court, Chancery 

Court Papers, case number 4647, MSA).

5 For information on Thomas Stone’s landholdings, see the 1783 tax lists in Appendix 7, “Thomas Stone in Tax 

Lists,” and Appendix 20, “Documentation for Map of Charles County Land Owned by Thomas Stone and His 

Heirs, 1770–1806.” The patent that Stone obtained for Haberdeventure in 1787 included part of Simpson’s 

Delight (276 acres), part of Bridget’s Delight (63 acres), Pryor’s Beginning (10 acres), part of St. Nicholas (73 

acres), part of Betty’s Delight (8 acres), and part of Hansonton (272 acres), in addition to most of the 442 acres of 

Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains surveyed in 1768 (Charles County Circuit Court, patented certificate 468, 

MSA S1195 480). I am obliged to Donald E. Zimmer of Port Tobacco for helping me to recognize the ambitions 

of Thomas Stone and Gustavus Richard Brown as landowners at the head of the Port Tobacco River. Zimmer also 

generously shared with me his well-researched opinion that Thomas Stone’s patent for Plenty did not include the 

mill (personal correspondence with author, January 12 and 23, 2019, and January 4, 2020, in author’s files). 
160

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

Table 1. Thomas Stone Taxable Property in Enslaved People, 

Charles County, Fifth District (Where Haberdeventure and Adjoining 

Properties Lay), 1782 and 1783 Tax Lists, MSA

Children 

< 8 years old

Children 

8–14 years 

old

Males 

ages 14–45 

Females 

ages 14–36

Men over 

age 45 and 

women over 

age 36

Total 

number of 

enslaved 

people

5th District, 

1782 Not available n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

5th District, 

1783 4 3 6 3 5 21

Though the number of domestic staff in wealthy households was increasing in the 

late eighteenth century, the higher proportion of enslaved males of prime working age to 

enslaved females of prime working age—six to three—at Haberdeventure is a strong indication of out-of-doors work. Historian Philip D. Morgan estimates that at most, up to 10 

percent of enslaved adult men and 25 percent of the enslaved adult women at a large 

Chesapeake plantation like Haberdeventure would be household staff. If we applied that 

estimate to the chart above, and exclude the one known enslaved craftsman, Tom, a carpenter, then it is likely that at least five adults of prime working age, composed of males and 

females, were field hands.6

Dr. David O. Percy of the Accokeek Foundation contributed a useful letter for the 

1988 HRS on how to assess the degree to which Thomas Stone “was engaged...in commercial farming.” He estimates that “one to three hands would be sufficient to produce foodstuffs for the household. For a commercial livestock operation, [Stone] may not have 

needed any additional fields hands. If tobacco production was added, he would have 

needed up to double the number of hands.” In 1783, Haberdeventure had more than 

enough staff to perform household work at the great house and tend to the kitchen garden 

and fowl, particularly given the presence of the five older adults (that is, men over age 

forty-five and women over age thirty-six) and a number of children to help with raising 

food.7

6 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 244–45. Thompson determined that at George Washington’s Mount Vernon in 

1799, most able-bodied enslaved people—“almost three-quarters”—were field hands, and over half of the field 

hands were women (“The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 117). Maryland state law in 1781 defined the 

age range of enslaved prime female hands as fourteen to thirty-six years of age and of enslaved prime male hands 

as fourteen to forty-five years of age for the purposes of the tax assessments of 1782 and 1783 (Lee, Price of 

Nationhood, 270n). 

7 Letter, David O. Percy, to “Mr. John Weymouth,” February 10, 1988, reproduced in Wearmouth HRS (1988), 

Appendix C. 
161

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

Besides the size of the enslaved population on the various parcels that made up 

Haberdeventure, another indication of farming for surplus at the home plantation is the 

extant corn crib. Architectural historian Orlando Ridout V included a photograph of the 

corn crib at Haberdeventure in an article on agricultural buildings in the Chesapeake. 

Ridout describes the corn crib as “a rare example of the larger, broader form used for corn 

storage in the eighteenth century, with the door centered in the long wall.” According to the 

National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, the corn crib postdates the eighteenth century and was built circa 1830–40. Even with a nineteenth-century construction 

date, the presence of a corn crib with a design that would not be out of place in the late 

eighteenth century suggests the possibility of large-scale corn production at 

Haberdeventure dating back to Thomas Stone’s tenure.8

Lastly, entries in Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book documenting surplus production 

at a rented Nanjemoy plantation testify to the expectation of profit within Thomas Stone’s 

peer group. As related in Chapter 2, Thomas Stone rented a plantation at Nanjemoy in 

Charles County from 1780 to 1782 to offset the cost of supporting his siblings Michael 

Jenifer Stone and Catherine Scott, as well as the seven enslaved people that Michael Jenifer 

Stone inherited from his deceased parents and brother Daniel Jenifer Stone. The Nanjemoy 

plantation raised tobacco, rye, wheat, corn, oats, cotton, lambs, pigs, and cattle. It also 

produced brandy, cider, perry (pear cider), and butter. Michael Jenifer Stone recorded the 

sale of wheat, corn, beef, pigs, lambs, and butter. Notably, in 1782, Michael Jenifer Stone 

sold 949 pounds of pork in Annapolis, where the provision export trade grew substantially 

during the war.9

In fact, the lease of the Nanjemoy plantation coincided with the high point of 

Congress’s reliance on Maryland for provisions to feed the Continental Army, between 

1778 and 1781. The French military and navy were also buying foodstuffs from Maryland 

suppliers. Wheat and flour were particularly in demand. Notably, the Stone brothers’ 

uncle, Daniel Jenifer, led the effort in Charles County to supply the Continental Army with 

8 Ridout, “Agricultural Buildings,” Figure 9.7, p. 188; National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

for Habre de Venture, CH-5, 1988, Section 7, p. 3. Corn (maize), an important source of food for people and 

livestock, had to be stored in a “dry, well-ventilated environment.” Specialized buildings to store large volumes 

of corn appeared on the colonial Chesapeake landscape in the eighteenth century (Ridout, “Agricultural 

Buildings,” 188). Unlike in the Caribbean, planters in the Chesapeake sought to raise the bulk of their food on 

their own properties. A planter on Virginia’s Northern Neck, John Mercer, believed he failed to fulfill his 

obligations to raise sufficient corn when, during a period of mismanagement, there was “but 8 barrels of corn 

upon my plantation, not enough at any of my Quarters to maintain my people” or to sustain livestock, and Mercer 

had to purchase “above £100 worth of corn” to make up for the shortfall (John Mercer to George Mercer, 

December 22, 1767–January 28, 1768, in Mulkearn, comp. and ed., George Mercer Papers, 195).

9 Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, pp. 13, 24; Papenfuse, In Pursuit of Profit, 87–89.
162

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

wheat, meat, and other supplies when called upon by the state. It would not be surprising if 

Daniel Jenifer honored his kinship ties with Thomas and Michael Jenifer Stone by including them in his contracts.10

The rented Nanjemoy plantation provided more than subsistence for Michael 

Jenifer Stone, his sister, and Thomas Stone, who paid for the lease. Slaveholding and 

profitmaking went hand in hand. Given the lack of surviving plantation accounts for 

Haberdeventure, a general knowledge of the business of plantations in its vicinity help us 

identify the ways in which Thomas Stone sought to improve his properties. The next 

section will discuss general trends in the region’s agriculture before discussing the organization of labor on Stone’s properties and Stone’s agricultural interests and investments.

Overview of Agricultural History 

in the Vicinity of Port Tobacco 

in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

When Thomas Stone acquired the original parcel of Haberdeventure (Haberdeventure and 

Hanson’s Plains Enlarged, 442 acres) in 1770, the Port Tobacco area was in its third phase 

of agriculture since European contact. In less than two centuries, “vast deforestation” had 

occurred. As Stone accumulated parcels of formerly occupied land, it was in his family’s 

long-term interests to protect the soil and wild spaces from further degradation.11

By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Algonquian-speaking 

Potomac Piedmont people had occupied the Port Tobacco area for several hundred years. 

Hunter-gatherers, they lived in semi-permanent villages, raised corn, beans, and squash, 

and cultivated tobacco for ritual purposes. An English Jesuit mission among the Piscataway 

at “Portobacco” in 1642 failed to maintain a long-standing Indian community; by the late 

seventeenth century, many Piscataway had moved to Virginia. Meanwhile, English settlement hugged the coastline of major waterways.12

In a second phase of post-contact settlement in the Port Tobacco area, from the late 

seventeenth century to 1760, population growth among European colonists and African 

slaves pushed settlement into the upland areas, including Port Tobacco. Whereas in the 

seventeenth century settlers used upland for livestock forage and timber reserves, wild 

areas were becoming increasingly scarce in the eighteenth century. By Thomas Stone’s 

10 Papenfuse, In Pursuit of Profit, 107; Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and 

Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 

203; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 174–80.

11 Geological Resource Inventory Report, 8. 

12 Julia A. King, “Evolution to Revolution, 9000 B.C.–A.D. 1814,” in Pathways to History: Charles County,

Maryland, 1658–2008, eds. Julia King, Christine Arnold-Lourie, and Susan Shaffer (Mount Victoria: Smallwood 

Foundation, 2008), 6–11, 18–21.
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Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

generation, large parcels of land had been broken up into smaller parcels through inheritance and sale. To create a 1,077-acre property, for example, Stone purchased seven different tracts, took advantage of wartime confiscations from Loyalists, and leveraged family 

connections.13

Another feature of the second phase of settlement in the Port Tobacco area, besides 

the growth of the native-born settler population and the subdivision of land, was the 

practice of mixed farming. By the mid-eighteenth century, planters who could afford to 

diversify added wheat to tobacco and corn cultivation. Tobacco wore out the soil after 

continuous usage of three to five years, but the land’s use could be extended by raising corn 

and then wheat. Furthermore, wheat and tobacco were sown and harvested at different 

times of the year, as Lee explains: “The growing cycles of cereal crops—wheat, corn, oats, 

rye, and barley—complemented that of tobacco. Wheat, for instance, was harvested about 

the beginning of July, after the time-consuming task of settling out tobacco seedlings was 

finished. Oats ripened shortly after the wheat, tobacco in September, Indian corn around 

the beginning of October.” The threshing of wheat could be done during the winter 

months, before the busy time in the tobacco production cycle, from April to June, when 

seedlings were transplanted into hills and young plants carefully attended to. “Large-scale 

wheat production, however, except in the Maryland counties closest to Philadelphia, 

remained a rich man’s project,” Walsh observes. “Yields per acre were low, ratios of harvested grain to seed were many times higher for wheat than for corn, and too much land 

and animal power was needed to make wheat a viable alternative staple for ordinary planters.” One motivation for Stone to accumulate land, then, in his home county of Charles 

County, which was relatively far from the grain export market at Philadelphia, was to have 

an adequate amount of land to bring under cultivation for mixed farming and to provide 

forage for livestock. Surplus pork and cattle could be sold for local consumption, ship 

provisions, and export to the West Indies. Furthermore, denser settlement in the Port 

Tobacco area in the eighteenth century encouraged domestic production and craftwork for 

local exchange.14

Economic diversification did not diminish the regional importance of Oronoco 

tobacco, though. Growers in Maryland raised the dull-leaf tobacco that for decades did not 

fetch the high prices of the sweet-scented strain produced on Virginia’s middle and lower 

Peninsula. Differences in the prices narrowed, however, in the mid-eighteenth century, 

with the help of Maryland’s Inspection Act of 1747, which strengthened the Oronoco 

tobacco market. Makers of “trash” tobacco abandoned the crop or left the area altogether. 

13 “Geological Resources Inventory Report,” 2; Lorena S. Walsh, “Land Use, Settlement Patterns, and the 

Impact of European Agriculture, 1620–1820,” in Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem, eds. 

Philip D. Curtin, Grace S. Brush, and George W. Fisher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 224. 

14 Lee, Price of Nationhood, 30 (quote); Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 539–623 (quote 602); 

Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 165–71.
164

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

Tobacco remained the leading cash crop on Maryland’s Lower Western Shore for the 

remainder of the eighteenth century, with slaveholding planters achieving greater economies of scale than non-slaveholders.15

By the time Thomas Stone began to develop his seat at Haberdeventure, in 1770, the 

Port Tobacco area had entered a third, and even more environmentally destructive, phase 

of agricultural production and land use since European settlement. Colonists raised 

tobacco and corn on partially cleared fields; plowing for wheat farming required the 

removal of tree stumps and roots. Because wheat crops were low yield in this region, and 

the amount of land finite, planters cleared marginal land to bring it under cultivation. 

Plowing and field clearing hastened erosion. By the 1770s, run-off sediment already 

reduced access to Port Tobacco by large watercraft, shifting commercial activity to a landing about a mile south of town (along Chapel Point Road). The loss of former wilderness 

spaces in upland areas reduced livestock forage, and more corn and corn fodder had to be 

raised to feed livestock (though if cattle were contained, their droppings could be used to 

fertilize fields). An increasingly restricted land market, accompanied by a trend to larger 

plantations and slaveholdings, resulted in a growing tenant population. Tenants who held 

land for short-term leases lacked a long-term interest in the health of the soil. Also, the 

bustling town of Port Tobacco promoted deforestation by offering a ready market for cut 

wood as firewood, building materials, and staves for export. The hogs and cattle that town 

residents consumed as meat were destructive to the land as well.16

After a variable market for Oronoco tobacco upon the close of the Revolutionary 

War, the outlook changed in the 1790s. “The European wars and the collapse of the French 

market” for Oronoco tobacco in 1793 swung the pendulum back to grain for planters who 

could afford to raise wheat for market: “Instead of tobacco, the planters overworked their 

marginal lands by planting grain. They plowed deeper and more often, cultivating as much 

area as their labor supply would permit, which for grain crops meant at least five times the 

ground they formerly were able to plant with tobacco. The rains washed their soils away 

15 Russo and Russo, Planting an Empire, 11, 40–41; Mary McKinney Schweitzer, “Economic Regulation and 

the Colonial Economy: The Maryland Tobacco Inspection Act of 1747,” Journal of Economic History 40, no. 3 

(1980): 551–69; Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 147–49, 431, 586–601.

16 Geologic Resources Inventory Report, esp. pp. 3–8, 17; Walsh, “Land Use, Settlement Patterns, and the 

Impact of European Agriculture,” 240–43; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 248–49; Peter C. Quantock, Anne T. 

Hayward, and Kelley M. Walter, “Port Tobacco: A Shifting Settlement Pattern,” Maryland Archeology 45, nos. 1 

and 2 (March–September 2009): 58–66, esp. 59, 63. On tenants and land use, see also Carville Earle and Ronald 

Hoffman, “Genteel Erosion: The Ecological Consequences of Agrarian Reform in the Chesapeake, 1730–1840,” 

in Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem, eds. Philip D. Curtin, Grace S. Brush, and George 

W. Fisher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 279–303. Hogs and cattle were particularly 

destructive to the Chesapeake’s forests. To allow for adequate forage, each animal needed roughly twenty to 

thirty acres of “palatable grasses, woody plants, and new growth of hardwood forests.” Cattle accelerated erosion 

by disturbing “ground cover” and creating “compacted topsoil.” Also, having too many animals, particularly 

cattle, ran the risk of overgrazing (Timothy Silver, “A Useful Arcadia: European Colonists as Biotic Factors in 

Chesapeake Forests,” in Discovering the Chesapeake, eds. Curtin, Brush, and Fisher, 161 [quotes]; Walsh, 

Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 611).
165

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

into the streams that once carried their tobacco to market. With the streams and rivers 

silted up there was no turning back again.... The land was gone and the poorer planters 

had no alternatives but to leave.”17

A substantial number of whites migrated west, seeking new opportunities. Between 

1790 and 1850, the white population in Charles County fell by 44 percent. African 

Americans, who already became the majority population by 1790, joined in the diaspora. 

Some left by choice, lured by growing cities like Baltimore, and some were taken by force to 

make a profit from newly opened land. By 1850, enslaved people made up the majority of 

Charles County’s inhabitants.18

Dismal assessments about the environmental impact of 150 years of colonial 

settlement dominate the scholarship on Charles County’s agricultural history; a more 

complex picture emerges from the evidence of new construction in the 1790s and early 

1800s among wealthier planters and the importation of enslaved people from Virginia by 

Thomas Stone’s son-in-law, John M. Daniel, and nephew, Alexander Scott. How did 

Thomas Stone position his family for the future? Stone put into place favorable conditions 

for long-term management of the home plantation by accumulating more than one thousand contiguous acres to pass on to his heir-at-law, making valuable additions to his portfolio by acquiring a mill and its adjacent arable land at Chandlers Hills and Welcome, and 

responding to the financial crisis of the 1780s by contracting the size of his enslaved workforce. Stone’s close relationship with his wealthy neighbor and brother-in-law Gustavus 

Richard Brown should not be overlooked, either, as a long-term family wealth strategy; 

Thomas’s nephew William Briscoe Stone formalized a sharing of resources between Rose 

Hill and Haberdeventure by marrying Brown’s granddaughter in 1825. How Thomas Stone 

managed his properties and made a profit from the land will be addressed next. 19

Organization of Labor

The 1988 HRS raised questions about who conducted the day-to-day management of 

Haberdeventure, given Thomas Stone’s frequent absences for his law business and public 

service, his eventual move to Annapolis in 1783–84, and the apparent lack of discussion 

about overseers in his correspondence. In the 1770s, a Chesapeake plantation of more than 

17 Papenfuse, In Pursuit of Profit, 220–21 (quote). 

18 Charles County Land Records document the forced migration of people held in bondage from Virginia to 

Maryland by John M. Daniel in 1794 (George, N#4:326), 1796 (Jerry and Daniel, IB#2:91), 1798 (Aggy, 

IB#2:473), and 1799 (Hannah and her children John, Tom, Lewis, and Sarah, IB#2:545), and by Alexander Scott 

in 1802 (John, Willis, Sukey, and Fanny, IB#5:247–48), MSA.

19 Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, tables 1.3 to 1.7. Lee, Price of Nationhood, 247–62, 

presents a picture of economic decline and creeping malaise in Charles County at the turn of the nineteenth 

century.
166

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

a thousand acres, twenty slaves, and an absentee owner might be expected to have had a 

manager or steward who supervised two overseers, one overseer for every eight to ten 

enslaved working hands. Unfortunately, plantation accounts by Thomas Stone do not 

survive, hindering our ability to discern the management structure and staffing of the 

plantation. The following discussion relies heavily on surviving letters between Thomas 

Stone and his siblings. The available evidence remains open to interpretation.

Tax lists from 1782 and 1783 suggest that in those years, twenty-one enslaved 

people—of whom nine were of “prime” working age—lived at the Haberdeventure plantation, and another ten enslaved working hands lived at Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and 

Addition to May Day. Unfortunately, surviving tax lists do not provide a population count 

for Haberdeventure and the more valuable arable land at Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and 

Addition to May Day in the same year. Thus we cannot rule out the possibility that some 

individuals who were counted at Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and Addition to May Day in 

the Sixth District in 1782 moved to Haberdeventure in the Fifth District by 1783. 

Nonetheless, a sufficient number of working hands were at both locations for there to have 

been a free or enslaved overseer or driver at each location, working in consultation with a 

farm manager or steward.20

Table 2. Thomas Stone Taxable Property in Enslaved People, Charles County, 

Sixth District (Which Included Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and Addition to 

May Day), 1782 and 1783 Tax Lists, MSA

Children 

< 8 years old

Children 

8–14 years 

old

Males 

ages 14–45

Females 

ages 14–36

Men over 

age 45 and 

women over 

age 36

Total 

number of 

enslaved 

people

6th District, 

1782 4 0 5 5 0 14

6th District,

1783 Not available n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

The sex and age composition of the enslaved population at Chandlers Hills, 

Welcome, and Addition to May Day was optimized for field labor. Given the absence of the 

elderly, it appears that older enslaved people, past their prime working years, were removed 

to Haberdeventure. This would have left the young children at Chandlers Hills, Welcome, 

and Addition to May Day often under their own supervision, which apparently was not 

uncommon on Chesapeake plantations. Also typical was the removal of older enslaved 

20 While the tax lists give us a total number of inhabitants, they are an imprecise measure of Thomas Stone’s 

slaveholding in 1782 and 1783, particularly as Stone would have paid taxes on enslaved persons he hired to 

augment his workforce. He also appears to have paid taxes on slaves held by his sister Grace and brother Walter, 

because Grace and Walter’s names do not appear on the personal property tax lists. 
167

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

African American children from their birth families at around nine years of age. Whites 

often recruited domestic servants from this latter youth group of pre-teens and adolescents; at least among males, the servants frequently left domestic work in their twenties and 

returned to field work or developed other skills. Thus it is not surprising to see a number of 

eight- to fourteen-year-olds at Stone’s home plantation, but not at the more valuable 

farmland at Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and Addition to May Day.21

Thomas Stone delegated authority at Haberdeventure to two younger brothers, 

Michael Jenifer Stone and Walter Stone. From our vantage point today, Michael Jenifer 

Stone is the second most visible white male authority figure at Haberdeventure after 

Thomas Stone. Michael Jenifer Stone, who was only four years younger than Thomas, may 

have been managing Haberdeventure as early as 1774, Rivoire asserts. Much more certain 

is that Thomas Stone put Michael Jenifer Stone, then a bachelor with his own law practice, 

in charge of the home plantation after Thomas and his wife Margaret moved to Annapolis 

in 1784. After Thomas and Margaret died in 1787, Michael Jenifer Stone carried on as 

co-executor of Thomas Stone’s estate and as guardian to Stone’s heir-at-law, Frederick. In 

September 1793, Frederick died unexpectedly from a yellow fever outbreak in 

Philadelphia, and the lines of authority become murkier. After Frederick’s passing, his 

sister, Margaret, now an heir to land, married Dr. John Moncure Daniel of Stafford County, 

Virginia, and the couple remained in Charles County until at least 1799. Michael Jenifer 

Stone also married in 1793, and by 1797 he had established a dwelling plantation at 

Equality, 620 acres “of level land, lying about two miles from the mouth of Port Tobacco 

creek.” Sometime between 1794 and 1797, Mildred Stone married and moved to Virginia. 

In early 1798, Michael Jenifer Stone formally handed over control of Thomas Stone’s estate 

to the husbands of Thomas’s surviving children, Margaret and Mildred Stone.22

21 Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 158; Fawyer, “The Black Family in the Chesapeake,” 

58; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 212–14.

22 Michael Jenifer Stone described his “dwelling place” Equality in a newspaper advertisement (“Lands in 

Charles County for sale,” May 9, 1797, in Maryland Gazette [Annapolis], June 15, 1797). Wearmouth identified 

Michael Jenifer Stone’s role as a manager of Haberdeventure in the 1988 HRS, and Rivoire concurred 

(“Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 7). On the arrangement with Thomas Stone that allowed 

Michael Jenifer Stone and their sister, Catherine Scott, to live at Haberdeventure rent-free after Thomas moved to 

Annapolis in 1784, see Chapter 2. A copy of the “Articles of Agreement, January 13, 1798,” between Michael 

Jenifer Stone, Travers Daniels “of Stafford County,” and Dr. John Moncure Daniel “of Charles County” about the 

handover of control of Thomas Stone’s estate can be found in Scott v. Stone et al., Chancery Court, Chancery 

Papers, case 4647, MSA. Rivoire cites a family book for Michael Jenifer Stone’s marriage year (“Summary 

Report,” 7). A 1794 deed in which his wife, Mary Hanson (Briscoe) Stone relinquished her right to dower for a 

property, confirms the marriage date (Charles County Land Records N#4:295, cited in “Michael Jenifer Stone 

(1747–1812),” Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.

colonial-settlers-md-va.us). Dr. Daniel imported slaves from Virginia to Maryland in 1794, 1796, 1798, and 

1799, which lends further credence to his residence in Charles County with Margaret (Rivoire, “Summary 

Report,” 42). On Margaret and Dr. Daniel’s occupation of Haberdeventure by 1798, see Chapter 2’s section on 

Grace Stone. Grace Stone’s stabilizing presence during the changes in ownership has not been explored. 
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As a plantation manager or steward, Michael Jenifer Stone’s principal duty would 

have been to supervise the overseers. The youngest surviving brother in the family, Walter 

Stone, carried out duties more closely resembling a business agent and clerk. Walter had 

overlapping commercial, professional, and personal contacts in Philadelphia, Baltimore, 

and Annapolis with which to advance Thomas’s (and his own) business interests. For 

example, when Walter arrived in Philadelphia in 1781, he was in a position to sell tobacco 

and flour for friends and family. After leaving Philadelphia in 1783, he entered into a 

commercial partnership with another brother, Colonel John Hoskins Stone (1750–1804). 

Colonel Stone, at that time, was an Annapolis resident who had recently dissolved a partnership with Robert Christie of Baltimore (a source of paint and stone steps for 

Haberdeventure). Walter also had two years of experience in clerking in Philadelphia prior 

to settling in Port Tobacco in 1784, which Thomas may have taken advantage of to bring 

order to his books and to settle his accounts prior to his intended departure for the West 

Indies in 1787. Thomas tasked Walter with reporting on the plantation, selling tobacco and 

pork, pursuing debtors, hiring out and selling slaves, and negotiating contracts with the 

miller. Between 1784 until his own death in 1791, Walter was a familiar presence at 

Haberdeventure, Port Tobacco, and the surrounding area.23

Below the positions of manager or steward, business agent, and clerk was overseer. 

Overseers were responsible for the “daily operations” of cultivating the soil, maintaining 

livestock, and enforcing work discipline with physical punishment. On large tobacco 

plantations in the colonial Chesapeake, an overseer typically would supervise a group of 

eight to ten enslaved laborers. Even on plantations that raised surplus grain and livestock 

for market, a pattern of small work groups prevailed. George Washington expected overseers to constantly attend to the people they supervised. The general wrote in 1794, “with 

me, it is an established maxim, that an Overseer shall never be absent from his people but 

23 This chapter builds on Wearmouth’s observation that Walter managed Thomas’s “business affairs” (1988 HRS, 

part 1, p. 51). Michael Jenifer Stone recorded Walter’s purchase of Thomas’s tobacco as early as 1780 (M. J. 

Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 13). While Walter was in Philadelphia, Thomas intended to send 

him tobacco, and James Craik Jr. did send flour to sell (Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, October 8, 1781, and 

April 21, 1782, Stone Family Papers, LC; Craik to Walter Stone, June 3, 1782, Kremer Collection, SMSC). On 

Thomas’s instructions to Walter on plantation affairs, see his letters of April 22 and 27, November 24, December 

21, 1785, and January 15, 1786, in Stone Family Papers, LC. Management structures on large eighteenth-century 

Chesapeake plantations are described in Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret”; Walsh, Motives 

of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit; Jean B. Russo, “A Model Planter: Edward Lloyd IV of Maryland, 1770–1796,” 

William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 49, no. 1 (1992): 62–88; and Jean B. Lee, “Mount Vernon Plantation: A 

Model for the Republic,” in Philip J. Schwarz, ed., Slavery at the Home of George Washington (Mount Vernon, 

VA: Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 2001), 13–45.

The firm Christie & Stone called in debtors to settle their accounts with an advertisement in the Maryland 

Gazette (Annapolis) on April 10, 1777 (cited in Sprouse, Along the Potomac River, 68). Thomas Stone’s letter to 

Robert Christie of September 17, 1773, requesting paint and stone steps, appeared in the Historical Magazine 

(November 1868): 239–40 (see also Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources”). It is 

believed that Stone intended to use these supplies for the finishing touches of Haberdeventure (Rivoire, 

“Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 53).
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Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

at night, and at his meals.” Planters delegated whipping to overseers. Michael Jenifer Stone, 

who might be considered a humane master, instructed an overseer in 1794 to “correct and 

whip” the people assigned to him on Michael Jenifer Stone’s direction.24

“Nowhere in Thomas Stone’s letters” is an overseer at Haberdeventure mentioned, 

Wearmouth comments. With an estimated minimum of five enslaved field hands of prime 

working age at Haberdeventure and another ten at Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and 

Addition to May Day in 1782 and 1783, we would expect to see one or two overseers on the 

properties. There are several possible explanations for the apparent absence. One, the 

relevant letters simply do not survive. Two, the steward or clerk handled all overseer 

interactions. Thomas Stone’s contemporary and fellow state senator, Edward Lloyd IV of 

Maryland’s Eastern Shore, is one example of a planter who did not concern himself with 

day-to-day management and instead relied on his staff. A third possibility is that Stone did 

not have white overseers and instead used enslaved overseers or drivers who were less 

likely to be literate (though we need to be careful about assumptions; there were literate 

blacks and illiterate whites in this society, too). Phil, who worked at Stone’s mill, is the most 

likely person (other than the carpenter, Tom Triplet) to have been a supervisor of lessskilled workers. Though the full range of his responsibilities is unknown, Phil worked 

closely with the miller, Thomas Ostro, and he was given the highest monetary valuation of 

all of the enslaved people that Thomas Stone held in bondage in Charles County at the end 

of Stone’s life. A fourth possibility for the apparent absence of overseers is that Stone did 

mention free white overseers in his letters, but he referred to them by name and not their 

occupation.25

While Stone did not use the word “overseer” in extant letters, he does mention the 

name “Turner” several times. It is not clear if Turner was an overseer, a tenant who hired 

slaves from Thomas Stone, or a contractor of some other kind. Furthermore, the references 

to Turner in Thomas Stone’s known correspondence all date to one year, 1785, a year for 

24 Russo, “A Model Planter,” 73 (quote); Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 187–91; George Washington to Burgess 

Ball, July 27, 1794, quoted by Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 95; Isaac, Landon 

Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom, 213–14; Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 481–82, 506; agreement 

between Michael Jenifer Stone and William Stone Griffin, January 1, 1794, Stone Family Papers, MS 406, 

MdHS (quote). In late 1783, Michael Jenifer Stone, in what he likely considered a humane gesture, tried to deter 

his brother Walter from selling enslaved people at auction where they might be sold to “those they dislike.” 

Michael Jenifer Stone also suggested that Walter look for buyers in Annapolis, where “humane masters” were 

more likely to be found than in rural Charles County (Michael Jenifer Stone to Walter Stone, November 1783 and 

December 3, 1783, Stone Family Papers, MS 406, MdHS; advertisement by Michael Jenifer Stone for the sale of 

enslaved people, dated May 9, 1797, appearing in the Maryland Gazette [Annapolis], June 15). Walter Stone did 

not take his brother’s advice, though, and went forward with plans for a “public auction” in Port Tobacco of 

“sundry valuable labouring negroes” in January 1784 (Maryland Gazette [Annapolis], December 18, 1783). 

25 Wearmouth HRS (1988) part 3, p. 10; Russo, “A Model Planter” 87; Appendices 4 and 18. Resources on 

enslaved overseers and drivers in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake include Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable 

Subject of Regret,” 86–87, and Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 218–20, 342–46. 
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which we happen to have a wealth of correspondence from Thomas to Walter Stone about 

plantation management. So far, Turner’s first name and place of residence remain a 

mystery.26

There are fragments of information on Turner. In the spring of 1785, Thomas 

Stone, writing from Annapolis, recalled that he had five enslaved people, four unnamed 

enslaved men, and one unnamed enslaved girl “with Turner.” Given the preponderance of 

adult males in this group, they likely were engaged in grain farming, which was male-labor 

intensive. Later that year, Thomas asked his brother Walter to send an enslaved young man 

named Ausmin to him in Annapolis “as soon as his time is out with Turner.” Given that 

Turner had hired Ausmin, is it possible that Turner had hired all five slaves (not just 

Ausmin) from Thomas Stone?27

The possible permutations in the relationship between Turner, Stone, and Stone’s 

bondspeople are endless. To give one example, in 1766, the rector of Charles County’s 

William and Mary Parish, which lay to the south between the Potomac and Wicomico 

Rivers, leased eight bondspeople, “the property of William and Mary Parish,” and 154 

acres of land to a merchant, Thomas Contee, and a wealthy planter, Philip Richard Fendall. 

The lease agreement gave Contee and Fendall, who most certainly did not manage the 

property themselves and would have relied instead on a hired man or relative, the freedom 

to direct the work of the bondspeople “in any and such manner as” Contee and Fendall 

“shall think proper.” Contee and Fendall were responsible for providing the enslaved men 

and women with meat, drink, clothing, and access to the services of a doctor or midwife—

no mention was made about housing, its quality or otherwise—and for paying the lease of 

the land and slaves in crop tobacco. In light of this example, Turner may have been a 

well-to-do planter or Port Tobacco merchant who had hired Ausmin for domestic service 

(as Ausmin would do for Thomas Stone in Annapolis) and leased Stone’s other bondspeople to place under the supervision of his own overseer.28

26 Several men carried the surname Turner in the 1783 tax list and 1790 US Census for Charles County.

27 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22, 1785, and Thomas Stone to “Walter Stone or Michl J Stone,” 

December 21, 1785, Stone Family Letters, LC.

28 Instrument of Writing, October 16, 1766, Charles County Land Records O#3:110–14, MSA. The agreement 

reads that the eight Negroes, named George, Jack, Ned, Jem, Will, Peg, Sall, and Nell, were “to be employed by 

the said Contee and Fendall...in any and such manner as they shall think proper” (110). The annual rate for 

leasing an adult male, by the terms of the document, was 1,240 pounds of crop tobacco, and the rate for leasing 

an adult female was 1,000 pounds of crop tobacco. I am grateful to the Early Colonial Settlers of Southern 

Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck website for the reference (“Thomas Contee [1729–1811],” www.

colonial-settlers-md-va.us). Ausmin (Osmin), who was born on Dr. Gustavus Brown’s estate, was counted as a 

member of the Stone household in Annapolis in January 1788 (Petravage, “Historic Furnishings Report,” 27, 

entry for “Ozman,” age two; inventory of Thomas Stone’s Annapolis estate, Appendix 4).
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Whatever his relationship to Stone, Turner was an important supplier of corn to 

Stone’s properties in 1785. In the fall of that year, Turner owed Stone fifty barrels of corn. 

Stone told his brother Walter that the corn Turner owed him could be given to the miller, 

Thomas Ostro, after Ostro sent forty barrels of corn to Haberdeventure. Stone also 

expected Turner and Ostro to give to Walter an accurate count of his cattle.29

Turner owed Stone corn and fodder in 1785 according to an “agreement.” This 

arrangement suggests that Turner was not an overseer; typically overseers kept a share and 

turned over all other produce to the owner. Surviving overseer agreements between 

Michael Jenifer Stone (on his own account) and Nathan McDaniel from 1796 and 1797 

offer a point of comparison. Michael Jenifer Stone initially supplied McDaniel with four 

“Negro men,” and the next year McDaniel agreed to oversee an additional man and 

woman. With five adult men and one adult woman, the sex and age composition of this 

group was similar to Thomas Stone’s and Turner’s arrangement in 1785 (four men and one 

“girl”). As compensation, McDaniel was to receive four hundred pounds of fat pork, four 

barrels of corn, and four bushels of wheat per year plus a share of the crop (between 

one-sixth to one-eighth of a share, depending on the number of hands Stone supplied). As 

would be expected of an overseer, McDaniel was to keep a share of the corn raised at the 

quarter and turn over the remainder to his employer.30

If Turner was a tenant, this would be consistent with a history of tenancy at 

Haberdeventure. As noted in earlier studies of Haberdeventure, there were two tenants on 

Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains in 1768 when Daniel Jenifer advertised the property 

for sale. The 1798 Federal Direct Tax list records four tenants at Haberdeventure (John 

McDaniel [i.e., John M. Daniel?], Ignatius Wheeler, Ignatius Varden, and Edward Welch). 

The doubling of the number of tenants between 1768 and 1798 makes sense given that 

Haberdeventure more than doubled in size between those two dates. In 1798, Thomas 

Stone’s own daughter Margaret was a tenant. According to an agreement between Margaret 

and Mildred Stone after the death of their brother, their father’s intended heir, Mildred 

inherited Haberdeventure and Margaret inherited the outlying property. Mildred and her 

husband Travers Daniels lived in Virginia, though, and allowed Margaret (Stone) and her 

29 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22 and November 24, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC.

30 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, November 24, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC; agreements between Michael 

Jenifer Stone and Nathan McDaniel for overseeing at Hawthorn, December 16, 1796, and August 31, 1797, Stone 

Family Papers, MS 406, MdHS. Stone also provided McDaniel with four horses, four oxen, and, for McDaniel’s 

own use, a cow. 
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husband Dr. John M. Daniel to occupy Thomas Stone’s brick house. Apparently Margaret 

and Dr. Daniel supplied their own labor to farm at Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and Addition 

to May Day because the 1798 Direct Tax shows no tenants there.31

One reason why the history of tenancy during Thomas Stone’s lifetime is obscure is 

that, for at least one year and possibly more, Stone preferred to pay the property taxes for 

his tenants and others who leased enslaved people whom Stone claimed ownership of. In 

1785, Thomas told his brother Walter that he wanted to pay the state tax for “persons to 

whom rented and hired.” The tenants and lessees would pay him what they owed in tax. As 

a result, Thomas’s name, and not the other people’s names, would be recorded.32

In summary, Turner appears to have leased both land and slaves from Thomas 

Stone. Thomas Stone (with Walter’s assistance as clerk) may have had similar arrangements 

with other tenants on his land. Fortunately, a surviving written agreement between Walter 

Stone and the miller Thomas Ostro from 1787, combined with other sources, provides 

information about one of Stone’s most important employees. According to the 1787 agreement, Ostro was to “manage & conduct” the mill, including keeping it in “good and proper 

repair” and doing “Justice to all customers.” Ostro also managed a field next to the road, 

for which he was entitled to half the profits, and raised hogs, with permission to retain 

one-fifth of the pork. The agreement suggests that Ostro worked with “Negroe Phil,” 

Thomas Stone’s most highly valued bondsman at the time, at the age of twenty-four. The 

document also directed that other enslaved persons held by Stone who “may be at the Mill” 

were to be treated with “care and humanity.” Ostro, the head of a family of five, was neither 

a landowner nor a slaveowner when the state of Maryland assessed his property for taxes 

31 CLR (1996), 35, 39; Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), March 2, 1769; Federal Direct Tax of 1798, MSA. The 

deed for Haberdeventure in 1770 mentions rents (Charles County Land Records, S#3:127–30, MSA). It is 

possible that the name “John McDaniel” in the list of tenants at Haberdeventure in 1798 might be a clerical error, 

misrepresenting the name of John M. Daniel, Thomas Stone’s son-in-law who occupied Thomas Stone’s house at 

the time. Two tenant houses at Haberdeventure were valuable enough to be recorded, but together were worth 

$70, while Thomas Stone’s brick house with three outbuildings was valued at $1,800. Over a decade earlier, 

Michael Jenifer Stone lived at Haberdeventure “rent-free” (answer of Travers Daniel and wife and John M. 

Daniel and wife, December 30, 1806, Scott v. Stone et al., Chancery Papers, Chancery Court, case 4647, MSA). 

Sarson observes that in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Maryland, tenants made land productive 

while sparing the landowner the expense of supplying labor (“Landlessness and Tenancy,” 583–84). Landowners 

risked destruction of the land by tenants, for example the cutting down of timber (Earle and Hoffman, “Genteel 

Erosion”). 

32 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC.
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in 1783. Ostro’s most valuable possessions when he died in 1796 were his horses and a 

horse wagon. Ostro also owned shoemaker tools and “some shew lasts,” suggesting one 

way that he supplemented his income.33

The 1787 agreement between Walter Stone and Thomas Ostro does not specify 

Phil’s duties at the mill; given his high valuation, he may have been a miller’s assistant. A 

study of George Washington’s grist mill offers a useful description of the responsibilities of 

a miller and a miller’s assistant. “The miller played the key role in determining the success 

or failure” of the milling “operation, as he was responsible for the overall management of 

the business of the mill in addition to overseeing the grinding of the grain.” In addition to 

keeping accounts, the miller maintained and repaired the mill and “was expected to...

supervise work in the cooperage when milling was slow.” Washington’s mill had a cooper’s 

shop in a neighboring building, where barrels were made for the shipment of cornmeal, 

wheat and rye flour, and the whiskey made at an on-site distillery.34

The experiences of an enslaved miller’s assistant named Ben at George 

Washington’s gristmill in the 1780s and 1790s suggest the kinds of work that Phil may have 

been engaged in. Ben “likely” was literate and could help with the keeping of accounts. He 

also “assisted in the cooperage and spent many hours repairing and cleaning the millrace” 

to maintain adequate water flow. On at least one occasion when a miller departed, Ben 

operated the mill in his stead.35

Women also had a history of working at mills in Southern Maryland. Depositions 

in a freedom petition case in the 1790s offer testimonies about Jenny Short or Shorter, a 

daughter of a mixed-race marriage (by a Catholic priest) between an English-born indentured servant, Elizabeth Shorter, and an enslaved man. (According to Maryland law at the 

time, Elizabeth was enslaved because she had children by a Negro slave, and their children 

were born into slavery.) Reportedly in the 1730s and 1740s, Jenny Shorter managed 

Tomachokin Mill in St. Mary’s County for Roswell Neale, a son of Anthony Neale of 

Aquenseek (variously spelled Acquinsicke), Charles County. (The same Anthony Neale 

33 Appendix 18 provides a transcription of the 1787 agreement between Walter Stone and Thomas Ostro. Variant 

spellings of Ostro’s name raise the question of whether the Stones used an anglicized spelling of a European 

name. Thomas Stone and Walter Stone repeatedly spell the name as “Ostro,” and the same spelling is recorded in 

the 1778 census of Charles County and on the miller’s 1796 probate inventory (Charles County Court Records, 

Liber X, No. 3, 1774–78, and Charles County Inventories 1790–97, p. 418, both MSA). The miller signed his 

surname “Osston” in the 1787 agreement with Walter Stone (Appendix 18), though, and in a newspaper advertisement, his signature is “Thomas Oston” (Maryland Gazette [Annapolis], October 29, 1789). The tax list of 

1783 also spells the name as “Thomas Oston.”

Phil had worked at the mill for at least a year and likely more when the agreement between Walter Stone and 

Thomas Ostro was made; in late 1785, Thomas Stone wrote to Walter that he wanted Phil to stay at the mill 

(December 21, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC). In January 1788, assessors of Thomas Stone’s estate in Charles 

County valued Phil, age twenty-five, at £80, £10 more than other adult men of prime working age, including Tom 

Triplet, a carpenter (Petravage, “Historic Furnishings Report,” 14). 

34 Dennis J. Pogue and Esther C. White, George Washington’s Gristmill at Mount Vernon (Mount Vernon, VA: 

Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 2005), 30–31, 65–69. 

35 Ibid., 28–29, 34, 67–68.
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gave to Roswell’s brothers, Henry and Edward, the mill near Port Tobacco that Thomas 

Stone acquired.) William Hill, a free person of color, recalled working with Jenny as a 

“millboy” when he was in his early teens and helping her lift sacks onto horses. A former 

overseer to Roswell Neale remembered Jenny’s son, Ned Short, attending the mill, and 

recalled that after Ned died, a woman named Alice Handley operated the mill for “two or 

three years” before an African American man took over.36

The roles of women at Thomas Stone’s mill during his period of ownership are 

unknown, but their presence is documented. As will be discussed shortly, when Thomas 

Stone leased and then purchased a mill near Port Tobacco, he also hired and later bought 

Rachael and Lucy, who were part of a large family at the site. Rachael was twenty-four years 

of age and Lucy was sixteen when Stone first hired them in late 1776. Rachael and Lucy 

may have had specialized knowledge about operating and managing the mill. Running a 

bakehouse is not out of the question, either.37

The work that Rachael and Lucy performed remains obscure. Phil had a higher 

profile at the mill, but we also do not know the extent of his responsibilities. He may have 

taken an important part in another of Ostro’s responsibilities at Stone’s mill, raising hogs. 

In 1786, Thomas Stone wanted Ostro to deliver seventy-two hogs to him. The following 

year, Walter Stone limited Ostro’s hog production to no more than “five thousand weight” 

a year, perhaps to rein in Ostro’s ambitions—Ostro was entitled to keep one-fifth of the 

pork he raised—or to curb deleterious effects on the land; hogs were “prolific breeders and 

notorious destroyers of crops.”38

Phil’s hire in 1794 at Michael Jenifer Stone’s Port Tobacco blacksmith shop, which 

was expanded or improved that year, together with Phil’s documented presence at the mill, 

suggests that he had talents as a mechanic or artisan. There appear to have been two other 

artisans among those whom Thomas Stone held in bondage, a carpenter, Tom Triplet, and 

36 Depositions of William Hill, William Gibson, Elizabeth Daily, and passim in Basil Shorter v. Henry Rozer, 

Judgment Record, transcribed in Thomas et al., eds., O Say Can You See, Early Washington, DC, Law and 

Family, http://earlywashingtondc.org/doc/oscys.mdcase.0012, accessed December 13, 2019. More residents 

remembered Jenny in her later years, when she exercised considerable independence. She continued to live on 

Roswell Neale’s property on St. Clement’s Bay and “supported herself” by “doctoring for the flux” in the 

“neighbourhood” and raising chickens. She also took care of “Negro children” before her death around 1750 

(depositions of William Hill, Jeremiah Neale, William Gibson, and John Baptist Anderson in ibid.)

37 After Thomas Stone purchased Rachael and Lucy, the daughters of Roger and Margaret (Peg), from the heirs 

of Roger Smith in 1782, their whereabouts become uncertain. In a letter in the spring of 1785 in which Stone 

listed “the negroes I have in Charles” County, the only person Stone specifically mentioned as being at the mill is 

a woman named “Margot.” This might be a reference to Rachael and Lucy’s mother. Later that year, Stone 

lamented the death of “Margt.,” who, Mrs. Stone informed her husband, had “suffered” from a “very bad” illness 

(Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22 and December 21, Stone Family Papers, LC). The woman named 

Rachael who was present at the valuation of Stone’s Annapolis estate in early 1788 may or may not be the 

Rachael whom Stone purchased from the Smith family; their approximate birth years (1748 for Rachael in 

Annapolis and 1752 for Rachael at the mill) are only four years apart (probate inventories of Thomas Stone, 

1788, and Roger Smith, 1768).

38 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, January 15, 1786, Stone Family Papers, LC; Appendix 18, 1787 agreement 

between Walter Stone and Thomas Ostro; Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 608 (quote). 
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Bob, about whom we know even less. Enslaved tradesmen were rare in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake, but their numbers grew over the course of the century, and in a mostly 

rural county like Charles County, they were most likely to be found at large plantations like 

Thomas Stone’s. In Maryland, free people or indentured servants were frequently engaged 

for craftwork such as blacksmithing, tanning, shoemaking, tailoring, gardening, and 

weaving.39

Carpenters, like Tom Triplet, and coopers were the most common of all skilled 

adult male slaves on Chesapeake plantations. Mills, houses, and outbuildings needed 

constant repair and maintenance. The previous owner of the Stone’s mill, Roger Smith, 

held two carpenters in bondage. George Washington invested substantial sums of money 

renovating his father’s “severely deteriorated” gristmill and then replacing it with a more 

technologically advanced design. Woodworkers also manufactured casks and barrels to 

store plantation produce.40

In summary, surviving letters by Thomas Stone to his brothers, Michael Jenifer 

Stone and Walter Stone, between 1784 and early 1786 plus other scattered evidence give us 

a partial picture of the management structure at Haberdeventure and outlying properties. 

When Thomas moved to Annapolis in 1784, he relied on his brothers to execute his 

instructions and maintain the profitability of the estate. Further down the hierarchy was a 

man named Turner, who rented enslaved people and likely land from Stone, the miller 

Thomas Ostro, and the highly skilled bondsmen known to us as Phil, Tom Triplett, and 

Bob. The presence of ten enslaved laborers at Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and Addition to 

May Day in 1782 and of nine enslaved individuals of working age at Haberdeventure and 

Hanson’s Plains Enlarged in 1783 exceeded the numbers needed to raise food, according to 

David Percy’s estimation. How Stone and his agents used the land productively will be 

addressed next. 

39 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 54, 209–12, 227; Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 547–48. It 

appears that Port Tobacco merchant George Clements entered into a limited partnership with Michael Jenifer 

Stone to support the latter’s blacksmith shop, based on surviving accounts in the William Briscoe Stone Papers, 

Rubenstein Library, Duke University (George Clements with Michael Jenifer Stone, January 1794–January 1795, 

listing construction materials and hires, an account of Michael J. Stone with Stone & Clements, January 13–

December 20, 1794, enumerating blacksmith work, and Archibald Johnson with Stone & Clements, January 

27–July 4, 1794, also documenting blacksmith work). The 1794–95 account of George Clements with Michael 

Jenifer Stone records the purchase of 200 bricks, an anvil, “four legs for Forge,” and two sheepskins (to make 

bellows). Clements also hired Michael Jenifer Stone’s enslaved blacksmith, Jesse. On Clements’s identity as a 

merchant, see Sprouse, Along the Potomac River, 106, 113, and Charles County Land Records N#4:379, MSA. 

Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book documents Thomas Stone’s patronage of his blacksmith shop in 1777 and 1779 

(Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 11).

40 Will of Roger Smith, transcribed in “Roger Smith (1716–1768),” Early Colonial Settlers of Southern 

Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us; Pogue and White, George 

Washington’s Gristmill, 13–14, 30–34. 
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Tobacco

Tobacco remained part of the lifeblood of Charles County throughout Stone’s lifetime. 

Indeed, with the help of agricultural improvements in the nineteenth century, tobacco 

endured as a vital part of Charles County’s economy into the twentieth century; the extant 

tobacco barn at Haberdeventure testifies to its persistence. Stone did not have to raise 

much tobacco himself to be deeply involved in the tobacco business—he accepted tobacco 

as payment for his legal work, brokered tobacco sales for his legal clients, and represented 

clients in debt cases involving tobacco. As it happens, though, there is evidence that Stone 

raised tobacco for credit and profit. Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book credits Thomas Stone 

for crop tobacco—that is, tobacco raised and packed by Stone—delivered at two warehouses in 1780. Another reference to crop tobacco occurred in 1782, when Thomas Stone 

paid in crop tobacco for an enslaved man known as Bob. Furthermore, in a letter from 

1785, tobacco was the first crop that Thomas Stone listed as the products of his Charles 

County plantations. Tobacco’s continuing importance in the local economy would have 

made it difficult to give up.41

Whereas some large planters in the late-eighteenth-century Chesapeake abandoned 

tobacco altogether—George Washington being one of the most well-known—others 

maintained production, including Stone’s legal client Charles Carroll of Annapolis and his 

son Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who, like Stone, came into political prominence during 

the Revolutionary War. In the late eighteenth century, tobacco’s boom-bust cycle continued, and the lure of high prices kept growers like Thomas Stone involved. The tobacco 

market was strong in Charles County between 1766 and 1770, and another rise in prices 

occurred in 1783, encouraging planters. In 1784 and 1785 John Hoskins Stone and Walter 

Stone were eagerly buying up Charles County tobacco and shipping it through Baltimore, 

which became Maryland’s leading hub of the tobacco export market in the 1790s. The 

Stone brothers, as well as Port Tobacco merchant Thomas How Ridgate, were able to 

benefit from Robert Morris of Philadelphia’s contract with the French tobacco monopoly 

from 1785 to 1787 as subcontractors to meet the French demand for the lower-quality 

Maryland leaf. Given Thomas Stone’s kinship ties with John Hoskins Stone and Walter 

41 Julia A. King, Archaeology, Narrative, and the Politics of the Past: The View from Southern Maryland

(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), esp. chapter 1; Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 

636; Michael Jenifer Stone day book, p. 13, Kremer Collection, SMSC; deed for Bob, Charles County Land 

Records, V#3:563, MSA; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC. Philip 

Richard Fendall listed “tobacco, wheat, and Indian corn,” in that order, as the principal crops of the seven 

hundred acre Potomac River, Charles County, plantation he advertised for sale in 1784 (Maryland Gazette

[Annapolis], October 14). The use of tobacco as currency remained strong during the Revolutionary War despite 

the uncertainty of the market. As the value of paper currency fell, tobacco offered “an excellent hedge against 

inflation” (Hoffman with Mason, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland, 337).
177

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

Stone, and his business relationship with Ridgate (discussed in Chapter 5), it is possible 

that Thomas Stone also profited from Morris’s contract with the French tobacco monopoly 

as a grower of tobacco.42

With a focus on grain and livestock farming at Chandlers Hills and Welcome (see 

below), presumably Thomas Stone’s enslaved workforce raised tobacco elsewhere, and 

Haberdeventure is one strong candidate. Daniel Jenifer’s 1769 newspaper advertisement 

for 342 acres of Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains Enlarged noted that the land was 

“better for farming than planting” tobacco. However, tobacco was being grown on the 

property at the time; the same advertisement stated that the two tenants paid rent of a 

“crop hogshead each.” The phrase “crop tobacco” referred to tobacco raised and packed 

by the grower, in distinction from transfer tobacco which was purchased from others to 

make up a hogshead. Also, the presence on a vacant portion of the property of an “old” 

tobacco house that measured twenty by thirty feet (along with an “old” and “very sorry” 

dwelling house) in 1768 testifies to a history of tobacco cultivation at the site. During his 

seventeen-year tenure, Stone acquired adjoining parcels to create a 1,077-acre property 

that may have included better land for raising tobacco than the 342 acres Jenifer originally 

advertised.43

Tobacco production at Haberdeventure during Thomas Stone’s ownership (1770–

87) remains unproven. Meanwhile, entries in Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book hint at the 

possibility that Stone raised tobacco on rented land. In 1780, Stone’s brother credited 

Thomas for hogsheads of crop tobacco at two Charles County warehouses, both of which 

were at some distance away from Haberdeventure—1,724 lbs. at Cedar Point, which lies to 

the south in William and Mary Parish, and 720 lbs. at Nanjemoy, situated in Durham Parish 

to the east. If Thomas Stone grew tobacco at Haberdeventure, presumably it would have 

been delivered to the warehouse on Port Tobacco Creek. Unfortunately, Michael Jenifer 

Stone’s day book ends in 1781, stopping short of the postwar period.44

Michael Jenifer Stone’s 1780 day book entry for Thomas Stone’s crop tobacco at 

the Cedar Point and Nanjemoy warehouses happens to coincide with the time Thomas 

rented land at Nanjemoy for his siblings Michael Jenifer Stone and Catherine Scott. It may 

42 Earle and Hoffman, “Genteel Erosion,” esp. 291; Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 633; Lee, 

Price of Nationhood, 224–27; Papenfuse, In Pursuit of Profit, 198–99, 216–17. Charles Carroll of Carrollton 

reduced tobacco production in the 1790s but did not entirely abandon the crop (“Genteel Erosion”). In 1790, 

Michael Jenifer Stone wrote to his brother Walter from New York, “I hear that Tobacco is [selling] high in 

London. Please to Collect and Ship all you Can for me” (April 17, 1790, Stone Family Papers, MS 406, MdHS). 

43 Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), March 9, 1769; 1768 patent for Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains 

Enlarged, Patent Records BC & GS 37:94, MSA 1195–481. On the distinction between crop tobacco and transfer 

tobacco, see Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 595, 600. 

44 Michael Jenifer Stone day book, April and May 1780, Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 13. The day book records 

Michael Jenifer Stone’s transactions with Thomas Stone between 1773 and 1781. Charles County had seven 

inspection warehouses in the 1760s and 1770s, according to Lee, Price of Nationhood, Table 8, p. 273. The 

tobacco inspection warehouse at Port Tobacco Creek stood at Chandler’s Point, on land owned by a Roman 

Catholic, William Neale (d. 1763) (Archives of Maryland, 50:518, 58:449, 64:152).
178

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

be, then, that the elder brother was in the habit of renting land to raise tobacco. This would 

have given Stone the flexibility to raise tobacco when the market was favorable. Though the 

war disrupted the transatlantic tobacco trade, Philadelphia merchants were willing to buy 

tobacco to ship to the West Indies, where it could be re-exported to Europe. Again, Stone 

had the connections to make the outlet feasible.45

Apart from the single 1780 reference to Stone’s crop tobacco, it is unclear how much 

of the tobacco that Stone handled was raised by other planters. Some years later, in 1785, 

Thomas, writing from Annapolis, told his brother Walter, then a resident of Port Tobacco, to 

expect delivery of tobacco from three men (Baker Howard, Jesse Doyne, and Jesse Bunch) 

“for me.” If these were payments for debt, Stone likely had a choice of accepting tobacco as 

payment or risk not being paid at all, given the shortage of specie at the time.46

While it is difficult to ascertain how deeply Stone invested his own resources in 

tobacco production, there is strong evidence to suggest that he retained an interest in 

raising the cash crop. For a practicing lawyer and public officeholder, undoubtedly it was 

easier to maintain the status quo of raising tobacco along with corn and wheat than to 

introduce “English” farming techniques that required long-term planning and disrupted 

established routines. Stone did take advantages of opportunities, though, to achieve higher 

profits from grain and livestock farming, beginning in 1776. 

Other Crops and Means of Profit

“There can be no great profit by our ordinary crops of corn & tobacco,” observed Virginia 

planter and lawyer John Mercer in 1767–68. In the eighteenth-century Chesapeake, planters’ profit margins were low unless they diversified; according to one estimation, tobacco 

yielded a profit of 5 to 6 percent. In contrast, wheat crops could achieve returns of as high 

45 Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise, 205–6. In letters of 1781 and 1782, Stone informed his brother 

Walter, who was working in the Office of Finance in Philadelphia under Robert Morris at the time, that he 

intended to send tobacco to him, presumably to sell in the Philadelphia market (Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, 

October 8, 1781, Fogg Collection, Maine Historical Society, Portland, ME, transcription in Jefferson, “Thomas 

Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources”; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 21, 1782, Stone Family 

Papers, LC). 

46 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC. Based on the 1783 tax assessment, 

these three men lived in other parts of Charles County. Jesse Doyne owned 550 acres in the Seventh District, 

which included Poynton Manor. Jesse Burch owned 250 acres in the First District and leased another 187 acres in 

the Third District. Baker Howard occupied 144 acres in the First District (Archives of Maryland, Volume 81). On 

indebtedness in postwar Charles County and the scarcity of cash in late 1785 and 1786, see Lee, Price of 

Nationhood, 228–39.

Whether Stone favored one tobacco merchant over another for the sale of his tobacco is not clear. The crop 

tobacco that Michael Jenifer Stone credited to Thomas Stone in 1780 was “delivered to” Thomas How Ridgate 

and Walter Stone (Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 13). In 1785, Thomas Stone 

instructed Walter to give “the two Saint Mary’s hogsheads” to Contee and Company, and he mentioned that he 

was expecting cash from the sale of tobacco to Col. Robert Townshend Hooe, the former business partner of his 

deceased brother, Frederick, and Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer (Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 27, 1785, 

Stone Family Papers, LC; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 40–41).
179

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

as 90 percent. Also, the tobacco market was variable. Charles Carroll of Carrollton 

remarked in 1765 that his income depended “upon the casual rise and fall in the price of 

Tobacco.” When Carroll inherited his father’s estate in 1782, he reduced Doughoregan 

Manor’s reliance on tobacco as a cash crop and placed more importance on raising wheat, 

corn, hogs, and cattle on the Anne Arundel County property.47

“Large-scale wheat production was...a rich man’s project” in eighteenth-century 

Charles County, as well as in other parts of the Chesapeake, except areas close to 

Philadelphia. Because wheat crops were low yield, more land had to be brought into 

production. Improving planters needed cattle, “the most valuable of plantation livestock,” 

to produce manure for fertilizer and serve as draft animals to pull plows. Fertilizer allowed 

improving planters to keep land in production longer, abandoning older methods of crop 

rotation that let partially cleared land lie fallow after seven years of use. Labor demands 

included removing tree stumps from former tobacco fields to ease plowing, and hiring 

ditchers to create and maintain meadows for livestock pasture.48

Thomas Stone witnessed firsthand a major contraction of the tobacco market in 

1772, which may have encouraged him to invest in grain and livestock farming. For five 

years previous, high tobacco prices encouraged planters to borrow and merchants to 

extend credit. Then, in 1772, a “financial panic” in Britain spurred merchants to call in 

their debts. As a trustee for the Port-Tobacco-based firm Barnes and Ridgate, which went 

into bankruptcy, Stone drew up mortgages and pursued debtors in court. Debt and credit 

were closely intertwined. As historian Bruce Mann explains, “Debtors and creditors in the 

Chesapeake—or, more precisely, Chesapeake debtors and their local and foreign creditors—lived in a state of mutual dependence possible only in a highly leveraged economy, 

where the fortunes of borrowers and lenders were so thoroughly intertwined that they 

often seemed more like partners. In commercial economies the road to wealth lies through 

credit. The road to ruin lies through debt. The enduring problem is that the two roads are 

identical until they diverge—a fork that is visible only in retrospect, and often only after it is 

too late to go back.”49

47 John Mercer to George Mercer, December 22, 1767–January 28, 1768, in George Mercer Papers, comp. and 

ed. Mulkearn, 213; Paul G. E. Clemens, “The Operation of an Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Tobacco 

Plantation,” Agricultural History 49 (1975): 519; Walsh, “Land Use, Settlement Patterns, and the Impact of 

European Agriculture,” 240; Charles Carroll of Carrollton to William Graves, September 25, 1765, Letterbook 

1765–68, MdHS, quoted in Earle and Hoffman, “Genteel Erosion,” 290 (quote). Charles Carroll of Carrollton’s 

father maintained tobacco as the primary cash crop at Doughoregan Manor up through the Revolutionary War 

(Hoffman with Mason, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland, 326).

48 Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 325, 602 (quote), 610 (quote), 622; Thompson, “The Only 

Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 91, 92, 117. For accounts of the challenges of introducing new farming 

techniques in the later eighteenth-century Chesapeake to improve yields for grain and livestock production, see 

Walsh, “Slavery and Agriculture at Mount Vernon,” 46–77, and Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit.

49 Lee, Price of Nationhood, 104 (quote), 105; Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 633; Bruce H. 

Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University 

Press, 2002), quotations on pp. 132, 137.
180

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

Stone’s contemporaries associated indebtedness with a loss of independence—

which manifested itself literally when debtors were jailed. Ridgate’s partner John Barnes, 

for example, was imprisoned in London in 1772 after their scheme to compete with 

London tobacco merchants failed. Stone witnessed the Barnes & Ridgate failure at a 

particularly fraught time during Britain’s imperial crisis. To quote from Mann again, “By 

the early 1770s, as parliamentary efforts to raise revenue from the colonies continued and 

the insistent demands of British creditors spread deepening distress, planters conflated the 

debate over constitutional rights and liberties with that over private indebtedness. Their 

newly recognized financial dependence [to British tobacco merchants and other financiers] lent a personal context to country idioms of political discourse—power, bondage, 

liberty, rights, virtue, independence—investing them with even greater emotional intensity 

than they carried on their own.”50

Nonimportation and the Revolutionary War encouraged the trend toward greater 

self-sufficiency and economic diversification among larger planters in Charles County. 

Stone’s experiences as a lawyer, which put him on the front lines of debtor-creditor negotiations, must have encouraged him further to diversify his portfolio.

Some of the clearest evidence of agricultural diversification on Thomas Stone’s 

property comes from Chandlers Hills and Welcome, Stone’s most valuable arable land, 

where the emphasis was on grain and livestock farming. The January 1787 agreement 

between Walter Stone, agent for Thomas Stone, and the miller Thomas Ostro makes no 

mention of tobacco. Instead, wheat, corn, cattle, and pork were the primary products. (See 

Appendix 18.) This marks a shift away from the former use of land, as of 1768, primarily to 

raise tobacco and pork.51

In 1785, Thomas Stone asked his brother Walter, “What wheat” had been “credited” to him, and “what corn?” Stone’s inquiry reveals that he used his land to raise a 

surplus of wheat and corn to sell at market. During the Revolutionary War, Stone’s uncle 

Daniel Jenifer purchased “beef, pork, corn, and wheat” to supply to American and French 

military forces, but the demands were not consistent. New England also bought provisions 

50 Ibid., p. 137. The bankruptcy of Barnes and Ridgate kept Stone busy. “Barnes and Ridgate exceeded all other 

merchants in the number of suits filed and judgments obtained” in Charles County in 1773 and 1774, reports Lee 

(Price of Nationhood, 106). Stone’s work for Barnes and Ridgate is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. 

Maryland passed a bankruptcy act on 1787 that eased the burdens on debtors (ibid., 239). 

51 Roger Smith raised tobacco, along with hogs and sheep, at Chandlers Hills and Welcome, based on his will 

and inventory of 1768. He owned hoes and axes, which were the common tools for raising tobacco, and no plows 

(Charles County Wills, Liber AE#6:28–30; Charles County Inventories 1766–73:283–86, MSA). Thomas Stone 

asked Walter Stone for an account of corn and wheat “got” at the mill in a letter of November 24, 1785 (Stone 

Family Papers, LC).
181

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

from Maryland during the war. After the war, merchants bought Maryland wheat, flour, 

pork, and corn, in addition to tobacco. Unfortunately, the wheat output of Stone’s properties is unrecorded. 52

Hogs, Cattle, and Sheep

While production figures for tobacco, corn, and wheat production at Haberdeventure and 

Stone’s other properties are lacking, tax lists and Stone’s probate inventory in Charles 

County combined with other sources offer some numbers for hogs, cattle, and sheep. 

Daniel Jenifer’s description of the 342 acres of Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains 

Enlarged that he put up for sale in 1769—“better for farming than planting”—suggests that 

Stone’s home plantation was suitable for raising livestock. Even so, evidence of livestock is 

more heavily weighted outside Haberdeventure’s boundaries, at the outplantation at 

Chandlers Hills and Welcome (patented as Plenty in 1787).53

Hogs were ubiquitous in the colonial and early national Chesapeake. In the seventeenth century, hogs often roamed freely. By the mid-eighteenth century, planters exerted 

more control over their swine by penning them and slaughtering them at younger ages. 

Before the Revolutionary War, planters sold pork locally, to markets in the West Indies, and 

as ship provisions. During the war, Charles County supplied pork (as well as beef) for 

military provisions.54

As of 1785, Thomas Ostro at the mill was an important source of pork for 

Haberdeventure. Late that year, Stone asked Ostro to supply Haberdeventure with 800 

pounds of pork and sell surplus for cash. Thomas Stone may have sought to curb the 

number of hogs at Haberdeventure because the animals damaged the environment. Ostro, 

on the other hand, had financial incentives to raise large numbers. According to a 1787 

agreement with Walter Stone, Ostro was allowed to keep one-fifth of the pork he raised at 

the mill for his own use and profit, provided that he produced no more than 5,000 weight a 

year. If the hogs that were slaughtered weighed no more than 150 pounds each, then Ostro 

could send at least 30 animals to market each year and stay within his allowance. 

52 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC (quote). On wartime purchases of 

foodstuffs from Charles County, see Lee, Price of Nationhood, 173–80. On Maryland as a source of wartime 

provisions, see Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise, 203–4, and Papenfuse, In Pursuit of Profit, 107. 

Michael Jenifer Stone advised Walter Stone that Maryland’s saleable products were “wheat, flour, tobacco, pork, 

and corn” (May 3, 1783, Stone Family Papers, LC). John Hoskins Stone and Walter Stone in their commercial 

partnership bought Maryland wheat and tobacco in 1785 and 1786 (Lee, Price of Nationhood, 226; John Hoskins 

Stone to Walter Stone, December 22, 1786, Stone Family Papers, MS 406, MdHS).

53 CLR (1996) 34; advertisement for Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains Enlarged, Maryland Gazette

(Annapolis), March 2, 1769 (quote); Lee, Price of Nationhood, 173.

54 Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 608–9.
182

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

Inexplicably, Thomas Stone’s probate inventories recorded only 5 hogs and 12 shoats in 

Charles County in early 1788. This number might represent what existed for plantation use 

at Haberdeventure, Stone’s home plantation.55

The only glimpses of pork production on Thomas Stone’s properties come from a 

handful of documents from 1781 to 1788. Likewise, evidence of cattle is limited to the 

postwar period. At the end of the war, the greater part of Thomas Stone’s cattle could be 

found on the east side of Port Tobacco Creek, at Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and possibly 

Addition to May Day. The 1782 tax list documents forty-eight head of cattle at Chandlers 

Hills, Welcome, and Addition to May Day (without specifying their precise location). A 

year later, Stone paid taxes on twenty-two head of cattle at his dwelling plantation, 

Haberdeventure. Unfortunately, because some tax lists are missing, we cannot count the 

total number of cattle in both locations in the same year. The 1996 CLR suggests that cattle 

could have been moved between the plantations, given their proximity. 

As is the case with hogs, Thomas Stone’s probate inventory for Charles County 

shows an apparent drop in the number of cattle by early 1788, with two oxen and four cows 

and calves recorded. One reason for the discrepancy may be that Stone paid taxes on cattle 

for his tenants in 1782 and 1783, thus making it appear as if he owned more head of cattle 

than he actually did. Or perhaps Stone enlarged his cattle herd during the war, as Charles 

Carroll of Carrollton did. Cattle played an important role in grain farming; manure collected from penned cattle was used as fertilizer, and cattle, especially oxen, were used as 

draft animals. If Stone wanted to raise more wheat on worn-out land, he had to have cattle. 

Cattle also were a source of food, leather, and tallow for candles.56

In April 1785, Thomas Stone estimated that he possessed “12 or 13 head” of cattle, 

which may or may not indicate that he was drawing down his own investment in grain and 

livestock farming from a wartime high. If he was contracting his investment in farming, it 

may have been intended to be temporary. When Stone was in financial distress in 1785, he 

used cattle sales as a source of ready money. “I will not sell the cattle on Credit,” Stone 

wrote to his brother Walter in December of that year. Stone directed Walter to sell all the 

55 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone or Michael Jenifer Stone, December 21, 1785, and Thomas Stone to Walter 

Stone, January 15, 1786, Stone Family Papers, LC; Appendix 18. Whether Michael Jenifer Stone supplied 

Thomas Stone with pork from the rented Nanjemoy plantation between 1780 and 1782 can only be speculated. In 

1782, Michael Jenifer Stone recorded that the Nanjemoy plantation had nearly 1,500 pounds of pork on hand and 

had sold 950 pounds at Annapolis (Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 24). The day 

book does not record the sale or transfer of pork from the rented Nanjemoy plantation to Haberdeventure. In 

1785, John Hoskins Stone offered pork raised at Nanjemoy to Michael Jenifer Stone, who was then living at 

Haberdeventure, if Michael Jenifer Stone wanted it (John Hoskins Stone to Walter Stone, December 19, 1785, 

Stone Family Papers, MS 406, MdHS). It was not unreasonable, then, for a Nanjemoy plantation to supply 

Haberdeventure with meat. On hog slaughter weights, see Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 609, 

table 38.

56 Hoffman with Mason, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland, 339. 
183

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

cattle “for Cash” after reserving a pair of oxen for Michael Jenifer Stone at 

Haberdeventure, if he wanted them, and setting aside a pair of oxen and two cows and 

calves for Thomas Ostro.57

Of the three main types of livestock raised for meat, Stone appears to have invested 

the fewest resources in sheep. Sheep had trailed behind hogs and cattle in planter priorities 

in the colonial Chesapeake, owing partly to the predation of wolves and lack of cleared 

land in the seventeenth century. In the first half of the eighteenth century, large planters 

raised sheep “primarily for meat” and considered wool an “important by-product” for 

import replacement. During the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, when nonimportation agreements made imported cloth more difficult to obtain, making wool took on 

greater importance as colonists increased domestic cloth production.58

No sheep appear in the appraisal of Thomas Stone’s property in Charles County 

shortly after his death. Other records, though, show Stone’s possession of small numbers. 

During the war, Michael Jenifer Stone recorded, on one occasion, Thomas Stone’s purchase of six sheep. More often Thomas purchased lambs as meat, according to his brother’s 

day book. In late 1784, Thomas Stone put sheep up for sale along with other plantation 

assets.59

Despite the absence of sheep in Thomas Stone’s estate in early 1788, domestic cloth 

production was a part of life. Stone’s Charles County inventory documents five weaver’s 

slays (now called reeds, used to beat the weft on a loom), a spinning wheel for wool 

(“woolen wheel”), and two “damaged” flax wheels for linen thread. The effort at import 

replacement was considerably less, though, than at Thomas Stone’s father’s plantation at 

Poynton Manor. In 1774, sixty-two sheep were grazing at Poynton Manor. Within the next 

four years, Stone’s elder half-brother Samuel nearly doubled those numbers. Likely 

encouraged by the war (Samuel’s inventory was taken in 1778), Samuel invested significantly in cloth production, possessing sheep shears, wool cards, two spinning wheels, an 

expensive “reel and winder” (£8) to make skeins of consistent lengths, and a “garter loom.” 

Samuel also owned a flax wheel to spin flax into yarn and a cotton gin to process cotton.60

57 Confirming Thomas Stone’s sale of cattle in the local market, Robert Fergusson wrote to George Gray on 

August 23, 1787, that a local resident paid Stone £10 for an unspecified number of cattle in the recent past 

(Glassford and Company Papers, Container 62, LC). To give a sense of how many head of cattle £10 could buy, 

Stone’s probate inventory for Haberdeventure assessed the value of a pair of oxen at £10 and cows and calves at 

£3 a head (Appendix 4). 

58 Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 339, 609–10 (quote).

59 Appendix 4; advertisement by Thomas Stone, Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), October 14, 1784; Michael 

Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, pp. 12, 13.

60 Probate inventories of David Stone, 1774, Prerogative Court, Inventories Liber 117:91–99, and of Samuel 

Stone, 1778, Charles County Wills 1777–82, AF#7:179–80, MSA. Michael Jenifer Stone also raised sheep for 

profit at the rented Nanjemoy plantation in 1780–82 and sold lambs, wethers (castrated male sheep used to 

produce wool), and wool (Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC).
184

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

Timber Farming 

Large landowners like Thomas Stone sought to strike a balance between keeping a timber 

reserve to maintain the value of the estate in the long term and making a profit in the short 

term. Over the course of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the growth of a 

native-born population, both free and enslaved, and the simultaneous geographic spread of 

plantations accelerated forest clearing in the Chesapeake. By the mid-eighteenth century, 

timber had grown scarce in early-colonized areas.61

Wood was felled to clear land for cultivation. Wood was also a saleable commodity. 

Locally, wood was needed as firewood for heating and cooking, as construction material 

for buildings and fences, and as staves to make into hogsheads and other types of barrels. 

Port Tobacco, a mile-and-a-half from Haberdeventure, would have been a ready market for 

the plantation’s timber, for use as firewood in the merchants’ stores, taverns, the courthouse, and dwellings. North American ports also exported wood to the West Indies in the 

latter half of the eighteenth century, but whether Port Tobacco was a net importer or 

exporter of wood at this time is an open question.62

It is not known how much tree cutting occurred at Haberdeventure after Thomas 

Stone gained control of his initial 442-acre parcel in 1770. “About 1200 Old loggs,” already 

cut, were on the property in 1768, prior to Thomas Stone’s purchase. Testifying to an 

ongoing practice of timber felling, a 1785 survey recorded 500 fence logs on a vacancy that 

was incorporated into Haberdeventure. Thomas Stone’s home plantation was “half cleared 

and half cultivated,” judging from the 1783 tax list. (In contrast, nearly all of the land at the 

more arable Chandlers Hills and Welcome tracts was cleared in 1783.) And very likely the 

existing woods at Haberdeventure were regrowth after felling by predecessors. Notably, 

Thomas Stone’s first documented purchase of slaves were for two men, Peter and Bob, in 

1774; their purchase could be interpreted as fulfilling a need to clear land for tillage, or to 

make marginal land arable, for instance by ditching.63

The best documentation for the commercial sale of wood from Thomas Stone’s 

property comes from the papers of his younger brother, Michael Jenifer Stone. Before 

Michael Jenifer Stone became a landowner, he used wood from Thomas Stone’s property 

to supply a blacksmith shop in the Port Tobacco area that he owned and operated. For 

example, in an entry in his day book dated September 1, 1777, Michael Jenifer Stone 

credited his brother for forty-five cords of wood, for “carting wood and coal” (which cost 

more than the wood itself), and for three pounds of steel and fifty-three pounds of iron. A 

61 Silver, “A Useful Arcadia”; Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 612–13. 

62 Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 422–23.

63 CLR (1996) 33–34 (quote); 1768 patent for Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains Enlarged, Patent Records 

BC & GS 37:94, MSA S1195–481; 1787 patent for Haberdeventure, Patent Records IC#C:62, MSA 1195–480; 

Charles County Land Records S#3: 523–24, 533, MSA. 
185

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

surviving account of blacksmith shop expenses between 1789 and 1791 records the purchase of wood from “F. Stone,” Thomas Stone’s principal heir. In 1789, Frederick’s property supplied about half of the smith’s yearly supply of wood.64

Orchards

Two documents hint at the presence of an orchard at Haberdeventure. Thomas Stone in his 

will granted his brother Michael Jenifer Stone “a right to live at the house at 

Haberdeventure, & use the garden[,] orchards & land he now uses.” Some years after 

Thomas’s death, Michael Jenifer Stone, during an absence from the plantation, asked his 

brother Walter if the orchard at Haberdeventure was being “kept up.”65

Unfortunately, the 1783 tax list does not confirm the presence of an orchard at 

Haberdeventure. The assessor noted orchards at two neighboring properties, though. 

Betsy’s Delight, then owned by Gustavus Richard Brown and later incorporated into Rose 

Hill, had a “good” peach orchard. Richard Gambra’s plantation next door to the north at 

Mattingsly’s Hope also had a “good orchard.” The presence of these nearby orchards 

confirms local fruit production.66

Fruit orchards had several functions in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake. English 

traveler Nicholas Creswell’s observed that local residents “generally plant a Peach Orchard 

on the worst land.” Orchards made poor soil productive. “We abound with all sorts of 

fruits, so as even to feed the hogs with peaches that would sell very dear at your market,” 

wrote Father Joseph Mosley from Newtown, St. Mary’s County, to his sister in England. 

Apples, pears, and peaches were the most commonly grown fruit. Local inhabitants made 

cider for household use and sold the surplus or distilled surplus cider to make brandy. 

Michael Jenifer Stone produced brandy at the rented Nanjemoy plantation and bartered 

64 Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 11; blacksmith’s shop account in Michael 

Jenifer Stone’s hand, 1789–91, William Briscoe Stone Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University. F. Stone’s 

estate furnished the shop with eighty cords of wood in 1789 and twelve cords of “underwood” in 1791. 

Rivoire wrote that there was a forge at the mill (“Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 27). I 

have not been able to verify this assertion. It does appear, based on the Michael Jenifer Stone day book, that 

Michael Jenifer Stone started his blacksmith shop in 1777, and Thomas Stone initiated his lease of the mill in late 

1776. Given how closely the Stone brothers’ businesses were intertwined, it is possible that the blacksmith shop 

was at the mill, or that Michael Jenifer Stone moved the shop to the mill after Thomas’s death. 

65 Will and codicil of Thomas Stone, 1787 (Appendix 3); undated notes by Michael Jenifer Stone, Stone Family 

Papers, LC, bound book, f. 333. Rivoire posits that Michael Jenifer Stone addressed the circa 1790 note to his 

brother Walter (“Summary of Additional Research Findings,” 38n24), based on internal evidence.

66 1783 tax assessment, Fifth District, Charles County, MSA. The 1996 Cultural Landscape Report for 

Haberdeventure identified the location of orchards north and east of the main house in aerial photographs of the 

1930s. According to the authors of the report, the possibility that the fruit trees in the 1930s photographs were 

remnants of Thomas Stone’s orchards was “extremely remote” (36–37). The report nonetheless suggests that the 

trees may have stood in orchards that dated back to the eighteenth century.
186

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corn to obtain more brandy. Appraisers at Thomas Stone’s house in Annapolis found seven 

bottles of peach brandy, perhaps the product of his own estate or gifts from other orchard 

owners. Orchards also offered grazing for sheep.67

As a “general rule...the larger the plantation, the greater the diversification,” 

observes historian Philip D. Morgan. As the owner of about 2,000 acres in Charles County 

and lessor of additional land, Thomas Stone raised tobacco but dedicated his most valuable 

arable land at Chandlers Hills and Welcome to grain and livestock farming. Stone also 

possessed valuable timber reserves as well as fruit orchards for producing cider and 

brandy. The planter’s acquisition of the Port Tobacco Great Mill in 1776–82 not only 

eliminated the costs of paying a miller to grind grain; ownership of a mill expanded Stone’s 

role, as a member of the gentry, in serving his neighbors. To this important investment we 

turn next.68

Stone’s Acquisition and Management of 

the Port Tobacco Great Mill 

For a man who appears to have shunned financial risk, the 1776 acquisition of a mill, which 

would require constant repair and upkeep, is a curious choice. Economic warfare between 

the colonies and the mother country had already disrupted markets for some time before a 

nonexportation agreement among the colonies went into effect in September 1775, discouraging cultivation of the region’s primary cash crop, tobacco, and threatening export 

markets for grain and meat. “All Mill business will probably be at an end for a while,” 

reflected George Washington, a grist mill owner, shortly before the nonexportation policy 

took effect. “I believe few Millers will find Imploymt if our Ports are shut up,” Washington 

continued, expressing widespread concern among planters who raised surplus wheat for 

markets in the West Indies, northern colonies, and Europe. Compounding the decision to 

take on the risk, in May 1776, a recent escalation in tensions between America and Britain 

led Stone to express fear about the colonies becoming a “vanquished” country if war broke 

out. The disproportionate strength of the British military weighed on Stone’s mind as 

efforts to reach a compromise with the mother country faltered. Nevertheless, in late 1776, 

Stone began what would become a six-year process of acquiring ownership of a mill, its 

adjacent arable land, and two enslaved women who lived on the property. Stone spent £526 

67 Gill and Curtis, eds., A Man Apart: The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1781, June 4, 1774; Edward 

Davitt, S.J., ed., “Letters of Father Joseph Mosley, S.J. (1757–1806),” Woodstock Letters, 35, no. 1 (1906): 41; 

Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 24; inventory of Thomas Stone’s Annapolis 

estate, 1788 (Appendix 4); Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 341, 485.

68 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 47 (quote). The name “Port Tobacco Great Mill” appears in the 1782 deed 

between Thomas Stone, Ignatius Wheeler Jr. and Henrietta Wheeler, Charles County Land Records, V#3:588, 

MSA.
187

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sterling plus £750 in “gold and silver currency” for the property, which lay about a mile 

from Haberdeventure. Stone paid another £1,000 in Maryland currency for the mill’s 

leasehold.69

Stone’s motives for acquiring the mill are undocumented. Lacking evidence, we can 

assume that Stone considered the mill a practical and potentially profitable investment. “Of 

all the industries and businesses in which planters engaged, milling was the most common.” In the eighteenth-century Chesapeake, gristmills were often for plantation use and 

to serve neighbors; their spread went hand-in-hand with the economic diversification of 

the area. A planter realized cost savings by raising and grinding his own grain, and the 

surplus could be sold to townspeople, the shipping trade, regional ironworks, or wherever 

there was demand.70

Some mills were constructed for more commercial uses in mind. George 

Washington outfitted his mill in 1770 with two sets of millstones, one of which was a pair of 

French buhr millstones to grind superfine flour, a higher grade of flour, for the export 

market in the West Indies. A mill built in Charles County near Newport on the Wicomico 

River in the 1760s had a bakehouse, presumably to make ship’s bread (biscuit) for maritime 

use. Stone’s mill may have been too far from navigable water to make ship’s biscuit a viable 

business, but it did have two sets of stones, raising the possibility that it could grind flour of 

higher and lesser quality.71

Mills attracted subsidiary industries but evidence for one at Thomas Stone’s mill, 

during his lifetime, is lacking. J. Richard Rivoire asserts that there was a forge for a blacksmith’s shop at Stone’s mill after 1790, but whether a forge existed there in Thomas Stone’s 

lifetime remains unverified. George Washington’s miller, to give another example, persuaded his employer to open a whiskey distillery in 1797. At Stone’s mill, the emphasis 

69 George Washington to Lund Washington, August 20, 1775, Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, 

Revolutionary War Series, 1:334 (quote); Thomas Stone to [James Hollyday?], May 20, 1776, in Smith, et al., 

eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 4:47 (quote). 

70 Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 422; Laura Croghan Kamoie, Irons in the Fire: The Business 

History of the Tayloe Family and Virginia’s Gentry, 1700–1860 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 

2007), 48 (quote). The establishment of grist mills in Charles County in the eighteenth century transformed the 

lives of females, who formerly had the task of grinding corn by hand and were freed up for other work (King, 

“Evolution to Revolution,” in Pathways to History, 18; Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. 

Walsh, Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland [Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1991], 71).

71 Pogue and White, George Washington’s Gristmill at Mount Vernon, 27; 1783 tax list information for the mill 

at Chandlers Hill, Appendix 7, “Thomas Stone in Tax Lists.” Robert Horner, a merchant who married a half-sister of Margaret Brown Stone, was a partner in a mill and bakehouse near Newport, Charles County, in the 1760s 

before falling into debt (Charles County Land Records O#3:694, S#3:220, G#3:57, cited in “Robert Horner 

(1718–73),” Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.

colonial-settlers-md-va.us). George Washington also took on risk as a mill owner in his flour sales. In 1772, 

Daniel Jenifer Adams sold Washington’s flour in the West Indies but did not pay Washington what Washington 

was owed. Thomas Stone arbitrated a resolution for the debt through the mortgage of land and an enslaved man 

to Washington in 1775 (Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, Revolutionary War Series, 1:334, 2:358, 

447–80, 3:114–17, 317–18). 
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appears to have been on the more traditional pursuits of raising corn, wheat, hogs, and 

cattle, though a subsidiary business cannot be ruled out. Thomas Ostro, the miller at 

Stone’s mill, owned shoemaking tools and “some shew lasts” when he died in 1796. Ostro 

supplemented his income through shoemaking. Stone prohibited at the mill two specific 

revenue-makers, drinking and gaming. As rural “neighborhood hubs,” mills were tempting 

sites for socializing and gambling.72

A hitherto overlooked sequence of events favored Stone taking control of a mill, 

which was located on a part of Chandlers Hills. In July 1775, Congress made an exception 

to the nonexportation agreement to allow American “produce” to be sold for arms and 

ammunition; the West Indies, a meat and grain importer, was the primary target of the 

action. “I think to grind up about 100 Barrels of Flour perhaps someone may want it, as the 

Congress have allowd it to be Exported for the purpose of getg Arms & Ammunition,” 

wrote Lund Washington, George Washington’s farm manager, in late 1775 as word spread 

of the exemption. Then, in September 1776, Henry Smith advertised the sale of land 

“within a mile of Port-Tobacco Town” with a water mill. At this point, Stone’s brother-inlaw, Gustavus Richard Brown, may have stepped in with funding.73

Political circumstances in 1776 gave Brown a ready buyer for one of his father’s 

plantations: Henry Riddell of Prince George’s County, native of Scotland and chief factor 

in Maryland for the Glasgow-based firm Glassford and Company, was purchasing land to 

shelter money from confiscation by Maryland’s state government. In October 1776 Riddell 

bought from Brown Middleton plantation at Nanjemoy plus an adjoining tract (939 acres 

in total) for £2,369 sterling, a large sum that few Marylanders could summon. A 1784 

advertisement described Middleton as sitting on a branch of Nanjemoy Creek, with a 

72 Rivoire, “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 27, 89; Pogue and White, George Washington’s 

Grist Mill at Mount Vernon, 45–55; Ridout, “Agricultural Buildings,” 196–98; Appendix 18, agreement between 

Walter Stone and Thomas Ostro (Osston), January 10, 1787; Kamoie, Irons in the Fire, 48 (quote); probate 

inventory of Thomas Ostro, July 19, 1796, proven 1797, Charles County Inventories 1790–1797: 418–19, MSA. 

Rivoire’s assertion about the presence of a forge at the mill appears to be based on the “extensive records” on the 

mill from the 1790s to the 1820s in the William Briscoe Stone Papers at Duke University and the Stone Family 

Papers at the Maryland Historical Society. Rivoire does not give specific citations from these manuscript 

collections. The other buildings at the mill site recorded the 1783 tax assessment, besides the mill, do not appear 

to have had industrial uses: “a small brick dwelling house,” an “indifferent” frame kitchen with a brick chimney, 

and the miller’s house (Rivoire, “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 89). Thompson makes 

sensitive comments about white male isolation in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake that would have made 

drinking and gambling at the mill tempting in “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 140–41.

73 Lund Washington to George Washington, December 3, 1775, in Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary 

War Series, 2: 480, in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology from Select Primary Sources”; Ford et al., eds., 

Journals of Continental Congress, 1774–1789, 2: 184–85; advertisement by Henry Smith, dated September 5, 

1776, in Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), October 22, 1776.
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frame “large dwelling house” with brick chimneys, four rooms to a floor, a frame kitchen 

with a brick chimney, a dairy, meat and cornhouses, a stable, two tobacco houses, two slave 

quarters, cherry trees in the orchard, and a “valuable and improvable marsh.”74

Brown’s father, Dr. Gustavus Brown (d. 1762), intended Middleton to provide 

lifetime support for his widow and, after her death, to descend to Gustavus Richard Brown 

and his male heirs “forever.” At about the time of Thomas Stone’s marriage to Margaret 

Brown, Gustavus Richard Brown, with the help of his new brother-in-law, docked the 

entail on Middleton through an action in common law called common recovery, an expensive legal procedure. Gustavus Richard Brown thereby held the land in fee simple, which 

allowed him to alienate it from the family line through sale or gift. Brown was thus poised 

to sell the valuable property when it suited him. He resurveyed the seven hundred acres 

and added a vacancy to create the 939-acre property called Middleton Resurveyed. On 

September 22, 1776, Maryland’s land office issued a patent to Brown for Middleton 

Resurveyed, a few weeks after Henry Smith began to advertise for the sale of the mill and its 

adjoining land and a month before Riddell’s purchase of the Brown family property.75

Brown may have pledged a portion of the proceeds of the sale of Middleton to his 

sister, Margaret, and her husband Thomas Stone, to make the acquisition of the mill and 

the arable land at Chandlers Hills and Welcome possible. The brothers-in-law shared real 

estate interests, as discussed in Chapter 2. There is also the possibility, though entirely 

speculative, that Brown gave some portion of the proceeds of the sale of Middleton to 

Stone to honor a clause in his father’s will that his sister Margaret was to have a marriage 

dowry of £300 sterling plus interest. The elder Dr. Brown asked his executors to raise that 

money from income on “bonds and securities” in Scotland; whether the executors 

74 Deed for Middleton, Gustavus Richard Brown to Henry Riddell, Charles County Land Records, October 30, 

1776, V#3:125; advertisement by Robert Fergusson, Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), September 23, 1784 

(quotes). Background on Riddell, who returned to Scotland during the Revolutionary War, can be found in 

Richard K. MacMaster and David C. Skaggs, “The Letterbooks of Alexander Hamilton, Piscataway Factor,” 

Maryland Historical Magazine 61 (June 1966): 153–54 and (December 1966): 310n. See also “Henry Riddell 

(1748–after 1777),” Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.

colonial-settlers-md-va.us. In 1783, Riddell’s successor as factor for Glassford and Company, Robert Fergusson, 

had possession of Middleton at Burditt’s Creek (1783 tax list; 1784 newspaper advertisement for the sale of 

Middleton, cited previously; will of Robert Fergusson in “Robert Ferguson (1740–1812),” Early Colonial Settlers 

of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us.

75 Gustavus Brown (d. 1762) entailed Middleton by granting the plantation to Gustavus Richard Brown “and the 

male heirs of his body, lawfully begotten, forever” (Will of Dr. Gustavus Brown, Sons of the Revolution in the 

State of Virginia Quarterly Magazine, 2:24–25); patent for Middleton Resurveyed, Patent Records BC & GW 

#51: 409, MSA S1195–732). In 1769, Thomas Stone and his brothers Frederick Stone and Daniel Jenifer Stone, 

were parties to a recovery of land by Gustavus Richard Brown and his mother, Margaret Brown, in Maryland’s 

Provincial Court (Provincial Court Land Records, DD#4, 1765–70, transcribed in Archives of Maryland, 

725:615–18). One downside of converting land from fee tail to fee simple was that English property law gave 

entailed land more protection from seizure by creditors (Priest, “The End of Entail”).
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followed this instruction is unknown. While there is no direct evidence that Thomas Stone 

and his wife were beneficiaries of the sale of Middleton plantation, neither has the payment 

of Margaret’s dowry been traced in any transaction.76

It is of course possible, too, that the timing of Middleton’s sale and Thomas Stone’s 

maneuvers to acquire the mill were entirely coincidental. As deep-pocketed Loyalist 

merchants left American shores with the approaching war, Brown may have been nervous 

about finding another buyer who could afford Middleton’s price tag. The argument here is 

that the timing of Brown’s sale of Middleton—within a month of Smith’s advertisement 

and two months before Stone began to acquire the land Smith advertised through a series 

of deeds—raises a flag about Brown’s intentions.

In any case, by the end of 1776, Thomas Stone initiated a multi-year process of 

acquiring the mill and the neighboring tracts of Chandlers Hills and Welcome with a lease. 

In December 1776, Stone, with his brother Walter as a witness, agreed to an initial annual 

rent of £60 “common currency” for the land and the hire of two enslaved women, Rachel 

and Lucy (Luce). In 1778, when a tenement became vacant, Thomas Stone would pay £80 

per year. The Stones made this lease agreement with the widow of Roger Smith and her 

next husband, Ignatius Wheeler, who resided in Harford County. Shortly thereafter, in 

1777, Thomas Stone signed a deed with another heir to the property, Henry Smith, whose 

advertisement for the land for sale in a Philadelphia newspaper may have caught Stone’s 

eye as he prepared to leave the city. After renewing the lease with the Wheelers in 1781, 

Stone bought out their interest in the property and purchased Rachael and Lucy in 1782.77

Another question raised by the timing of Stone’s acquisition of the mill is, Why was 

Father James Walton, S.J., Superior of the Jesuit mission at Newtown in St. Mary’s County, 

willing to sell the remaining thirteen years of an eighty-year lease of the twenty-acre mill 

site in 1782? A need for funds may be the answer. In 1773, Pope Clement XIV had issued a 

decree to suppress the Jesuit order. Though the extensive land- and slaveholdings of the 

Jesuit missions in Maryland were not subject to the pope’s confiscation because they were 

76 Will of Dr. Gustavus Brown, Sons of the Revolution in the State of Virginia Quarterly Magazine, 2: 27.

77 Charles County Land Records, V#3:539–42, MSA. The Stones entered into a lease agreement with Ignatius 

Wheeler of Harford County and his wife, Henrietta, who was formerly married to Roger Smith (d. 1768), the 

property’s owner in the 1750s and 1760s. At his death, Roger Smith gave his wife Henrietta a lifetime interest in 

his holdings of Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and the mill. He also gave her a lifetime interest in two enslaved 

families: one headed by Roger and Peg, who had seven children, and another headed by Jane, with two children. 

Rachel and Lucy, who Stone leased, were the only daughters of Roger and Peg recorded in wills and deeds. 

Control over Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and the enslaved who lived there was complicated by the fact that 

Henrietta (Smith) Wheeler survived her brother-in-law, Basil Smith, whom Roger had named as the heir and who 

died in 1774. Basil designated his son Henry as the heir to his brother’s property, but Henrietta and her next 

husband Ignatius Wheeler obviously maintained their interest in the estate; they entered into the lease agreement 

with Thomas Stone in 1776, renewed the lease in 1781, and sold their rights to the land to Stone in 1782. In 

1777, Stone paid Henry Smith, son and heir of Basil Smith, £526 sterling for 500 acres of Chandlers Hills and 

Welcome with “mills” and “mill lands,” and in 1782, Stone gave Ignatius Wheeler and his wife Henrietta (Smith) 

Wheeler £750 in gold and silver for Chandlers Hill, Welcome, Rachel, Lucy (Luce), and the mill and mill lands 

(Charles County Land Records V#3:205–6, 588–89, MSA; “Roger Smith (1716–68)” in Early Colonial Settlers 

of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us).
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held privately, and Catherine the Great of Russia had granted amnesty to the Jesuits, the 

order’s future in Maryland was in some doubt in 1782. Cash from the sale of the mill lease 

to Stone—Stone paid £1,000 in Maryland currency—may have been used to pay down 

debts owed by the Maryland mission to the English Provincial in London and put the order 

on a better financial footing for a re-organization that started the following year, in 1783.78

Walter Stone’s documented interest in the mill offers another clue to its financing. 

Walter witnessed the signing of the lease in 1776. He negotiated the miller’s contract in 

1786 and 1787, and he continued to have a relationship with the miller Thomas Ostro after 

Thomas Stone passed away. At the time of his own death in 1791, Walter owed Ostro 

money. It is possible that John Hoskins Stone and Walter Stone’s commercial firm were 

partners in the mill, but this is a matter for future investigation. Walter may have been 

acting in his own interest to learn the business of milling, which was an avenue to wealth.79

Thomas Stone took advantage of several factors—wartime demand for flour, a 

division of property among the Smith family, the money raised from the sale of Middleton, 

and financial uncertainty of the Jesuit mission in Maryland—to join the ranks of elite 

Chesapeake planters who owned mills. Mill ownership was not a prerequisite to membership among Maryland’s elite. Thomas Stone’s contemporary Edward Lloyd IV of Talbot 

County on the Eastern Shore, for example, sold his father’s mill after coming into his 

inheritance in 1770. Nonetheless Stone must have believed that having a mill under his 

control served his interests. Walter Stone’s involvement in the mill strongly suggests that 

the mill produced surplus flour on a commercial scale, beyond plantation use. Even if the 

mill’s production was on a smaller scale, its ownership increased Stone’s visibility in the 

Port Tobacco neighborhood. The mill would have drawn customers from around the area, 

78 Edwin W. Beitzell, The Jesuit Missions in St. Mary’s County, Maryland (Abell, MD: privately printed, 1959), 

chapter 4; Thomas Murphy, S.J., Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 

41–49; Charles County Land Records, V#3:590–91, MSA. As noted by Rivoire in his “Summary Report of 

Additional Research Findings,” the prominent Maryland Catholic Anthony Neale of Acquinsicke secured a lease 

of an existing mill in 1715 for his younger sons, Henry and Edward Neale (Charles County Land Records H#2:4, 

MSA). Notably, 1715 was the year that Maryland came under crown control after the conversion of the Fourth 

Lord Baltimore to Protestantism. Catholics were thereupon excluded from public office, which must have 

motivated Anthony to provide financial security for his younger sons. The mill was roughly half-way between 

Acquinsicke, which had a “mission chapel,” and St. Thomas Manor; both locations had a need for bread for Mass 

and to suit the taste of visiting priests. Joseph Zwinge, S.J., mentions Walton and the priests’ demand for bread in 

“The Jesuit Farms in Maryland: Facts and Anecdotes,” Woodstock Letters, 41 (1912): 70–73, 202–3, and passim. 

More on Walton appears in Beitzell, Jesuit Missions. On Acquinsicke, see the National Register of Historic 

Places Registration Form for Acquinsicke, CH-53, 1992. An eighty-year lease was standard procedure for a mill 

site on land not already owned by the mill’s builder, under the terms of a 1669 Maryland law on mills (John F. 

Hart, “The Maryland Mill Act, 1669–1766: Economic Policy and the Confiscatory Redistribution of Private 

Property,” American Journal of Legal History 39, no. 1 [January 1995]: 1–24).

79 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, November 24, 1785, January 15, 1786, Stone Family Papers, LC; Appendix 

18; will of Walter Stone, Charles County Will Book AF #11:47, transcribed in Petravage, “Historic Furnishings 

Report,” 34–35.
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as well as persons seeking company in a largely rural society. With the mill, Stone amplified 

Haberdeventure’s impact on local networks and positioned him, and his brother Walter, to 

take advantage of war-time markets for grain and flour.80

Domestic Production

The lack of functional names for the nine outbuildings listed in the 1783 tax list for 

Haberdeventure hinders our understanding of domestic production at the plantation, and 

is less fortunate still for understanding the wide range of work performed by free and 

enslaved residents on the property. Some amount of information on textile, dairy, and cider 

production is available from documentary evidence combined with secondary sources.

Haberdeventure employed women and possibly men in the production of cloth. As 

noted previously, the presence of five weaver’s slays, two flax wheels, and one woolen 

wheel at Haberdeventure in early 1788 indicates the production of locally made “country 

cloth.” When Thomas Stone gave his brother Michael Jenifer Stone “country linen” in 

1777, the cloth may very well have been made at Haberdeventure. Michael Jenifer Stone, in 

turn, may have supplied Thomas with cotton raised at the rented Nanjemoy plantation to 

weave with wool. “Sheep were scarce during the colonial period, especially in the South,” 

clothing historian Linda Baumgarten writes, “and so colonists mixed wool with other 

fibers to make it go further. Because of the differences in climate and in the labor force, 

northerners mixed wool with linen, producing linsey-woolsey, while southerners typically 

mixed it with cotton.”81

Chesapeake planters had stepped up their efforts to rely less on imported cloth 

during nonimportation in the 1760s and 1770s, but the weaning was difficult. In 1774, after 

the colonies prohibited all British manufactured goods from being imported except medicine, a factor for a Glasgow-based firm wrote to his employer from Piscataway, “The Lower 

Countys [i.e., Charles County and other parts of Southern Maryland]...think they cannot 

subsist without an importation of some articles such as Cottons, osnabrigs, coarse cloths, 

coarse white Linens, Nails, salt, and some shoes for some considerable time to come, not 

having materials and hands proper to manufacture these articles at present.” Demand was 

particularly strong for cheaper cloth to clothe servants and slaves, the factor related.82

80 Russo, “A Model Planter,” 67.

81 Appendix 4; Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 11 for “country linen” and p. 24 

showing “156 [pounds of?] cotton in seeds” in September 1780 and eighty pounds of cotton in July 1781; 

Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal, 96 (quote).

82 Alexander Hamilton to James Brown and Company, June 27, 1774, in Richard K. MacMaster and David C. 

Skaggs, eds., “The Letterbooks of Alexander Hamilton, Piscataway Factor,” Maryland Historical Magazine 61 

(1966): 165; Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal, 95–96. Provision of clothing for the enslaved was one of the 

greatest expenditures of enslavers’ households (Walsh, Motives of Profit, Pleasure, & Profit, 555n).
193

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Haberdeventure, as a large plantation, had the resources to temporarily expand 

domestic cloth production as political tensions with Great Britain rose. To give examples 

from other plantations, Charles Carroll of Annapolis built a weaving house at Doohoragen 

Manor in Anne Arundel County in 1770, staffed by male and female artisans. Carroll raised 

sheep to supply wool for the weavers. In 1781, Stone’s uncle Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer 

wrote to the steward of his Anne Arundel County plantation, “Are the Women spinning up 

the Wool?” The spinners included Mary Reed, a white housekeeper. If Reed left her position, as she threatened to do, “You may let her have some Cotton or Wool to Spin,” Jenifer 

directed. He added, “I should think that Kate and Nancy if kept close to Spinning might 

easily Spin the whole that we have to do.” Jenifer’s use of first names for Kate and Nancy 

suggests that they were enslaved women. Spinning was for all three women an occasional 

assignment, folded in with other work. Closer to Haberdeventure, William Hanson, in a 

1777 advertisement for his 530-acre dwelling plantation near Port Tobacco, touted the 

presence of a “spinning room” in a multi-purpose outbuilding plus a dwelling house for a 

weaver.83

Women up and down the social scale spun wool, linen, and cotton thread. For elite 

women like Margaret Stone, evidence of spinning is often indirect. For example, one 

interpretation of the presence of a linen wheel in the family rooms of a large planter on 

Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1766 is that the planter’s wife or her daughters spun flax in 

that space. At this particular plantation, three additional linen and woolen wheels in 

outbuildings are believed to be where enslaved women spun. In another example, Thomas 

Stone’s aunt, Betty Eden, a widow of a merchant-planter and a sister of Daniel of St. 

Thomas Jenifer, bequeathed “my spinning wheels” (of unspecified kind and quantity) to 

her niece, Thomas Stone’s sister, Betty Anne Eden. For Betty Eden, the spinning wheels 

were part of a group of practical furniture that she gave to her niece, namely chairs, tables, 

beds, and kitchen equipment, which conveys the everyday nature of spinning even for elite 

women. Spinning was a socially acceptable means of contributing to the household 

economy.84

Wives of tenants and plantation employees supplemented their incomes by spinning and weaving in addition to sewing and knitting. In the 1760s, two French women 

operated a spinning and weaving school at St. Thomas Manor near Port Tobacco, working 

with wool, cotton, and flax. Presumably their clientele were other free females interested in 

learning how to produce cloth to support their families. Michael Jenifer Stone, on his own 

account, paid women for making shirts, breeches, and other clothes for himself, his 

83 Hoffman with Mason, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland, 240–44, 340; Royal Gazette (New York), 

September 19, 1781; Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), August 14, 1777.

84 Walsh, Motives of Profit, Pleasure, and Profit, 565, wherein she discusses evidence of spinning at the plantation of Susanna and Richard Tilghman, who held sixty people in bondage at the time of Richard’s death in 1766; 

Betty Eden’s will, 1791, St. Mary’s County Wills JJ#2:7, MSA.
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nephew Alexander Scott, and a boy he held in bondage, Jesse, as well as for knitting stockings. Grace Stone paid others for making clothing for the people she claimed ownership of, 

too, though she also supplied the enslaved with cloth, thread, and buttons with the expectation that they would make their own clothes.85

White women also commonly supervised dairying at plantations. Appraisers at 

Haberdeventure in 1788 recorded three milk pans and five pots to store butter. (At Stone’s 

Annapolis house, a cow provided milk, but the town house lacked butter pots for storing its 

own butter.) Likely a dairy was among the nine outbuildings at Haberdeventure in 1783. 

Even so, the plantation could not always supply its own needs; in 1781, Thomas Stone 

acquired butter made at the rented Nanjemoy plantation from Michael Jenifer Stone.86

Cidering is likely but not certain at Haberdeventure. The 1783 tax list recorded the 

presence of apple and peach trees not at Haberdeventure, but at Moberly, a tract Stone 

owned on the other side of Port Tobacco Creek. Peach brandy on hand at the Stones’ 

Annapolis house in early 1788 may or may not have been made on his property. The rented 

Nanjemoy plantation produced cider, perry (pear cider), and brandy. Cider required less 

labor to produce than beer, and cider houses could be found throughout Tidewater to 

supply “thirsty households.”87

In summary, Charles County plantations were an important investment and revenue stream for Thomas Stone. Enslaved laborers produced a mix of tobacco, wheat, and 

corn, and raised livestock, much like at his father’s estate at Pointon Manor. During and 

after the war, Stone moved more forcefully into the grain and livestock market, as did 

George Washington and other wealthier planters in the Chesapeake, but he did not abandon tobacco. When Chandlers Hills, Welcome, and the Port Tobacco mill came up for sale 

85 Walsh, Motives of Profit, Pleasure, and Profit, 339, 547, 622; Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of 

Regret,” 40, 55, 101, 107–8; Joseph Zwinge, “The Jesuit Farms in Maryland: Facts and Anecdotes,” Woodstock 

Letters 41, no. 2 (1912): 218–19; Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, pp. 15, 20; 

Appendix 16. In 1781, Michael Jenifer Stone paid cash for the weaving of thirty-two yards of country cloth (day 

book, p. 25). At Mount Vernon, George Washington supplied some premade clothes to the several hundred of 

people who lived in slavery there. He also purchased thousands of needles and buttons plus thimbles and fabric 

for the enslaved to make clothing themselves. People in bondage also purchased and bartered for materials on 

their own (Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 177–82; Eleanor Breen, “Underpinning a 

Plantation: A Material Culture Approach to Consumerism at George Washington’s Mount Vernon,” in Material 

Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity, eds. Barbara J. Heath, Eleanor Breen, and Lori 

Lee [New York: Routledge, 2017]: 77–97). For an account of Martha Washington supervising sewing at Mount 

Vernon, see Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 39–40, 55.

86 Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 337–38, 468, 548; Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject 

of Regret,” 40, 92–95; Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, SMSC, pp. 13, 24. Rivoire lists 

dairies as a common outbuilding in Charles County based on his research in Orphans Court records (Homeplaces,

18). English-born Father Joseph Mosley, S.J., was dismissive of local dairy production in Southern Maryland. In 

a letter to a relative in his native country circa 1760, he blamed the heat: “as for cheese, we have none in this 

country. Butter is here too liquid, and cold meat too soon spoils” while traveling (Mosley to Mr. Mosley, undated, 

in Davitt ed., “Letters of Father Joseph Mosley,” 44–45). On butter making, see also Carr, Menard, and Walsh, 

Robert Cole’s World, 73–75.

87 Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 341 (quote); King in Pathways to History, eds. King, ArnoldLourie, and Shaffer, 18; Ridout, “Agricultural Buildings,” 203.
195

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in 1776, Stone moved quickly on the opportunity, possibly using funds from the sale of 

Middleton to finance the enterprise. Stone’s plantations were not self-sufficient. Stone 

outsourced blacksmithing to his brother, for example, and purchased food and clothing 

supplies as needed. Stone also rented property, like the Nanjemoy plantation, to serve his 

purposes. A small measure of cloth production occurred at Haberdeventure—not enough 

to replace imports over a sustained period of time. Without surviving plantation records, it 

is impossible to calculate how much wealth Thomas Stone derived from agriculture. Stone 

remained committed, though, to consolidating his control over land and retaining enslaved 

people who would presumably work on that land to bequeath to his son and principal heir. 

The American Revolutionary War encouraged his ambitions; the economic recession that 

followed challenged his financial standing.

Impact of the American Revolution 

Thomas Stone took advantage of opportunities that emerged during the American 

Revolutionary War to expand his landholdings and make new investments. After his 

purchase of the 442-acre core of Haberdeventure in 1770, Stone did not add to his landholdings until late 1776, when he initiated a multi-year process of acquiring control over 

the mill, Chandlers Hills, and Welcome from the heirs of Roger Smith and the cashstrapped Jesuit mission in Maryland. With the mill and an emphasis on grain and livestock 

farming on its adjacent land, Stone positioned himself to reap a profit from wartime 

demand for flour and other foodstuffs. 

Other acquisitions followed. Between 1776 and the Peace of Paris of 1783, Thomas 

Stone tripled the size of his landed estate by adding 1,085 acres to his initial 442-acre 1770 

purchase. His success in absorbing Bridget’s Delight and Simpson’s Delight, two tracts 

along the western edge of Stone’s original 442-acre purchase, for example, highlights the 

advantages he held by virtue of his legal expertise, social connections, and financial prudence. William Lindsay, the former occupant of Bridget’s Delight and Simpson’s Delight, 

died in 1779, indebted to merchants in England and Scotland. Largely by paying off the 

debts, some of which fell into the hands of Maryland’s commissioners for confiscated 

property, Stone gained title to the land. A few years after the war, Stone took advantage of 

an opportunity to diversify his financial portfolio by purchasing (in partnership with his 

uncle, Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer) part of a share in the Baltimore Ironworks Company 

held by the Loyalist Daniel Dulany. As argued previously, Gustavus Richard Brown’s 

advantageous sale of the Nanjemoy plantation Middleton to Scottish merchant Henry 
196

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Riddell, who was eager to buy land to shield his wealth from confiscation, may have provided Stone with cash or credit with which to purchase the mill and its valuable adjacent 

land.88

Stone pursued a conservative means of amassing wealth through the acquisition of 

land and capital investments like the mill and iron works. But his wealth did not shelter him 

completely from a postwar recession throughout the new United States. Maryland experienced a credit crisis from 1784 to 1787 due to a combination of high taxes to pay down war 

debt, a specie shortage, lower tobacco prices in 1785, and the terms of the Peace of Paris 

that allowed British creditors to claim debts in America. Debtors defaulted on payments to 

creditors (and sheriffs could not collect lawyer fees). The economic turmoil prompted a 

debtor’s riot in Charles County court in the summer of 1786, Maryland’s paper money 

debate in 1786–87 (see Chapter 1), and a national convention in May 1787 to revise the 

Articles of Confederation that led to the creation of the US Constitution.89

When the financial crisis hit, Stone had been active in Charles County real estate 

market. His acquisition in 1783 of a house and six lots in Annapolis, for which he had 

entered into a bond for £2,250 Maryland currency, compounded his financial situation 

during the postwar recession. Furnishing and maintaining an urban house and garden 

would have incurred additional annual expenses. Years later, Stone’s executors deemed his 

purchase of the house “not...beneficial” to Stone’s finances. In 1787, Alexander Contee 

Hanson, a man of high social standing like Stone and a Maryland General Court judge, 

estimated his living expenses in Annapolis at £565 a year, excluding rent and pay to hired 

88 See Appendix 20, “Documentation for Map of Charles County Land Owned by Thomas Stone and His Heirs, 

1770–1806,” for details of Stone’s acquisitions of Bridget’s Delight and Simpson’s Delight, as well as Distrest, 

formerly held by the Lindsay family. Daniel Dulany (1750–1824) was the son of Daniel Dulany Jr. (1722–97), a 

proprietary officeholder before the war. After the younger Daniel left for London in 1774, the state of Maryland 

confiscated his property in the province (Papenfuse, BDML, 1:287). Stone also purchased an enslaved woman, 

Jeane, from a confiscated estate (Charles County Land Records V#3:591–92, MSA). The record of Stone’s 

purchase of the quarter of one-tenth of a share in the Baltimore Ironworks Company can be found in Sales Book 

of Confiscated Property belonging to Daniel Dulany son of Daniel with the State of Maryland, folios 55–55A 

(Land Division), MSA, copy in Kremer Collection, SMSC.

89 On the credit crisis of 1784–87, see Chapter 1 and Lee, Price of Nationhood, chapter 8. George Washington, a 

far wealthier man than Thomas Stone, was “hurt...deeply” by the “credit contraction of 1784–87” (Walsh, 

“Slavery and Agriculture at Mount Vernon,” 61).
197

Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

servants. Hanson had a household of ten people, “half of whom are servants.” Stone’s 

urban household, which as of early 1788 included five enslaved servants, likely was of 

similar size.90

In 1785, Stone called in his debts, relying on his brothers Walter and Michael 

Jenifer Stone in Charles County to carry out much of the business of debt collection while 

Thomas resided in Annapolis. “I am in want of everything due me and must have it,” 

Thomas directed his brother Walter that April. Thomas’s letters had a more urgent tone as 

the end of the calendar year, a traditional time to settle debts, drew near and the price of 

tobacco dropped. “I want money exceedingly,” Thomas Stone wrote in late November. 

“Sue every body who owes me,” Thomas instructed. Unfortunately, the loss of Charles 

County court records from the 1780s, as well as the lack of detailed documentation of the 

settlement of his estate, hampers the identification of “every body” who owed Thomas 

Stone during this distressing period.91

A year earlier, in 1784, for reasons that are not well understood, Thomas had 

started to draw down his plantation assets, including people held in bondage. This effort 

continued in 1785. Thomas Stone advertised in the Maryland Gazette the auction of slaves, 

livestock, and tools at two separate events. In November 1784, Stone put up for sale, at his 

mill, an unknown number of enslaved men, women, and children, as well as horses, cattle, 

90 Anne Arundel Land Records, NH#11:295–97, 348–50, MSA; bill of complaint in Michael J. Stone and 

Gustavus R. Brown v. Daniel Jenifer, Chancery Court, Chancery Papers, case 4818, MSA, photocopy in Jean B. 

Lee Collection, Box 33, SMSC (quote). According to Stone’s executors, Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, from 

whom Stone purchased the Annapolis house and lots, agreed to an abatement of £250 on the house and then 

asked for the money with interest after Stone died. Stone’s executors, unable to pay the amount in cash, transferred Stone’s part share in the Baltimore Iron Works to Jenifer (ibid.). In a polemic about insufficient salaries for 

state officials published in the April 6, 1787, issue of the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser

(Baltimore), Alexander Hanson Contee listed expenses for food, drink, livestock feed, firewood, medical care, 

clothing, attending the General Court of the Eastern Shore twice a year, and “Pocket Money.” The estimate did 

not include the cost of furnishing a house and maintaining its garden. According to the inventory of the Stones’ 

house in Annapolis in early 1788, the moveable goods inside and around the house had a total value of £994. 

This figure excludes the £156 in total assessed value of five domestic servants, Ausmin (“Osmin”), Rachael and 

her son Jack, Betty, and Clare (Appendix 4, “Probate Inventories of the Estate of Thomas Stone”). 

91 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22, 1785 (quoted), April 27, 1785, November 24, 1785 (quoted), and 

Thomas Stone to “Walter Stone or Michael Jenifer Stone,” December 21, 1785 (quoted), Stone Family Papers, 

LC; Papenfuse, “Legislative Response to a Costly War,” on the fall of tobacco prices in 1785.

In letters to his brothers in 1785, Thomas Stone named nine people whom he was willing to sell or hire out: 

Carpenter Tom, Bob, Sall and her child, Violet, Ann, Heth, Guss, and Little Clare. Stone discouraged the sale of 

Violet, Ann, and Heth. See Chapter 3 and Appendix 9 for more information about these individuals.
198

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sheep, and plantation tools, on the generous terms of five-years credit (with interest). 

During court week in Port Tobacco in June 1785, Stone offered for sale “very valuable 

negroes”—specifically men, women, and boys—on shorter credit.92

Figure 30. Advertisement by Thomas Stone, Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), October 14, 1784. 

Courtesy of the Maryland State Archives.

Admittedly, the advertisements do not specifically state that the enslaved people, 

livestock, and tools up for sale in 1784 and 1785 were Thomas Stone’s property. As a lawyer 

and a male citizen, it is possible that Stone was the public-facing figure for a sale to benefit 

an indebted client or a female relative. Sometimes advertisers notified the public that they 

were selling a particular person’s estate. In the two advertisements in question, though, no 

other name is given besides that of the subscriber, Thomas Stone. 

Of relevance here, letters from late 1785 document Stone’s willingness to sell 

people whom he claimed ownership of at that time. Stone named Tom Triplet, Bob, Sall, 

and Gustavus Thomas (Guss) as people whom he was willing to sell privately. Another four 

he wished to hire out but not sell: Violette Thomas, Ann, Heth, and the younger Clare.93

92 Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), October 14, 1784, and June 9, 1785. At the second sale, Thomas Stone 

displayed more reluctance to extend credit, which is consistent with secondary sources on the contraction of 

credit during the postwar recession (Holton, “Did Democracy Cause the Recession that Led to the 

Constitution?”). Giving buyers less time to pay off their debt, Stone offered one year of credit for payment of half 

the purchase price, and two years for payment of the whole if buyers provided “bond and security for principal 

and interest.” The Charles County land records appear to bear no trace of the sales conducted at these auctions in 

1784 and 1785. For suggestive evidence that a young woman known as Nan was put up for sale at this time, see 

Chapter 3, footnote 63. 

93 For more information about these individuals, see Chapter 3 and Appendix 9.
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“I really do not know what to do with the negroes,” Stone wrote to his brothers in 

late 1785. After the two advertised sales of slaves, livestock, and plantation tools in 1784 

and 1785, Thomas Stone still had an unresolved, and currently unidentified, problem. 

Wearmouth, author of the 1988 Historic Resource Study of Haberdeventure, suggests that 

Stone’s interest in agriculture was declining at this time, after he moved his principal 

residence to Annapolis. Haberdeventure Plantation and its outlying properties had multiple stakeholders among his siblings, though, as outlined in Chapter 2. And these stakeholders would not have welcomed a decline in profits. Stone may have decided to rely more on 

tenants who supplied their own labor; Stone seemed to prefer that his tenants and employees hire people whom he held in bondage. By outsourcing day-to-day plantation management to tenants and employees, Thomas Stone could secure a steady income through rents 

and reduce the risk of personal losses through bad crops, low commodity prices, illness, 

self-emancipation, or other potential setbacks.94

Stone may have found himself with an oversupply of labor, as a number of large 

Chesapeake planters did in the 1770s and 1780s. By this time, most blacks in Tidewater 

Virginia and Maryland were native-born, and the demographics of the black population 

were more favorable to family life than had been the case generations earlier. Furthermore, 

the spread of grain and livestock farming reduced the need for year-round unskilled labor 

and boosted the supply of hirelings. “Mixed grain farming required fewer hands, especially 

fewer women and children, than did tobacco culture.” Men undertook the more skilled 

and more physically demanding tasks, such as cradling (mowing with a scythe), carting, 

and plowing. Extra hands could be hired on a short-term basis when labor demands in 

wheat farming peaked at harvest. Free whites of more modest means, eager to increase 

their estates, were ready buyers for the enslaved women and children whom larger planters 

sold. “Selling was the instinctive choice” among planters with extra hands in the late 

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.95

94 Thomas Stone to Michael Jenifer Stone, November 24, 1785 (in which Stone wrote that he wanted Thomas 

Ostro to hire people whom Stone claimed ownership of), and Thomas Stone to Walter or Michael Jenifer Stone, 

December 21, 1785 (for quote and reference to Ausmin being “with” the tenant or overseer Turner), Stone 

Family Papers, LC. As noted in Chapter 1, tenancy became increasingly common in older settled areas like 

Charles County in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Meanwhile slaveholding increased 

among a larger proportion of Charles County’s white population, part of a wider trend. “The early national 

tobacco South generally was more a slaveholding than a landowning region,” comments Sarson (“Landlessness 

and Tenancy,” 576). On the spread of slaveholding in Maryland after the war, see also Lee, Price of Nationhood, 

253, and Russo, “A Model Planter,” 85.

95 Jennifer Hull Dorsey, Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland (Ithaca, NY: 

Cornell University Press, 2011), 17, 18 (quote); Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 622; Morgan,

Slave Counterpoint, 170–75, 498–558; Russo, “A Model Planter.” Planters responded in various ways to the 

surplus of enslaved labor after the Revolutionary War. George Washington opted not to sell enslaved people 

(Walsh, “Slavery and Agriculture at Mount Vernon,” 72–73). Edward Lloyd IV and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, 

both of Maryland, did sell people whom they held in bondage (Russo, “A Model Planter”; Earle and Hoffman, 

“Genteel Erosion,” 291).
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Selling enslaved people was also a way to raise cash to pay off debts without reducing landholdings. Given that enslaved people were a highly important form of liquid wealth 

in the South, there is an overwhelming sense that Stone was making a financial choice in 

the moment and considered enslaved laborers (with the exception of Clare’s family) as 

goods to be bought or sold as economic times demanded. By putting slaves up for hire or 

sale in 1784 and 1785, Stone was making a temporary adjustment based on his current 

needs. His goal was to maintain the long-term viability of his estate for his family.96

In late 1786 or 1787, Thomas Stone shared with his younger brother Michael Jenifer 

Stone that his finances were not yet in the clear. Expressing sympathy for Michael’s indebtedness and encouraging him “to collect what is due to you,” Stone wrote, “[I] am not 

entirely rid of embarrassments of this kind at present. I am endeavouring however to 

contract my Affairs & will if possible settle every thing I owe this Year.” Stone continued, 

“It is in truth a Life of real misery to be indebted.” Years after Thomas’s death in October 

1787, Michael Jenifer Stone, as co-executor of Thomas’s estate, reflected that land was his 

brother’s most valuable asset. In a statement to Charles County court in 1807, Michael 

testified that Thomas’s estate could not afford to educate Thomas’s son Frederick “in the 

manner his...Father meant and contemplated,” and the legacies to Thomas’s daughters of 

£2,000 each “were never paid.” Michael explained that the debts owed to Thomas “produced much less” than Thomas anticipated, “and the Debts due from his estate were larger 

on account of many Fees which as a Lawyer he had received and which his Executors and 

representatives were compelled to return on account of unfinished business.” Thomas 

Stone’s land ownership was his most lasting legacy to his children; the executors were able 

to pay off Thomas’s debts by declining to pay the daughters their cash legacies and selling 

“a Considerable part of” Thomas Stone’s “large real estate.” Because of the executor’s 

efforts to preserve and build upon what remained of Thomas’s landholdings, Stone’s two 

surviving children, his daughters, were able to divide more than two thousand acres of 

Charles County land between them.97

96 On enslaved people as liquid wealth in British plantation societies, resources include Priest, “The End of 

Entail,” esp. 301–2, and Caitlin Rosenthal. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge: 

Harvard University Press, 2018). Stone made two substantial purchases shortly before advertising the June 1785 

auction. In March 1785, Stone paid £1,000 Maryland currency to William Harrison for the purchase of 277 acres 

of Hansonton, which Stone incorporated into the 1,077 acres of Haberdeventure that he surveyed that year 

(Charles County Land Records, Z#3: 131–32, MSA; 1787 patent for Haberdeventure). Two months later, Stone 

paid £3,150 in current money for the part share in the Baltimore Iron Works Company (Sales Book of 

Confiscated British Property, MSA). These actions may have put Stone in more straitened financial circumstances. 

97 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, undated (ca. 1786–87), The Rosenbach, Philadelphia; defendant’s statement in 

the handwriting of Michael Jenifer Stone, December 16, 1807, filed in Charles County court, December 22, 

1807, in Alexander Scott v. Michael Jenifer Stone et al., Chancery Papers, case number 4647, MSA. As of 1798, 

Margaret Stone and her husband held 1,000 acres in Charles County, and Mildred Stone and her husband 

controlled 1,075 acres (1798 Direct Tax, MSA). See also Appendix 20.
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Agriculture and Domestic Production at Haberdeventure, 1770–1787

Thomas Stone chose a slow and steady approach to wealth building by focusing on 

land ownership, planting, and the legal profession. He declined opportunities to join his 

brothers in merchant partnerships, considered a risky pursuit at the time, particularly 

before Maryland passed a bankruptcy law in 1787. Instead, Stone focused on achieving and 

maintaining landed gentry status. His motivations, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, 

included his birth order and a political philosophy that favored landed gentlemen over 

merchants as officeholders. Stone accumulated land, enslaved people to work the land, and 

a mill to take advantage of the grain and flour market. When a financial crisis hit after the 

war, Stone sought to sell or hire out enslaved people to meet the demands of creditors and 

retain other assets. Prudent estate management minimized, but did not eliminate, the risks 

that came with economic and political uncertainty.

203

CHAPTER FIVE

Thomas Stone as a

Lawyer and Politician

Thomas Stone’s “dye is cast” letter of May 20, 1776, hints at what would be, over 

time, a more marked push-and-pull between public service and private life. 

Equipped with a gentleman’s sense of obligation to serve in government if called 

upon, Stone had to carve out time for private concerns, often citing a need to attend to 

family or his law practice. A biographer of Stone, Jean B. Lee, asked, Why did Stone not end 

his law practice in order to allow more time for public office? If income was a motivation, 

as Lee suggests, the question might be asked the other way around: Why did Stone not end 

his public engagements in order to attend more fully to his law practice?1

This chapter will explore the complex reasons why Stone remained attached to 

both pursuits, despite the toll on his body and time away from family. Stone believed that as 

a lawyer, he served essential functions for the community, specifically for people with 

property. In the course of discussing Stone’s reputation in law within Maryland and the 

legal circles he operated in, the chapter will touch on the various means of earning an 

income as a lawyer. A sampling of Maryland court records confirms Stone’s own account 

of a heavy caseload in the state’s higher court in 1786, lending credence to his claims about 

demands upon his time. The last section will explore connections between law and government. While we lack a comprehensive analysis of his political interests, legislative contributions, and voting record, one clear theme in Stone’s public life is the protection of 

Maryland’s interests.2

Overview of Thomas Stone’s Legal and Political Career

After training in law in Annapolis, Thomas Stone in 1765 and 1766 qualified to appear 

before the bar in the courts of Baltimore County, Frederick County, Prince George’s 

County, and the Mayor’s Court of Annapolis in addition to his native county, Charles. 

Admission to colonial Maryland’s higher court, the Provincial Court in Annapolis, followed in 1768. Between 1709 and 1773, the Provincial Court heard civil cases involving 

1 Lee, “In Search of Thomas Stone,” 304.

2 Wearmouth’s 1988 HRS and Lee’s article, “In Search of Thomas Stone,” offer overviews of Thomas Stone’s 

political life. More work remains, though, to tease out Thomas Stone’s personal motivations to serve in government.
Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

204

more than £20 sterling or 5,000 pounds tobacco. Thereafter a law expanded the county 

court’s jurisdiction in civil cases up to £100 sterling or £30,000 pounds tobacco and 

allowed capital offenses against white men to be tried at the county level. Enslaved people 

had already been tried at the county level for capital offenses for about forty years. 

Decisions in the county courts could be appealed to the Provincial Court. The next highest 

court, the Court of Appeals, was made up of the governor and the upper house of the 

legislature before independence, and five appointed judges who held no other office after 

independence. In 1776, Maryland’s new state government replaced the Provincial Court 

with the General Court of the Western Shore, which met in Annapolis, and the General 

Court of the Eastern Shore, held in Easton, Talbot County.3

Thomas Stone was also active in chancery cases in courts of equity. Equity refers to 

“a system of jurisprudence collateral to, and in some respects independent of ‘law,’ the 

object of which is to render the administration of justice more complete, by affording relief 

where the courts of law are incompetent to give it, or to give it with effect, or by exercising 

certain branches of jurisdiction independent of them.” After 1763, Maryland’s county 

courts sat as a court of equity in cases up to 5,000 pounds of tobacco or £20 sterling. Above 

this amount, cases sent to the Chancery Court, in which the Chancellor (usually the governor) and the upper house sat as judges until 1776. The state constitution separated the 

offices of chancellor and governor.4

Two other courts in Maryland in Thomas Stone’s lifetime were the Prerogative 

Court and the Vice-Admiralty Court. The Prerogative Court, which handled wills, probate 

inventories, and estate administration during the colonial period, was replaced in 1777 by 

an Orphans’ Court and register of wills in each county. Admiralty courts were courts of 

civil law, not common law, administered by the British crown, and heard maritime cases. 

Based on current knowledge, Thomas Stone was not an advocate in a court of 

vice-admiralty.5

By the time Stone left Maryland to serve in the Second Continental Congress in 

Philadelphia in May 1775, he had been active as a lawyer for about a decade. In 1775, Stone 

stayed in Philadelphia for two two-month periods, but in 1776 he extended his stay from 

April until October. During that second year, Stone took part in the unfolding of the 

Declaration of Independence, served on the committee that drafted the Articles of 

Confederation, helped in managing troop supplies, and conducted other congressional 

3 Day, A Social Study of Lawyers in Maryland, 7–12, 640; “Thomas Stone” in Papenfuse, BDML, 2:787; 

Maryland State Archives Guide to Government Records, http://guide.msa.government.gov.

4 Ibid.; Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1823 (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1990), 236 (quote); Morris L. Radoff, Gust Skordas, and Phebe R. Jacobsen, The County 

Courthouses and Records of Maryland, Part Two: The Records (Annapolis, MD: Hall of Records Commission of 

the State of Maryland, 1963), 2.

5 Thomas Stone’s name does not appear in David R. Owen and Michael C. Tolley’s Courts of Admiralty in 

Colonial America: The Maryland Experience, 1634–1776 (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1995).
205

Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

business. Stone opted not to return until September 1778, despite his re-election by 

Maryland’s legislature in November 1776 and February 1777, because of “private affairs. “ 

Those “affairs” included the illness and death of his widowed mother, which was a turning 

point for the family.6

Elizabeth (Jenifer) Stone’s survival as a widow until 1776 had delayed the accounting 

and division of her deceased husband’s substantial estate. Upon her passing, her sons 

Thomas Stone and John Hoskins Stone, as co-administrators of David and Elizabeth Stone’s 

estate, undertook a final settlement and distribution. (The estate included a share held by 

their brother Daniel Jenifer Stone, who had died in Philadelphia in 1773.) As early as 

December 20, 1776, Michael Jenifer Stone’s day book records receipt from Thomas Stone of 

“sundry effects” delivered to him from the estate of his parents and deceased brother Daniel 

Jenifer Stone valued at £180.5.0 current money. Thomas Stone and John Hoskins Stone did 

not submit a final account of their parent’s estate to Charles County court, though, until 

June 1778. The account was in the estate’s favor by £1,208 current money, meaning that the 

heirs were not encumbered by debts. June 1778 was an especially busy month for Stone 

family affairs. Not only did Thomas and John Hoskins submit a final account of their parents’ estate, but Thomas also was involved in settling the estate of his elder half-brother and 

father’s principal heir, Samuel Stone, who had died in May. A division of enslaved people 

held in bondage by David and Elizabeth Stone followed in July 1778. After repeated requests 

for his presence, Stone finally returned to Congress in September.7

6 Burnett, Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, 2:l–li; Thomas Stone to the Maryland Assembly, 

February 22, 1777 (quote), Etting Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, with contextual information 

provided by Letters of Delegates to Congress, eds. Smith et al., 6:379n2, both of which can be viewed in 

Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology from Select Primary Sources.” In a letter to the Maryland congressional 

delegation of November 29, 1776, Maryland Council of Safety wrote, “The people are uneasy, we are informed, 

in Charles County. Mr Stone has wrote the Major. Mrs Stone is very unwell, so that he cannot attend congress at 

present” (Archives of Maryland, 12:491). “Mrs. Stone” could be a reference to Margaret Stone. It is also, 

possible, though, given that the Council heard the news secondhand, that there was some confusion. Stone’s 

mother, Elizabeth Stone, may have been the “Mrs. Stone” who was “unwell.” An entry in Michael J. Stone’s day 

book dated December 20, 1776, is the earliest known record of her death (Kremer Collection, SMSC, p. 10). 

Other references to the private concerns that kept Stone in Maryland in December 1776 include Charles Carroll 

of Carrollton to Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, December 7, 1776, in Burnett, Letters of Members of the 

Continental Congress, 2:172, and Maryland Council of Safety to Thomas Stone, December 12, 1776, Archives of 

Maryland, 12:524. Thomas Stone was a member of the committee that drafted the Articles of Confederation, 

chaired by John Dickinson (Wearmouth HRS [1988]; Lee, “In Search of Thomas Stone,” 312). 

7 Whether Elizabeth Stone disposed of a third of her deceased husband’s moveable estate (including enslaved 

people) during her widowhood, as she was entitled to by law, is not presently known. For an understanding of 

widow’s thirds and the pressures to retain land and slaves in the family, two resources are Lois Green Carr, 

“Inheritance in the Colonial Chesapeake,” esp. 169–70; Lee, “Land and Labor,” esp. 330. Evidence of Stone 

family estate settlements comes from the following sources: Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer Collection, 

SMSC, p. 10; final account of David Stone’s estate, June 9, 1778, Charles County Register of Wills, 1777–82, 

Wills AF#7:170–71, MSA; will of Samuel Stone Jr., May 14, 1778, proven May 26, 1778, Testamentary 

Proceedings 1778 AF#7:158, cited in Legislative History Project Biographical File for Michael Jenifer Stone, 

MSA SC 1138–1204; probate inventory of Samuel Stone, June 20, 1778, Charles County Register of Wills, 

1777–82, Wills AF#7:179, MSA; Appendix 6 of this HRS, settlement of Michael Jenifer Stone’s portion of the 

estate of David, Elizabeth, Daniel Jenifer Stone, July 15, 1778; and Charles Carroll of Carrollton to Charles 

Carroll Sr., May 24, 1778, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, eds. Smith et al., 9:741.
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

Estate settlements rewarded “scrupulous attention to detail.” The work involved 

close attention to accounts of monies owed and owing to the estate, the paying out of 

legacies, and clearing any number of legal hurdles. And the implications for families (and 

their dependents) could be profound. This, then, was one reason for Thomas Stone’s 

retreat from government service outside Maryland from late 1776 to mid-1778. Having 

been “totally engaged in publick Business” for two years, Stone wrote in early 1777, “my 

private affairs now call for some attention.”8

Nearly as soon as he returned to Congress, though, in September 1778, Stone’s 

concerns shifted to maintaining his law practice. After attending in Philadelphia for about 

two weeks, Stone resigned, “being convinced that I cannot attend Congress so constantly 

as every Delegate ought to do, without giving up the Practice of the law.” Stone did not 

return to Congress until 1784.9

In the intervening years, Stone seems to have preferred serving in Maryland’s upper 

house, the state senate, over attending Congress. Prior to the American Revolution, it 

would have been nearly impossible for a laboring lawyer like Stone to be appointed to the 

upper house. Wealth and leisure time to serve were as necessary as loyalty to the proprietary government. Stone’s uncle, Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, for example, who joined the 

Council in 1771, was “in easy Circumstances having by a successful Trade considerably 

increased his Paternal Fortune.” But Stone, like his contemporaries of more modest backgrounds who found themselves in the unprecedented position of forming governments 

composed of men in their own image, struggled to find his footing. In a 1782 letter to his 

brother Walter from Easton while attending the General Court of the Eastern Shore, Stone 

declined an unknown job offer from the US superintendent of finance, Robert Morris. 

Stone wrote that already “a great part of my time” is “devoted to the public Service” as a 

state senator. In fact, he was “so pressed by a Variety of Business,” including “private and 

Family affairs,” that he was considering “dropping part of my Law Business or declining all 

public engagements.” But “the latter I cannot well reconcile it to myself to do,” and Stone 

would rather draw down his law business. I “shall narrow my professional circuit,” he 

declared.10

8 Albert J. Schmidt, “The Country Attorney in Late Eighteenth-Century England: Benjamin Smith of Horbling,” 

Law and History Review 8 (Autumn 1990): 241 (quote); Thomas Stone to the Maryland Assembly, February 22, 

1777 (quote), Etting Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology 

from Select Primary Sources.”

9 Stone attended Congress from September 25 to October 8, 1778 (Burnett, Letters of Members of the 

Continental Congress, 3:liv). Thomas Stone wrote a letter of resignation to Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, October 

28, 1778, Roberts Collection, Haverford College, transcription in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of 

Primary Sources.” It would be worth examining what induced Stone to return to Congress after the conclusion of 

the war.

10 Horatio Sharpe to Hugh Hamersly, October 30, 1768, Archives of Md. 14:547; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, 

April 21, 1782, Stone Family Papers, LC. 
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

Saying he would draw down his business was undoubtedly easier than acting upon 

his words, for Stone was much in demand as a lawyer, as will be evident from later parts of 

this chapter. He also had to keep ahead of his expenses. In July 1782, not long after he 

declined Morris’s job offer, Stone purchased a mill, the mill’s lease, and adjoining land for 

£1,000 current money and £750 in gold and silver, respectively. A year later, Stone acquired 

an Annapolis townhouse with a bond for £2,250 current money. Stone took advantage of a 

quickening real estate market as the war came to a close.11

A major setback in Stone’s health in 1783 further complicated his position. Though 

Stone’s condition improved in the middle of the year, in December he (along with his wife) 

was confined at home at Haberdeventure. Stone did not witness General George 

Washington’s own declaration of a return to private life in December 1783, when Congress 

and the state legislature met in Annapolis. Poor health and bad road conditions were two 

reasons why Stone did not attend not Congress in early 1784, after his election to that body 

in late November 1783. Meanwhile, Stone also fell behind in his law practice.12

In a letter from his home in Charles County to Maryland’s governor of March 1784, 

Stone asked for the understanding of Maryland’s governor for Stone’s delay in attending 

Congress, which continued to hold session in Annapolis. Not only did Stone have difficulty 

extricating himself from Haberdeventure because of “those withstanding incidents which 

attend to country gentlemen when suddenly called from home.” Stone also had to meet a 

challenge from Prince George’s County Court, which threatened to discontinue suits due 

to Stone’s nonattendance. “Sickness has prevented me from attending this court for a year 

past,” Stone wrote, and out of concern for the “consequences” for those people “who have 

great amount of their property at stake,” Stone wanted to stop in Upper Marlborough, the 

seat of Prince George’s County, on his way to Annapolis to ask the court for a continuance. 

Then, Stone hoped to postpone his “eastern shore business,” too, in order to focus on 

service in Congress in April, when the General Court of the Eastern Shore was scheduled 

to meet. “After that,” he offered, “I shall become a citizen of Annapolis and will give every 

attention to public concerns which can be expected from me on which is in any degree 

consistent with my professional duty.” Stone’s intention to take up residence full-time in 

Annapolis sounds like a relief measure to reduce his travel; he had signed the deed for the 

11 Charles County Land Records V#3: 588–89, 590–91, MSA; Anne Arundel County Land Records NH#11:295–

97, MSA.

12 See Chapter 2 for evidence about a turn in Thomas Stone’s health in 1783. Thomas Stone told his brother 

Walter, who was then in Annapolis, that he and his wife were “very sick” in a letter of December 3, 1783, 

repository unknown, transcription in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Primary Sources.” The entry 

for “Thomas Stone” in Papenfuse, BDML, shows nonattendance in the state senate in November and December 

1783 (2:788). On Stone’s nonattendance in Congress in January 1784, see Letters of Delegates to Congress, eds. 

Smith et al., 21:255. Maryland’s House of Delegates had elected Stone to be one of Maryland’s congressional 

delegates on November 26, 1783 (Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, eds. Ford et al., 25:812). 
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

Annapolis townhouse some months before, after the sharpest point of his illness had 

passed. At the same time, Stone stated plainly to the governor that he remained committed 

to his law practice.13

Two years later, Stone still had not resolved how to keep up his obligations in 

various courts while maintaining his public duties. In November 1786, Charles County 

Court justices called out publicly Thomas Stone for his nonattendance, “whereby the 

docket has been loaded and swelled to a most enormous size.” In his response from 

Annapolis, Stone disputed the claim as a distortion. Stone attended “all” the county court 

meetings in 1785 and had attended in April and August (the June court having been postponed to this month to help tobacco growers affected by excessive rain). A trip to 

Annapolis on public business left Stone “fatigued and weakened” and unable to attend 

September court, and in November, when Charles County Court met again, Stone was tied 

up in Maryland’s General Court.14

The last word we have by Thomas Stone on the push-and-pull between public 

service and his law practice comes from an open letter in the Maryland Gazette to address 

Maryland’s paper currency debate of 1786–87. In his opening—intended to discount 

accusations that state senators intended to make their powers “independent” and “permanent” as suggested in recent newspaper publications—Stone conveyed that his physical 

weakness and commitment to his law practice made him a humble man: “I take the first 

opportunity, which ill health, and necessary attention to professional business, have admitted to reply.” Stone’s work ethic is evident from his testimony that at a meeting of state 

senators in Annapolis at Mann’s Tavern on a Sunday morning: “I drew up what appeared to 

be in substance conformable to the opinion of the senators.” Stone’s willingness to take 

notes and summarize the thoughts of the room conforms to an anonymous description of 

Stone in Sanderson’s 1824 biography: “He was most truly a perfect man of business; he 

would often take the pen, and commit to paper, all the necessary writings of the senate, and 

this he would do cheerfully, while the other members were amusing themselves with 

desultory conversation.” Stone appears to have been personally happy to serve in the 

upper house of the government of Maryland, a state whose interests he was dedicated to, 

13 Thomas Stone to William Paca, March 18, 1784 (misdated May 10, 1786 in the transcription in Jefferson’s 

“Thomas Stone: A Chronology from Select Primary Sources”), Haverford College. Stone also referred to his 

duties and responsibilities as a “country gentleman” and planter in the letter, complaining of the “severity” of the 

winter weather which “has thrown everything into such disorder” that loss was possible if the land was not 

carefully attended to until June. Stone eventually took his seat on March 26, 1784 (Letters of Delegates to 

Congress, eds. Smith et al., 21:434n). Later that year, Stone informed his friend James Monroe that Maryland’s 

lower house had not asked him to sit in Congress because he had made it known that he would decline out of 

“regard to my family” and for “those who have committed their private Affairs to my management as Counsel” 

(December 25, 1784, in Burnett, Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, 7:628). For an example of 

Thomas Stone’s professional work as a lawyer in 1784 in Prince George’s County, see Carson Gibb, “Captain 

Berry’s Will: Debauchery, Miscegenation, and Family Strife among Eighteenth-Century Gentry,” February 2000, 

MSA SC 5228. Gibb transcribed Stone’s petition to the Orphans’ Court on behalf of the family of Captain 

William Berry.

14 Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), December 14 and 28, 1786.
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

and apply his knowledge and skills. But this service also took a toll on his energies. 

Believing himself obliged, as a “man in my situation” to execute the “public trust,” Stone 

wrote that the senate seat was also “a burthen the greatest of my life,” requiring greater 

sacrifice of “quiet, health” and private “interest” than he could muster.15

What were Stone’s attractions to public office if it was a “burthen”? Why did he not 

devote his limited energies to his law practice? Stone denied having a hunger for high 

office. Instead he spoke of serving in the “public trust.” In his “dye is cast” letter of May 20, 

1776, Stone confessed that he would rather be in Maryland than sitting in a tumultuous 

Congress where outspoken men gained fame. “I had much rather be in the Province where 

perhaps I might be of some Service, tho even there I am not ambitious of elevated station.” 

Stone maintained this stance up to the end of his life, writing in 1787, “I neither profess 

power or influence, nor do I desire them.”16

Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, who remained close to his sister’s family even as he 

rose to the top of Maryland’s political ladder, was undoubtedly a model of public service 

for Thomas Stone and his brothers. In the spring of 1776, as Maryland held fast to its 

position to promote reconciliation with Britain, Stone wrote encouragingly to Jenifer, the 

president of Maryland’s acting executive body, the Council of Safety. “My Brothers are all 

Steady friends to your Council,” Stone assured him, “and we have not the least Doubt but 

when your Conduct comes to be tried by your Country you will receive it’s thanks for your 

great Attention to the publick Good.” Governor Horatio Sharpe some years before also 

praised Jenifer for his public service. In a letter to Lord Baltimore’s Secretary to recommend Jenifer for a proprietary revenue office, Sharpe described Stone’s uncle as “a Person 

generally known & well esteemed throughout the Province, his unexceptionable Conduct 

as a Justice of the Peace for many years, as a Member for some time of the Lower House of 

the Assembly, [and] as a Provincial Justice.” Sharpe noted Jenifer’s willingness to attend “as 

a Commissioner for running the Boundary Lines” between Maryland and Pennsylvania 

(which led to the creation of the Mason-Dixon line), “when Gentlemen enjoying very 

lucrative Offices excused themselves from the Trouble.” Sharpe implied that Jenifer 

absorbed the financial costs of serving in the public interest.17

15 “Thomas Stone to the Printers,” March 28, 1787, printed in the Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), April 5 and in 

the Maryland Journal (Baltimore) April 6, 1787, republished in Yazawa, Representative Government and the 

Revolution, 80–87 (quotes 80, 81, 87); Sanderson, Biography of the Signers, 9:331.

16 Thomas Stone to (James Hollyday?), May 20, 1776, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, eds. Smith et al., 

4:52 (quote); “Thomas Stone to the Printers,” March 28, 1787, in Yazawa, Representative Government and the 

Revolution, 87 (quote).

17 Thomas Stone to Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, April 24, 1776, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, eds. Smith 

et al., 3:581 (quote); Horatio Sharpe to Hugh Hamersly, October 30, 1768, Archives of Maryland, 14:547 (quote); 

Papenfuse, BDML, 2:485.
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

Stone, too, had private financial resources that enabled him to serve in public office 

with little or no compensation. What Stone called his “professional business”—the practice 

of law—gave him an income, but it also was a part of his identity. The large size of his law 

library hints at the considerable personal satisfaction that he derived from law. Books were 

also something he liked to spend his money on.

Law as a Profession in the Latter Half of the 

Eighteenth Century

Law was emerging as a profession on both sides of the British Atlantic over the course of 

the eighteenth century. Many gentlemen still read law as part of their education but did not 

derive an income from practicing law. Alan F. Day in his landmark work on lawyers in 

colonial Maryland provides a working definition of a professional lawyer as “anyone who 

maintained a regular and extensive practice and whose primary source of income was from 

the law.” In Thomas Stone’s generation, the most distinguished lawyers read widely in the 

law, and Stone’s possession of more than five hundred volumes on law at the time of his 

death suggests that he had an intellectual engagement with the subject that went far beyond 

its mechanics.18

English common law formed the basis of the law in colonial Maryland, as well as 

Virginia, and much of the work was formulaic and routine. Charles Hobson, editor of the 

Papers of John Marshall, explains how the common law’s “forms of action,” which had 

evolved in England over hundreds of years, governed courtroom procedures:

In this highly formalized system, the essential task of the lawyer was to fit the 

facts of his client’s case into one of the known formulas, which were embodied 

in the writs and pleadings. He had to decide whether this or that action would 

‘lie,’ that is, could be sustained, on a given set of facts. The entire proceedings 

from the initial writ to the execution of the judgment were governed by the 

rules of the action in which the plaintiff sued. A lawyer had to be thoroughly 

familiar with these rules or risk having his case dismissed.

Contemporaries cast aspersions on “pettifoggers” who navigated courtroom proceedings 

with a superficial legal knowledge. “Ephemeral insects of the law,” Thomas Jefferson wrote 

of the less well-trained lawyers who relied on a single publication, William Blackstone’s 

Commentaries on the Laws of England (London, 1765, 1775). “More than all the others,” 

18 Day, A Social Study of Lawyers in Maryland, 28–29. 
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

Jefferson wrote, Blackstone’s Commentaries had contributed “to the degeneracy of the 

legal science. A student finds there a smattering of everything, and his indolence easily 

persuades him that if he understands that book, he is master of the whole body of the law.”19

Thomas Stone’s possession of 530 volumes of books on law is one sign that Stone 

rose above the level of a “pettifogger.” Alan Day believed that the number of volumes in 

Stone’s law library was “unparalleled” in eighteenth-century Maryland. To give some sense 

of the scale of this collection, lawyer John Mercer of Stafford County, Virginia (d. 1768), 

who raised and tutored his nephew George Mason IV, had about 460 volumes on law out of 

a total collection of 1,200 volumes. This was on the upper end. More typical of a “large” law 

library in Maryland was the collection of James Key of Charles County (d. 1779), who had 

182 volumes on law comprised of 117 different titles. Alexander Contee Hanson (1749–

1806), son of John Hanson of Charles County, author of a compilation of Maryland laws, 

and Chancellor of Maryland after 1789, had ninety-seven law titles at his death.20

We can assume that Thomas Stone curated his collection and made it available to 

others. Bennie Brown, who studied John Mercer’s library, determined that Mercer’s 

“collection was never static. Mercer bought books, sold books, lent books, and got rid of 

obsolete books.” By Brown’s estimation, Mercer had about four hundred volumes out on 

loan at the time of his death. Book lending was a common practice, and it appears that 

people continued to borrow from Thomas Stone’s law library after Stone’s death. Stone’s 

executors notified the public in January 1788 that “many volumes of law tracts, and other 

books, late the property of Thomas Stone, Esq., are missing.” Thomas Jefferson 

19 “Introduction” in Charles F. Hobson, ed., Papers of John Marshall, Volume V: Selected Law Cases, 1784–

1800 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press Rotunda, 2014, accessed January 25, 2019), xxxiii (quote); 

Konig and Zuckert, eds., Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book, 9 (quote), citing a letter from Thomas Jefferson 

to John Tyler, June 17, 1812; Michael Miles, “‘A Haven for the Privileged’: Recruitment into the Profession of 

Attorney in England, 1709–1792,” Social History 11 (May 1986): 197–210. 

20 Petravage, “Historic Furnishings Report,” 21 (see also Appendix 4); Day, Social Study of Lawyers in 

Maryland, 61 (quote), 390–91, 466; Bennie Brown, “John Mercer, Merchant, Lawyer, Author, Book Collector,” 

in “Esteemed Bookes of Lawe” and the Legal Culture of Early Virginia, eds. Warren Billings and Brent Tarter

(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 95–112. For a list of James Key’s law library (1779), see 

Charles County Land Records, V#3:437–38, MSA.

Thomas Stone, besides the 530 volumes on law, had an additional 258 bound volumes (plus 121 unbound 

pamphlets) for a total of 788 volumes. George Wythe of Williamsburg, Virginia, who taught Greek, Latin, and 

law to such notables as Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, had a library of up to six hundred and fifty volumes 

at the time of his death (Wythe W. Holt. Jr. and the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “George Wythe [1726 or 

1727–1806],” in Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Wythe_George_1726_or_1727–1806, 

accessed September 17, 2020; Linda K. Tesar, “The Library Reveals the Man: George Wythe, Legal and 

Classical Scholar,” in “Esteemed Bookes of Lawe” and the Legal Culture of Early Virginia, eds. Warren Billings 

and Brent Tarter (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 113–36.
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

complained of the “losses I have sustained by lending my books,” but given the difficulties 

of acquiring and accessing books in the colonies, borrowing books was essential to the 

circulation of knowledge.21

Stone directed the executors of his estate to sell his books if needed to raise money 

to pay off debts. Presumably this occurred, as the executors had to dip into Stone’s real 

estate holdings in order to pay off debts, little trace of his library survives, and the law 

library made up 45 percent of the total value of Stone’s personal property in Annapolis 

(excluding the valuation of five enslaved people). Likely Stone himself shopped estate sales 

to acquire books. John Adams of Massachusetts, it is believed, purchased the basis of his 

legal library from an estate sale.22

The book publishing trade and the legal profession grew together in the eighteenth 

century. “Excepting perhaps clergymen, no group of Virginians or early Americans were as 

dependent on books as lawyers and judges,” comment the editors of a recent volume of 

essays on books and legal culture in colonial and early national Virginia. And while county 

courthouses had law and statute books on hand, local magistrates “seldom had any significant education in the law.” Disparities in legal education between the bench and bar at 

times challenged the deference that justices expected from their elevated position in the 

courtroom.23

Lawyers gained a competitive edge by keeping up with new law books out of 

England and having broad knowledge. Published trial reports, for example, helped lawyers 

in America keep up with English court rulings—which remained relevant in American 

courts well past independence—but the reports were known to be inaccurate, incomplete, 

and biased. “Good lawyers, like good scholars, understand that newer reference works may 

supplement earlier ones but never supercede them.” Thomas Jefferson’s legal commonplace book, for instance, documents different interpretations of common law over centuries. The commonplace book also shows a breadth of reading that his mentor, George 

Wythe, encouraged. With law becoming an increasingly crowded field, Jefferson counseled 

a relative interested in the profession, “It is superiority of knowledge which can alone lift 

21 Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), January 31, 1788; Brown, “John Mercer,” in “Esteemed Bookes of Lawe,” eds. 

Billings and Tarter, 107–8; Thomas Jefferson to John Garland Jefferson, June 11, 1790, in The Papers of Thomas 

Jefferson Digital Edition, Main Series, eds. McClure and Looney, 16:480; “Introduction,” in Sara Martin, ed. The 

Adams Papers Digital Edition, Legal Papers of John Adams (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 

Rotunda, 2008–19), 1:lxiv.

22 Introduction,” in The Adams Papers Digital Edition, Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. Martin, 1:lxxv. The 

only known book with a Thomas Stone provenance is a copy of A Practical Treatise on Fines and Recoveries

(London, 1780) inscribed “T:Stone 1785” at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. (documentation 

in the Jean B. Lee Collection, Box 1, Folder 31, SMSC; conversation with Amy Muraca, Chief of Cultural 

Resource Management for George Washington Birthplace National Monument and Thomas Stone National 

Historic Site, November 1, 2018). 

23 Billings and Tarter, eds., “Esteemed Bookes of Lawe,” 3 (quote), 4 (quote); Lounsbury, The Courthouses of 

Early Virginia, 134, 160–65; Mary Sarah Bilder, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the 

Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 119.
213

Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

you above the heads of your competitors, and ensure you success.” The editors of John 

Adams’s Legal Papers identify the “stock in trade” of a successful later eighteenth-century 

lawyer’s book collection: “a busy and prosperous lawyer would require a full collection of 

reports, treatises, abridgments, collections of precedents, and statute books.” Adams’s 

collection, the editors assert, went beyond this to support his “intellectual approach to the 

law,” but unfortunately his holdings have not been systematically studied.24

Knowledge and abilities went a long way to recommend a lawyer. Stone’s contemporary Samuel Chase (1741–1811), for example, is said to have had “crude manners and 

lack of social polish.” But his father, a clergyman, was well-educated and is believed to have 

given his son a solid early education. In recognition of Chase’s legal knowledge, Chase was 

named Chief Justice of Maryland’s General Court in 1791 and Associate Justice of the US 

Supreme Court in 1796. Another contemporary, Luther Martin (1748–1826), at least in his 

more advanced years, had an unkept appearance and wore old-fashioned clothes, according to jurist Roger B. Taney who knew him at the turn of the nineteenth century. Taney 

recalled Martin’s use of “uneducated” language. “For example, I have heard him say he 

cotch him, instead of catch him, and he sot down, instead of sat down, and many other 

words and phrases not much better.” And perhaps like Chase, Martin lacked table manners, being “coarse and unseemly at a dinner-table, in his manner of eating.” But the 

Princeton graduate who served thirty years as Maryland’s attorney general was “the 

acknowledged and undisputed head of the [legal] profession in Maryland.” Taney wrote 

that Martin was “a profound lawyer,” in part because of the “fulness of his legal knowledge.” Taney continues, Martin “had an iron memory, and forgot nothing that he had read; 

and he had read a great deal on every branch of the law.... His associates at the bar had...

great respect for his legal learning.” Thomas Stone appeared in court often with Martin, 

and they must have shared a love for discussing the fine points of a case in a neighboring 

tavern.25

Though much remains unknown about the functions and contents of Thomas 

Stone’s large law library (What pleasures did Stone derive from books? Did he collect 

works on government as well as on law? Did he tutor law students?), his possession of 530 

24 Kevin J. Hayes, “The Law Library of a Working Attorney: The Example of Patrick Henry,” in “Esteemed 

Bookes of Lawe” and the Legal Culture of Early Virginia, eds. Warren Billings and Brent Tarter (Charlottesville: 

University of Virginia Press, 2017), 143 (quote); Konig and Zuckert, eds., Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book, 

7–9; Thomas Jefferson to John Garland Jefferson, June 11, 1790, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital 

Edition, Main Series, eds. McClure and Looney, 16:480; “Introduction” in The Adams Papers Digital Edition, 

Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. Martin, 1:lxxv–lxxvii. 

25 James Haw et al., Stormy Patriot: The Life of Samuel Chase (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1980), 7 

(quote), 167–68, 178; Roger B. Taney, “Early Life and Education,” chapter 1 of Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger 

Brooke Taney, LL.D. (Baltimore: John Murphy & Co., 1876), 65–67 (quotes); Bill Kauffman, Forgotten 

Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008), 117. Unfortunately, 

Stormy Patriot, more concerned with Chase’s political life than his legal practice, offers little analysis of Chase’s 

law business. Of the lawyers documented in the sample of higher court records for this HRS, Luther Martin and 

Samuel Chase, along with Thomas Jennings, appeared most often with Thomas Stone as co-counsel or the 

opposing lawyer (Appendix 19).
214

Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

volumes on law at his death surely buttressed his high standing in legal circles in Maryland. 

Another intriguing component of his life as a lawyer is his litigation work. Without surviving account books of Thomas Stone’s legal business, we don’t know how much work Stone 

conducted inside relative to outside the courtroom. The sample of court records taken for 

this study strongly suggests that Stone remained active in litigation throughout his professional life, but even trial lawyers conducted a substantial amount of their business outside 

the courtroom. Often disputes were settled out of court through a series of “sequential 

moves.” A study of five counties in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia found that less than 

eight percent of “all suits on a writ of debt,” the most common of legal actions, “went to a 

jury trial.” About a third of defendants negotiated a settlement “immediately after being 

served with the initial capias,” a writ to take a defendant into custody. Another 17 percent 

who “chose to draw out the proceedings at least a little longer” dropped their complaint 

before entering a plea. Our images of Stone as a lawyer, then, should include Stone counseling his client on a courthouse porch or negotiating between parties in a tavern room.26

Some gentlemen knowledgeable about the law eschewed litigation, for various 

reasons. James Madison read law after college and again in 1783–85 but never went before 

the bar. Biographers have suggested that his shy personality may have been a factor. In 

1774, Madison’s friend Thomas Jefferson abandoned his law practice after seven years 

because it “had grown increasingly routine.” Jefferson continued to read law—broadly 

construed to include such texts as a 1767 London edition of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the 

Laws and a 1766 edition of Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments—to advance his thinking as a reform-minded lawmaker.27

Jefferson, we presume, could afford to stop his law practice. For others, “riding the 

circuit” to meet with clients at various county courthouses or providing counsel in the 

higher courts at Williamsburg or Annapolis (and, after 1781, Easton on Maryland’s Eastern 

Shore) offered an important stream of income and a higher public profile. Stone established a circuit in the mid-1760s that included Baltimore County, Frederick County, Prince 

George’s County, and Annapolis. When the General Courts of the Western and Eastern 

Shores replaced the Provincial Court in 1777, he extended his travel to Easton. Another 

circuit rider was John Adams, whose practice in Massachusetts reached its height in 1772–

73. Adams endured uncomfortable travel and lodging and long periods away from family. 

26 Turk McCleskey and James C. Squire, “Knowing When to Fold: Litigation as a Writ of Debt in MidEighteenth-Century Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 76 (July 2019): 509–44 (quotes 532, 533).

27 Mary Sarah Bilder, “James Madison, Law Student and Demi-Lawyer,” Law and History Review 28 (May 

2010): 389–449, esp. 404; Konig and Zuckert, eds., Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book, 5, 426n, 491n.
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

But “as his reputation increased...Adams began more and more to draw his business from 

the upper ranges of the social and financial order,” and we can presume the same occurred 

with Stone.28

Because lawyer fees for service in court were set by statute, the quantity of business 

mattered for a lawyer hoping to derive an income. Lawyers faced the additional prospect of 

nonpayment. In Maryland, sheriffs were responsible for collecting lawyer fees, and Stone 

at times had trouble obtaining from the local officials what was due. In early 1774, Thomas 

Stone wrote, “I have been almost ruined by the scandalous conduct of Sheriffs toward me.” 

Because sheriffs were not collecting his legal fees, Stone was in a compromised position of 

not being able to pay a debt and apologized to his creditor: “Ordinarily, no gentleman 

should have asked me twice for money owed him.” Twelve years later, Thomas Stone found 

himself in a similar situation. Stone needed cash from Charles County’s sheriff, Charles 

Mankin, to pay “Mr. Harrison” at the close of 1785. “Push Mankin,” Stone wrote to his 

brother and agent, Walter Stone, as the end of December drew near. Kent County’s sheriff 

also was delinquent in collecting fees due to Stone for services performed in 1785, a difficult year for debtors in Maryland.29

Out of bitter experience, attorney John Mercer of Virginia believed it folly to 

depend on a law practice for a cash income. Writing in 1767–68, not long after the Stamp 

Act temporarily halted court business, Mercer commented about his son James Mercer, 

“He has made a bad choice for a Livelihood in depending upon Lawyers fees” for cash. The 

combination of low fees set by statute and nonpayment compelled six Virginia lawyers, 

including Mercer’s son as well as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Stone’s brother-in-law 

Gustavus Scott, to submit a public notice in 1773 calling attention to the problem. For their 

practice in Virginia’s General Court in Williamsburg, the men asserted, “the Fees allowed 

by Law, if regularly paid, would barely compensate our incessant Labours, reimburse our 

Expenses, and the Losses incurred by Neglect of our private Affairs; yet even these 

28 For an evocative account of the arduousness of circuit riding on the eighteenth-century British American 

seaboard, see “Introduction,” in The Adams Papers Digital Edition, The Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. Martin 

1:lxii.

29 Day, Social Study of Lawyers in Maryland, 91; “Introduction,” in The Adams Papers Digital Edition, The 

Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. Martin; Thomas Stone to unknown, February 2, 1774, published in Autograph 

Letter and Autographs of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence in the Possession of George C. Thomas 

(Philadelphia, 1908), no page number, in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources”; 

Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, November 24 and December 21 (“push Mankin”), 1785, and January 15, 1786, in 

Stone Family Papers, LC; Thomas Stone to William Tilghman of Chestertown, February 26, 1787, repository not 

given, in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources.” Charles Mankin served as sheriff 

of Charles County from 1782 to 1785 (Lee, Price of Nationhood, 242). 
216

Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

Rewards, confessedly moderate, are withheld from us, in a great Proportion, by the unworthy Part of our Clients.” For gentlemen who practiced law to achieve financial independence, the dependence on others to honor their debts stirred unease.30

Despite the occasional difficulties in collecting pay, the practice of law was considered an acceptable profession up and down the social scale in colonial Maryland and 

Virginia. Day’s study of lawyers in early Maryland found that firstborn sons and only sons 

in wealthier families became lawyers, not just younger sons. Attitudes toward law appear to 

have reflected the development of the profession in eighteenth-century England, where 

“the profession of attorney was attracting a great many gentry families and prosperous 

‘middling people.’” These men from the better sort made being a lawyer respectable and 

genteel, asserts scholar Michael Miles. Miles also recognizes the higher premium placed on 

learning later in the century, offering financial rewards to those with “breadth of knowledge” to keep pace with economic development and increasing specialization.31

To offer a view from the top of Maryland’s social scale, Charles Carroll of 

Annapolis, one of Maryland’s wealthiest men, encouraged his only son, Charles Carroll of 

Carrollton, in 1759 to study law at the Inns of Court in London where the colony’s top 

lawyers trained. The younger Carroll did not relish the task, in part because colonial 

Maryland’s penal statutes prohibited Roman Catholics from being called to the bar outside 

of the chancery and prerogative courts. But the father believed in the importance of his son 

and heir’s knowledge of law as a means of maintaining and advancing the family’s social 

and political status without relying on capricious governments or self-interested men:

Many reasons ought to incline you to a close & serious Study of the Law, it is a 

shame for a Gent: to be ignorant of the Laws of his Country & to be dependent 

on ev’ry dirty Petty fogger whose Intent: it may be to lead him by such a dependance into endless difficulties—On the other hand how commendable is it for a 

Gent: of an Independant fortune not only not to stand in need of Mercenary 

Advisers but to be able to advise & assist his friends, Relations & Neighbours of 

all sorts.

The elder Carroll drew out his list of the uses of knowledge of the law, both for “benevolent” and profitable purposes. “Suppose you shd: be called upon to act in any publick 

Character,” Charles Carroll of Annapolis continued, “w[ha]t an awkward figure would you 

make without the knowledge of the Law either as a Legislator, Judge, or even an Arbitrator 

of differences among yr Neighbours & friends.” Acknowledging the colony’s restrictions 

30 Mulkearn, comp. and ed., George Mercer Papers, 193 (quote); “Notice Concerning Legal Fees,” May 20, 

1773, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, Main Series, McClure and Looney, eds., 1:98. The 

latter cites a relevant passage in Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 

1948), in which Malone reports that John Mercer sought to collect £10,000 in unpaid fees (123–24). For another 

perspective on John Mercer (1704–68), see Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 514–18.

31 Day, Social Study of Lawyers in Maryland, 41; Miles, “‘A Haven for the Privileged’, 201, 210 (quotes). Miles 

names the emerging fields of navigation law, trusteeship, and contracts.
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

on Roman Catholics to practice law, which were introduced with the establishment of royal 

government in 1692, Carroll wrote, “It is true as things stand now you are shut out from the 

Bar, but you are not debarred from acting as a Counsellor, & in that way many great fortunes have been made.” If, however, the son chose not “to make the Law a Profession in 

order to accumulate a fortune,” nevertheless “the knowledge of it is absolutely necessary to 

ev’ry private Gent: of fortune who has the least Idea of being Independant,” that is, able to 

serve as his own counsel.32

Charles Carroll of Annapolis alluded to the “great fortunes” that had been made 

from the practice of law. Thomas Jefferson advised a relative (and future son-in-law) 

Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. in 1787 on the financial benefits of studying law. Not only 

would Randolph’s service in government benefit from legal knowledge: “every political 

measure will for ever have an intimate connection with the laws of the land.” But also, 

Jefferson added, “it is a source of infinite comfort to reflect that under very change of 

fortune we have a resource in ourselves from which we may be able to derive a honourable 

subsistence. I would therefore propose not only the study, but the practice of the law.” 

Jefferson acknowledged the practical aspects of becoming a lawyer.33

Thomas Stone credited his law profession for providing him with a “comfortable 

estate” without having to rely on “chance” like commercial life did. His brother Michael 

Jenifer Stone, also a lawyer, called law “a sure but slow way to grow an estate.” How much 

did lawyers earn? Day warns in his study of early Maryland lawyers, “any endeavor to 

calculate earnings must remain highly tentative.” Colonial Maryland governor Horatio 

Sharpe lamented in 1768 that he had difficulty attracting qualified men to proprietary 

offices of profit because they could make more money practicing law. At the time, proprietary offices of profit could yield between one hundred and three hundred pounds a year. 

With law being so “lucrative,” lawyers also declined to sit as judges, who served without 

pay until 1776. Luther Martin, who was one of the men who appeared most often with 

Thomas Stone in the higher courts according to the sample of court records made for this 

HRS, wrote in his autobiography that he was making upward of a thousand pounds a year 

(Maryland currency) when the courts closed during the war. This would be on the high 

end; Day’s research suggests a range between £150 and £450 sterling for a lawyer of 

Thomas Stone’s caliber with an established practice. Withdrawing from litigation could 

result in a precipitous fall in income, to judge from an account given by Virginia lawyer 

John Mercer. In a letter to a son, Mercer wrote that his annual income in 1764 and 1765 was 

£1,548 and £961, respectively, but upon leaving his law practice in 1766 his income for the 

32 Charles Carroll of Annapolis to Charles Carroll of Carrollton, October 6, 1759, in Hoffman, ed., Dear Papa,

Dear Charley: The Periginations of a Revolutionary Aristocrat, 1:124, 129 (quote); Hoffman with Mason, 

Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland, xxiv, 67.

33 Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., July 6, 1787, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital 

Edition, Main Series, eds. McClure and Looney, 11:556.
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

year dropped to £108, which included £20 for writing “Opinions &c.” In 1767 he more 

than doubled his earnings from writing “Opinions &c,” but the yield of £49 was still far less 

than his active days in litigation. Mercer remained committed to “my practice (if it could be 

so called)” and a brewery enterprise to supplement his income from planting.34

Scattered evidence exists of Thomas Stone’s earnings from the law and of the 

various kinds of legal work he performed. A surviving receipt from 1785 shows that 

Maryland’s Intendant of Revenue, Thomas Stone’s uncle Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, paid 

Stone one hundred guineas (£105 sterling) to be a “Lawyer for the State” and to advise 

Jenifer “upon Questions of Law which occur in the Execution of his Office.” Jenifer paid 

Stone and Samuel Chase each the same amount to advise him on the thorny issue of confiscation of British estates. Some years before, in 1778, Charles Carroll of Carrollton retained 

Stone as a lawyer in his private affairs; we do not know how much Carroll paid Stone for 

his services. In addition to Stone, Carroll hired James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who briefly 

resided in Annapolis from 1777 to 1778. Carroll informed his father, “I think I have secured 

the two best lawyers that practice in our courts of law.” At the time, Carroll was preparing 

for an ejectment cause (a land dispute) against John Trammel, a Virginian who sought 

profit by surveying vacant land and renting it out. Trammel claimed land that Carroll 

occupied. Thomas Stone and Thomas Jennings were co-counsels for the defendant when 

John Trammel’s Lessee v. Arthur Nelson came before the Provincial Court in 1780. The jury 

found in favor of the plaintiff. The case’s development can be followed in the Carroll 

Papers and in Maryland Reports (1812).35

Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer and Charles Carroll of Carrollton were patrons of 

Thomas Stone’s legal work. Carroll even paid for Gustavus Scott, Thomas Stone’s brotherin-law and a well-established attorney in his own right, to assist Stone with a continuation 

of the Trammel case and other legal work. Patronage as a form of social networking 

34 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, July 16, 1782, Stone Family Papers, LC (quote); Michael Jenifer Stone to 

Walter Stone, March 12, 1782, Stone Family Papers, MS 406, MdHS (quote); Day, Social Study of Lawyers in 

Maryland, 89, 97–98, 114; Archives of Maryland, 14:522–23; Burnard, Creole Gentlemen, 46 (quote)–47; Luther 

Martin, Modern Gratitude...[Baltimore, 1802?], no. V, p. 150; John Mercer to George Mercer, December 22,

1767–January 28, 1768, in Mulkearn, comp. and ed., George Mercer Papers, 198. Day determined that 

Annapolis lawyer Stephen Bordley was making as much as £1,000 Maryland currency a year in fees in 1750, 

1756, and 1758 (table V-1). Day’s tally of James Hollyday’s earnings on three counties of the Eastern Shore show 

a more modest income outside the capital with totals between £288 and £366 between 1762 and 1765 (table V-3). 

Michael Jenifer Stone recorded his earnings from his early law practice in his day book in 1778, 1779, and 1780 

(Kremer Collection, SMSC). On September 1, 1779, M. J. Stone noted that he had made £816.10.0 “by the Law 

to this date” (p. 20).

35 Receipt of payment, Thomas Stone to Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, February 25, 1785, Stone Family Papers, 

LC, in Jefferson’s “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources”; Haw et al., Stormy Patriot, 135; 

Charles Carroll of Carrollton to Charles Carroll of Annapolis, May 17, 1778, in Hoffman, ed., Dear Papa, Dear 

Charley, 2:1125, 1127n2, 3:1184. On the Trammel case, see ibid., 2:570n6, 3:1336–38, and “John Trammell’s 

Lessee against Arthur Nelson,” in Thomas Harris Jr. and John McHenry, Maryland Reports, Being a Series of the 

Most Important Law Cases Argued and Determined in the General Court and Court of Appeals in the State of 

Maryland, from May 1780 to May, 1790, vol. 2 (New York, 1812), 4–9.
219

Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

reached a zenith in eighteenth-century England and its colonies, and lawyers were not 

immune. Michael Miles, writing about lawyers in eighteenth-century England, comments 

on the critical role of patronage in advancing a law practice.

The eighteenth-century attorneys never managed to free themselves completely 

from a dependence on patronage. This placed them in a paradoxical position. 

Whilst there certainly existed a rough code of honour among attorneys, which 

included a desire to make themselves impartial professionals who were paid 

only for their expertise, few of them were quite independent enough to offend 

the interests of powerful personages on whom they were dependent for much 

of their lucrative work.

In the 1770s and 1780s, Thomas Stone represented Maryland’s proprietor, the sixth Lord 

Baltimore, the proprietor’s family members, and proprietary appointees, all of whom had 

great wealth and influence. In 1773, for example, Thomas Stone was co-counsel for the 

defendant in Joseph Hanson Harrison v. Richard Lee, Jr., a high-profile case over proprietary fees. Annapolitans William Paca and Samuel Chase came to Port Tobacco to argue for 

the plaintiff. Lee, a sheriff by proprietary appointment, was the son of Richard Lee Sr., a 

council member, naval officer of North Potomac, and resident of Blenheim.36

Having the patronage of other powerful men like Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer and 

Charles Carroll of Carrollton almost certainly helped Thomas Stone attract business. In 

1785, a fellow state senator, Richard Ridgely, approached Thomas Stone with a request. 

Charles Ridgely of John (circa 1749–86) of Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties, a merchant, real estate developer, and farm owner, wanted Thomas Stone as his defense attorney 

at a murder trial. Details of the case have not been found; a different court case documents 

Stone’s fee as Ridgely’s attorney and mentions Ridgely’s acquittal. In order to pay Stone’s 

fee of £306.18.4 current money, Ridgely sold an unspecified number of enslaved people. 

Ridgely’s murder trial is the only known criminal case that Thomas Stone served as attorney for.37

A more routine part of Stone’s legal work was to collect debts for merchants. In 

1773, the year of Harrison v. Lee, Stone acquired more high-profile business in Charles 

County as a trustee for the firm of Barnes and Ridgate, based in Port Tobacco and London. 

When Barnes and Ridgate fell into bankruptcy during the credit contraction of 1772–73, 

36 Charles Carroll of Carrollton to Charles Carroll of Annapolis, May 24, 1781, in Hoffman, ed., Dear Papa,

Dear Charley, 3:1436; Miles, “‘A Haven for the Privileged,’” 209 (quote). Gustavus Scott (1753–1800), a 

surviving brother of Robert Scott, Catherine (Stone) Scott’s husband, trained in law at the Inns of Court in 

London and in 1777 married Margaret Caile of Dorchester Co., Maryland (ibid., 3:1438n1; Day, Social Study of 

Lawyers in Maryland, 617; Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, Presidential Series, 1:420; Papenfuse, 

BDML, 2:717–18). Jean H. Vivian contextualizes the Harrison v. Lee case in “The Poll Tax Controversy in 

Maryland, 1770–1776: A Case of Taxation with Representation,” Maryland Historical Magazine 71 (1976): 

151–76. Appendix 19, “Legal History Methods and Results,” shows that Stone’s repeat clients in 1779 included 

the lord proprietor or his wife, former agent and receiver general Rev. Bennet Allen, and in 1786 Richard Lee, 

former naval officer of North Potomac.

37 Papenfuse, BDML, 2:684–86; Chancery Court Record Book 29 (1794):420–21, MSA.
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

the firm named three trustees to satisfy debts, recover money owed to the firm, and pay 

salaried employees for a term of nine months. John Rogers (1723–89) of Prince George’s 

County was the more senior of the two attorneys named as trustees. The third man, Philip 

Richard Fendall (1734–1805), was clerk of Charles County Court, a proprietary appointment he inherited from his father. Fendall also undoubtedly had wealth to provide security 

for financial transactions; he was connected by birth and marriage to the Lee family at 

Blenheim. As compensation for their work, the trustees were to receive a ten percent 

commission for “their trouble and care,” plus payment for “Traveling Charges and 

Expences.” The 1773 power of attorney and deed of trust documents Barnes and Ridgate’s 

widespread land holdings in Charles County, totaling more than 1,200 acres; town lots in 

Port Tobacco, Benedict (in Charles County), Georgetown (Montgomery County), and 

Carrollsburg (Prince George’s County); plus eleven enslaved individuals. The trustees sold 

land, prosecuted sixty-two debt cases in Charles County court in 1774, and accepted 

mortgages in lieu of immediate payment.38

Mortgages continued to be drawn up in 1776 as a result of judgments in the trustees’ favor in Charles County Court. The trustees accepted enslaved people as securities for 

debt, as Maryland’s law allowed. For example, a planter in Charles County named John 

Haislip, who owed Barnes and Ridgate £43 plus interest, mortgaged an enslaved girl named 

Monica, age nine. By the terms of the mortgage, the girl would be held by the trustees for a 

year. If Haislip paid the amount owed within a year, he could recover Monica. Another 

planter, William Boarman Senior, who owed over £36 to the trustees, surrendered two 

adult enslaved men, George and Harry, ages thirty-two and twenty-two, as security for the 

debt.39

Documentation also survives of Stone’s pursuit of debts for Peter and Isaac Wikoff, 

merchants of Philadelphia. On a referral from William Paca, the Wikoffs in 1781 asked 

Stone to recover money from two St. Mary’s County residents, John Lucas and J. Allen 

Thomas, on protested bills of exchange. The bills were for £100 and £105 sterling, and the 

Wikoffs were eager to have the money “with all costs, Damages, & Interest until paid.” 

Sixteen months after engaging Stone, the Wikoffs wrote, “We want our money beyond 

38 Vivian, “The Poll Tax Controversy in Maryland”; Day, Social Study of Lawyers in Maryland, 95–96, 601; 

Owings, His Lordship’s Patronage, 150; power of attorney and deed to trust, John Rogers, Thomas Stone, and 

Philip Richard Fendall, trustees for John Barnes and Thomas How Ridgate, May 18, 1773, in Charles County 

Land Records, S#3:410–27, MSA; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 106–7; “Philip Richard Fendall (1734–1805),” 

Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us. To give an indication of Fendall’s high social standing, Fendall married second, between 1776 

and 1780, Elizabeth Steptoe Lee, widow of Philip Ludwell Lee (d. 1775) of Stratford Hall, Virginia (ibid.).

39 Recorded property sales by the trustees in Charles County Land Records include S#3:508–9 (October 9, 

1773), 532–33 (October 30, 1773), 547–49 (March 10, 1774), and 710 (March 13, 1775), MSA. Mortgages 

entered into by the trustees include S#3:700–1 (Haislip, February 24, 1775), V#3:51–52 (Boarman, December 

11, 1775), and 66–67 (January 15, 1776), MSA. Judgments in the March 1775 session of Charles County court 

resulted in four more mortgages, all recorded on February 6, 1776 (Charles County Land Records V#3:76–81, 

MSA). Based on these records, in Charles County, trustees pursued debts ranging from £7.18.6 (with interest 

from 1763) to £166.17.4 (V#3:66–67, 76–78, MSA).
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

expression, and therefore we beg in the most earnest manner, that you will take such 

measures as you may now think will recover it in the most expeditious way.” Paca, who 

resided in Annapolis and the Eastern Shore, may have believed Stone to be well-suited to 

prosecute commercial debts in Southern Maryland.40

Other documented legal work that Stone performed for unknown fees include 

drawing up a mortgage for George Mason IV, executing a deed for property in Charles 

County for George Washington, and recording Port Tobacco merchant Thomas How 

Ridgate’s answer in a Chancery suit (and undoubtedly advising his client during the process). Stone alluded to the costs of hiring a lawyer in a note to William Tilghman, a lawyer 

in Kent County, for whom or with whom he was preparing a case: “Dudley has sent his 

Papers but no money which you know is about as necessary as Papers to enable a Lawyer to 

file a long Chancery Bill.” Time was money.41

Thomas Stone’s Work as a Lawyer

Archival research in court records for this HRS was limited to the higher courts—that is, 

the Provincial Court before the war, and the General Courts of the Western and Eastern 

Shore established in 1777. Appendix 19, “Legal History Research Methods and Results,” 

discusses the reasons for this decision. Adopting a sampling method in order to detect 

patterns, every reference to Thomas Stone on the dockets of the Provincial Court and the 

General Courts of the Western and Eastern Shores in the selected years of 1771, 1779, and 

1786 was recorded in a spreadsheet and photographed.

As we might expect to see for a lawyer of Stone’s standing, Stone’s caseload in the 

higher courts increased over time. In September 1771, Stone pleaded 27 cases in the 

Provincial Court. Fifteen years later, Stone was counsel in 247 cases in a month in the 

General Court of the Western Shore, a nine-fold increase. Admittedly the docket was 

considerably heavier in (May) 1786 due to an economic crisis and the resumption of legal 

40 Peter and Isaac Wikoff to Thomas Stone, December 6, 1781, and April 29, 1783, William Cooke Papers, MS 

Collection 195, Box 1, MdHS, transcriptions in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary 

Sources”; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 8, 1783, in Stone Family Papers, LC. Robert F. Oaks mentions 

Peter and Isaac Wikoff in “Philadelphia Merchants and the First Continental Congress,” Pennsylvania History: A 

Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 40 (April 1973): 163. On the Wikoffs, see also Papers of George Washington 

Digital Edition, Diaries, 5:264n. 

41 Rutland, ed., Papers of George Mason, 3:1040; Abbott. ed., Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War 

Series, 3:115; answer of Thomas How Ridgate in the hand of Thomas Stone and signed “T:Stone for Deft.,” 

March 27, 1786, in Sarah and Elizabeth Doncastle v. Thomas How Ridgate et al., Chancery Court, Chancery 

Papers. no. 4334A, MSA; Thomas Stone to William Tilghman, February 26, 1787, repository not given, in 

Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources”; “William Tilghman (1756–1827)” in 

Papenfuse, BDML, 2:833–34. Jefferson’s “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources” also 

includes a transcription of an opinion by Stone dated February 2, 1786.
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

business after the war. (Unfortunately, in the course of this research, the total number of 

cases that a court heard during a term was not recorded.) Unmistakably, though, Stone had 

reached a mature stage in his law profession by 1786. 

Stone trained in law in Annapolis, and he returned to the city to join its circle of 

prominent resident lawyers later in life, in 1784. “Annapolis was considered as the place, of 

all others in [Maryland], where a man should study law, if he expected to attain eminence 

in his profession,” reflected Roger B. Taney, who read law under Jeremiah Townley Chase 

in the capital city. John Sanderson’s report that Thomas Stone studied law with Thomas 

Johnson (1732–1819) remains unconfirmed, but Forensic Club minutes from the early 

1760s record Stone mingling with other men who would have distinguished law practices 

based in Annapolis, including William Paca and Robert Alexander. A visitor in 1783 commented, “Annapolis is a nursery of the long robe. Its lawyers would do honour to any bar 

in Europe. The Governor, who is of this profession, has instituted a society composed of 

students of the law, who meet at his house, at stated periods, to discuss law questions and 

questions in political economy. He proposes the subject, sits as President, and gives judgment, in conjunction with his council, the Chancellor, the lawyers and the Judges of the 

General Court. When the debates are finished the company sup with the governor.” The 

governor whom the visitor was referring to was William Paca, a founding member of the 

Forensic Club in 1759 who maintained sociability among his fellow lawyers.42

Annapolis stood out as a regional hub for legal education and the legal profession 

for several reasons. Despite its small size, Maryland “ranked in the top three, along with 

South Carolina and Virginia, in the number of practitioners with legal training in London,” 

according to legal historian William E. Nelson. Nelson also observes that Maryland’s legal 

system was more centralized than in other colonies. Maryland’s colonial governors, who 

presided over the Court of Appeals, Provincial Court, and Chancery Court and appointed 

county justices, exerted more oversight over the lower courts than in Virginia, where “the 

county courts were dominated by local oligarchies that sometimes ignored the orders of 

the central, appellate court in Williamsburg and routinely advanced their own local interests.” Nelson posits that Maryland’s sensitivity to Roman Catholics as a religious minority 

may have encouraged strong central oversight over the legal system.43

As is consistent with the history of colonial Anglo American common law courts, 

debt cases made up a great part of Thomas Stone’s business in Maryland’s Provincial Court 

and General Court. In the sampling of court records for this project, out of 296 cases in 

which Thomas Stone served as counsel and the forms of action were identified, 125 (42 

42 Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, 58 (quote); Sanderson, Biography of the Signers to the Declaration of 

Independence, 9:329; Lee, The Price of Nationhood, 94; Jean B. Lee, “Thomas Stone (1743–87): An Unfinished 

Biography,” unpublished manuscript, 1995, chapter 2, pp. 12–13, SMSC; Papenfuse, In Pursuit of Profit, 142, 

quoting from a visitor’s account in the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, September 30, 1783.

43 William E. Nelson, “The Law of Colonial Maryland: Virginia without Its Grandeur,” American Journal of 

Legal History 54 (2014): 187, 188; Day, Social Study of Lawyers in Maryland, 7.
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Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

percent) were for debt. Nelson asserts that “the most important job of [colonial] 

Maryland’s courts...was to maintain lines of credit that kept the tobacco economy functioning by assisting creditors in the collection of their debts.” Documentation of Stone’s 

work as a trustee for the merchant firm Barnes and Ridgate of Port Tobacco when they fell 

into bankruptcy in 1773, and his pursuit of debtors in St. Mary’s County for the 

Philadelphia merchants Peter and Isaac Wikoff in the early 1780s, discussed previously, 

also shed light on his debt litigation business.44

Ejectment was the next most common form of action documented in the sample, 

making up 85 cases out of 296 for which the form of action was identified (29 percent). 

Ejectment was, at its root, a land dispute. “Ejectment originated as a personal action, a 

form of trespass, brought by a lessee ousted from his land before his lease expired,” explain 

the editors of The Papers of John Marshall. “In time, through an elaborate fiction, the 

remedy was extended to freeholders claiming title to land.” As noted previously, Thomas 

Stone’s assistance to Charles Carroll of Carrollton in an ejectment case in Frederick 

County, John Trammel’s Lessee v. Arthur Nelson, is relatively well documented. Stone 

delivered “very able and learned arguments” as counsel for the plaintiff in another ejectment case, John Kelly’s Lessee v. William T. Greenfield combined with John Kelly’s Lessee v. 

Henry G. Sothoron in the October 1785 term of the General Court of the Western Shore. 

The suit arose in St. Mary’s County.45

One of the more unexpected results of the archival research in court dockets was 

Thomas Stone’s presence as counsel in freedom suits by enslaved African Americans. 

Though Stone’s name was attached to a case, Eleanor Toogood v. Dr. Upton Scott of 1782, 

published in Harris and McHenry’s Maryland Reports as early as 1812, his participation in 

any freedom suit has hitherto not been explored in scholarship. Other lawyers of his 

generation in Maryland, such as Luther Martin and Samuel Chase, have received a little 

more attention for their appearance as lawyers in freedom suits. Martin, a slaveholder, 

pleaded cases on both sides of freedom suits, though Martin’s position as state attorney 

general complicates how we read this record. Chase, also a slaveholder, reportedly served 

44 Ibid., 169 (quote). On the prevalence of debt cases in Virginia, where English common law also shaped 

jurisprudence, see “Introduction,” in Papers of John Marshall, ed. Hobson, 5: xxxiv, and McCleskey and Squire, 

“Knowing When to Fold.”

45 “Introduction,” in Papers of John Marshall, ed. Hobson, 5: xxxvi (quote); Harris and McHenry, Maryland 

Reports (1812) 2:121–45, quote 128. The General Court of Western Shore docket of October 1785 confirms that 

Thomas Stone was counsel for the plaintiff in Kelly’s Lessee v. Greenfield and Kelly’s Lessee v. Sotheron. In a 

testament to the resonance of this case, Maryland Reports includes a statement by Alexander Contee Hanson, 

Chancellor of Maryland, on the case from 1801 (2:140–45).
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as counsel for Mary Butler, an enslaved woman who claimed descent from a seventeenth-century indentured white female servant known as “Irish Nell,” in Mary Butler v. 

Adam Craig (1787). (See Chapter 3 for more on Butler v. Craig.)46

By and large, lawyers in freedom suits before 1790 have received little attention 

except as names on a page. (William G. Thomas’s recent book, A Question of Freedom: The 

Families Who Challenged Slavery From the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War [2020], 

studies lawyers who were active after 1790.) The sampling of court records for this HRS 

revealed that Stone was counsel for the defense in five freedom suits in the May 1786 

session of the General Court of the Western Shore. During an examination of the May 1785 

docket for other purposes, Stone’s name was stumbled upon as the defense attorney in the 

freedom suits of fifteen individuals with the Toogood surname. Stone comes up in unexpected places, too, such as an essay about the descendants of an indentured servant, Mary 

Davis; Stone defended a slaveholder, Anthony Addison, in a petition for freedom by 

Rosamund Bentley, a great-granddaughter of Mary Davis, filed in Prince George’s County 

court in 1779.47

Records uncovered thus far show Stone serving as counsel for slaveholders, not for 

the enslaved. But this must not be interpreted as an indication that Stone opposed freedom 

suits altogether, for three reasons. One, a more comprehensive search of court records at 

the county level as well as in the higher courts may yet reveal that Stone represented plaintiffs in freedom suits. Legal historian William Thomas speculates that among the reasons a 

lawyer might represent a petitioner was a belief in the petitioner’s “legitimate claim to 

freedom” and the prospect of “a steady stream of fees” if the client won their freedom and 

a cascade of rulings in favor of family members followed. The mechanics of hiring a lawyer 

46 Both Martin and Chase were named Honorary Counsellors of the “Maryland Society for promoting the 

Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes and others unlawfully held in Bondage,” founded in 1789, 

two years after Stone’s death. The society barred slaveholders from membership (Kauffman, Forgotten Founder,

Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin, 92–93; Haw et al., Stormy Patriot: The Life of Samuel Chase, 103, 

161–62). Stormy Patriot mentions Chase manumitted one enslaved person from his household during his lifetime 

(161). At the time of his death in 1811, Chase held fifteen people in bondage (Day, Social Study of Lawyers, 

256). Martin “owned six slaves” in 1790 but apparently died with little property (Kauffman, Forgotten Founder,

Drunken Prophet, 93, and passim). 

47 Harris and McHenry, Maryland Reports (1812) 2:26–38; Courtney C. Hobson, “A Mother’s Inheritance: 

Women, Interracial Identity, and Emancipation in Maryland, 1664–1820,” January 2016, in Thomas et al, eds., O 

Say Can You See: Early Washington, DC, Law and Family, www.earlywashingtondc.org/stories/mothers_inheritance, accessed October 30, 2020. The docket for the October 1782 term of the General Court of the Western 

Shore confirms that Thomas Stone was counsel for the defense in Toogood v. Scott, as indicated in Maryland 

Reports. The Court of Appeals docket, however, does not confirm the account in Maryland Reports that Stone 

joined John Hall and Thomas Jennings as counsel for the appellant, Dr. Scott, in 1783. The freedom suits on the 

General Court of Western Shore docket in May 1786 in which Stone was counsel for the defense were the 

following: Matthew Butler v. Edward Eaglin [i.e., Edelin?] and Agnes Butler v. Edward Eaglin [i.e., Edelin?], 

from Charles County Court; Nancy Butler v. Nathaniel Ewing, from St. Mary’s County Court; and Alley Butler v. 

William Knott and William Lazarus Butler v. William Knott, from Montgomery County Court. A year earlier, 

Stone represented the defendants in the following suits: Dick Toogood, Rose Toogood, and Priss Toogood v. 

Philip Turner, from Charles County Court; Cato, Cate, Joshua, Poll, Jacob, Priss, Vachel, and Maria v. Joseph 

Warfield, from Charles County Court; Jacob v. Luke Warfield, from Charles County Court; Charles Toogood, 

Press Toogood, and Bett Toogood v. Samuel Fowler, from Charles County Court.
225

Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

is another factor to keep in mind about Stone’s apparently exclusive appearances as counsel for the defendant in freedom petitions. The availability of ready money to pay lawyer 

and courtroom fees, the legal merits of the case, and personal connections all played a part 

in securing representation. Also, Stone died before a surge of freedom suits came before 

Maryland’s courts in the 1790s.48

The geographic spread of Thomas Stone’s clients is another finding from the 

archival research for this HRS. Rather than having a practice limited to the interests of 

residents in Charles County and Annapolis, Stone represented clients from at least twelve 

different counties. Undoubtedly this experience increased Stone’s knowledge of 

Maryland’s affairs.

Law, Politics, and Family

Little about Thomas Stone’s legal philosophy can be gleaned from the court records sampled for this project. Charles E. Hobson, editor of the papers of John Marshall, cautions his 

readers, “Common law pleadings...are largely boilerplate productions that give little 

indication of the lawyer’s ability or of his legal strategy. Often, however, this is the only 

evidence we have of Marshall’s participation.” Chancery suits offer more promise: “a 

chancery suit file is more revealing than a common law file because all the testimony had to 

be reduced to writing; the pleadings also offer a more detailed and straightforward narration of the circumstances of the dispute.” A more comprehensive survey of Stone’s legal 

work should include his chancery suits.49

State legislative records offer more evidence about Stone’s interests in law, though 

we still lack his personal reflections. Stone helped draft a British property confiscation law 

for Maryland in 1780, for example, to break a deadlock between the Senate and House of 

Delegates. Stone also appears to have been a leader in shaping Maryland’s legal system in 

the postwar period. In January 1782, he prepared a Senate message to the House of 

Delegates on “an act relating to costs in criminal cases.” In December 1783, Stone wrote a 

long answer (one of his longest published compositions) to Charles Carroll of Carrollton’s 

protest of a “bill concerning the admission and qualification of attornies and solicitors.” To 

48 Thomas, A Question of Freedom, 63 (quotes). On the difficulty of pinpointing contemporary lawyers’ personal 

views on chattel slavery, see also Papenfuse, “From Recompense to Revolution,” esp. 59n55.

49 “Introduction” in Papers of John Marshall Digital Edition, ed. Hobson, 5:2 (quote).
226

Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

offer one other example of Stone’s involvement in legal reform at the state level, Stone 

served on a Senate committee that discussed a bill “to prevent frivolous appeals and writs 

of error, and improper removals of causes from the inferior to the superior courts.”50

Our better understanding of Thomas Stone’s family life at Haberdeventure and the 

pressures he put on himself to be an eminent (and a busy, active) lawyer tell us a great deal 

about what pulled Stone away from public service. What were his internal motivations for a 

life in the “public trust,” besides a genuine interest in Maryland’s welfare? Stone’s early law 

practice widened his network and increased his social profile, making him an attractive 

candidate for political office. His political rise advanced his law practice by further enlarging his circle and attracting clients. In his letters, though, Stone spoke of public service as a 

detriment to his law practice. This may have been just rhetoric, though he did seem torn 

between two constituencies: his clients and the citizens of Maryland. 

Stone believed that as a lawyer he provided an important community service to 

people with “property at stake.” In what ways did Stone’s identity as a lawyer inform his 

public service? As merchants, landowners, and other creditors were painfully aware, the 

legal business conducted inside courthouses and the nearby taverns was critical to keeping 

the economy moving. The suspension of court business during the Stamp Act Crisis of 

1765–67, Alan Day argues, was a political baptism for Stone’s generation. The years that 

Stone spent as a lawyer were bookended by debtor agitation of 1786, which led Charles 

County’s court to close. “Laws are penned by men of erudition,” Stone wrote in early 1787 

in a response to a debtor relief bill to emit paper currency; Stone would have included 

himself in this number, but he admitted that men were flawed, and that the laws they make 

“frequently are doubtful.”51

In what ways did Stone’s career in law and politics affect his family’s interests? Jean 

B. Lee speculates that Maryland’s legislature elected Stone as a delegate to Congress in 

1775, despite his lack of prior legislative service, to win over his uncle, Daniel of St. Thomas 

Jenifer, to the patriot side. Certainly Stone’s service in the higher levels of national and 

50 Lee, “In Search of Thomas Stone,” 305–6; Hoffman with Mason, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland, 

330–32; Votes and Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Maryland, November Session, 1781, January 9 and 

10, 1782 (pp. 20–21); Votes and Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Maryland, November Session, 1785, 

February 16, 1786 (p. 47). Charles Carroll of Carrollton delivered before the Senate his protest to “a bill concerning the admission and qualification of solicitors and attornies” on May 30, 1783. Thomas Stone submitted his 

answer on December 25, 1783, and the answer was entered in the Senate proceedings in early 1785 (Votes and 

Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Maryland, April Session, 1783 [p. 73–74], November Session, 1783 [p. 

29], November Session, 1784 [p. 44–49]. Stone’s answer to Carroll’s protest is over five pages of printed text 

long. 

51 Day, Social Study of Lawyers in Maryland, 123; Lee, Price of Nationhood, 232–36, on the agitation in Charles 

County court in June 1786; Thomas Stone to the Printers, March 28, 1787, in Yazawa, Representative 

Government and the Revolution, 86, 87 (quotes).
227

Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

state government fostered close ties with his powerful and influential uncle, whose patronage also lifted the fortunes of Stone’s brother, Walter, and likely helped the political careers 

of his other brothers, Michael Jenifer Stone and John Hoskins Stone.52

Stone also seems to have cultivated a reputation for estate management and finance. 

His success in co-administrating his parents’ estates without debt may have attracted 

clients such as Mrs. Judith Chase, a wealthy widow in Charles County. As noted earlier in 

this chapter, Philadelphia financier Robert Morris made an unknown job offer to Stone in 

1782, and Stone had a keen interest in Maryland’s paper money debate of 1786–87. During 

his service on Congress in 1784, Stone was involved in the development of the US Treasury 

Department.53

The law appears to have been Stone’s primary source of income, but he invested his 

earnings in real estate, such as land and a grist mill, that was itself a source of revenue. 

Stone also purchased a part of a share in the Baltimore Iron Works Company. Chapter 4 

argues that Stone’s position as a member of Congress in 1775–76 put him in a favorable 

position to learn about Congress’s exception to a nonexportation agreement that allowed 

the sale of grain to the West Indies. Stone soon thereafter initiated an expensive and somewhat risky acquisition of the grist mill, possibly paying for it in part from the proceeds of a 

sale of his brother-in-law’s plantation, Middleton. Stone likely helped craft the sophisticated legal document that docked the entail on Middleton in 1769, thus allowing Gustavus 

Richard Brown to sell it in fee simple.

How Stone’s legal and political career impacted enslaved communities at 

Haberdeventure is more difficult to ascertain. His travel to attend court and visit clients in 

other counties and his service in government in Annapolis and Philadelphia had implications for the management of the house and the plantation. George Washington, for example, when in residence at Mount Vernon arbitrated disputes between employees and 

enslaved laborers, and he had a vested interest in enslaved people’s well-being. The apparent lack of freedom suits filed against Stone during his lifetime suggests he was deemed a 

formidable defendant if brought to court, or he and his wife offered incentives to discourage the filing of petitions for freedom. Members of the Thomas family may have used this 

time to gather advice and lineage information to advance their claims at a more favorable 

time, which surfaced in the 1790s, after the deaths of Thomas and Margaret Stone.54

It is nearly impossible to assess whether Thomas Stone was any more or less committed to his law practice than to public service. The two pursuits complemented each 

other during the Revolutionary era, and by building Haberdeventure Stone announced his 

arrival as an urbane gentleman qualified for political leadership on the basis of his landed 

52 Lee, “In Search of Thomas Stone,” 297.

53 Ford et al., eds., Journals of the Continental Congress, 26: 356, 27:465, 472.

54 Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret,” 51–57.
228

Thomas Stone as a Lawyer and Politician 

wealth. Stone did seem sincere, though, in his words about the risks and sacrifices he made 

for the cause of American independence, including the loss of potential earnings from his 

law practice. Stone’s dynastic ambitions made it difficult for him to give up law. Despite 

investments in planting and milling, Stone must have believed that his law practice income 

was necessary to maintain the growth of his estate.
229

Conclusion with Suggestions for

Further Research

Thomas Stone entered the Revolutionary War as a member of Maryland’s 

Protestant native-born elite with an already impressive client list in his law 

business. Stone exited the war as a member of Maryland’s legislative upper house, 

a position that he may have been excluded from if Maryland had remained a colony 

because he lacked the leisure that Councilors typically possessed. Stone also served as a 

member of an American congress, but when he referred to “my Countrymen” in his letter 

of May 20, 1776, arguably he was referring to Marylanders. The architecture of 

Haberdeventure was a mix of local and cosmopolitan influences. The one-and-a-half-story 

form with gambrel roof reflected his family roots in Charles County, while the central 

passage and arc of the house and wings communicated knowledge of the wider world. 

Maintaining the Stone family’s social distinctions took work. Performances of gentility, the 

acquisition of land and business ventures, management of family affairs, and delegation of 

labor—in all these ways and more, Haberdeventure was an enterprise among multiple 

stakeholders. Stone’s parents, his siblings, and his brother-in-law, Gustavus Richard 

Brown, all had an interest in its stability and growth.

Members of the enslaved communities at and around Haberdeventure sought to 

take advantage of social, economic, and legal opportunities during the Revolutionary era, 

too. A woman known as Bet fled Stone’s household in Philadelphia in the fall of 1776, a 

time of tumult in the city. In 1797, Violette Thomas secured a pledge from Stone’s son-inlaw, John Moncure Daniel, a head of household at Haberdeventure, to manumit her in two 

years’ time. About one-third of the people named in Thomas Stone’s probate inventory of 

early 1788 plus Bet, who was not listed, are known to have sought or obtained their freedom by a variety of strategies, some making use of the courts that Stone knew so well. Most 

of the documentation for these efforts dates to the 1790s, but the possibility that their 

claims to freedom had roots in the pre-1787 era at Haberdeventure is strong. Likely 

Thomas and Margaret Stone were managing a revolution in their own household in the 

1770s and 1780s.

The remainder of this conclusion will discuss areas for future research that have 

come to light over the course of preparing this HRS. These fall under the broad categories 

of family, slavery, African American history, and global history.

Casting a larger net for information about Thomas Stone, his family members, and 

the people they held in bondage would undoubtedly yield more material. One shadowy 

presence is Thomas’s brother, Colonel John Hoskins Stone. He and Thomas may have 

shared investments in Charles County. Account books, particularly of Annapolis-based 
230

Conclusion with Suggestions for Further Research

firms, might tell us about purchases made by the Stone family and enslaved members of 

their households. Research on the Scott and Daniel families of Virginia might enrich our 

understanding of the Stone family and the people they held in bondage. Charles County 

court records of the 1760s and 1770s remain untapped.

Examining the men whom Thomas Stone was closest to in government would help 

round out our picture of him. At the top of the list would be Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, of 

whom no biography exists, and James Monroe, whose family remained friendly with 

Thomas Stone’s daughters and brother Michael Jenifer Stone after Thomas’s death. Also, 

the upcoming publications of the John Dickinson Writings Project would be worth a look 

for any mention of Thomas Stone, given Stone’s service on Dickinson’s committee for 

drafting the Articles of Confederation and the men’s reputations for having conservative 

views on independence.

Thomas Stone’s only son and principal heir, Frederick, died as a minor. The life of 

Alexander Scott, Thomas Stone’s nephew who considered Haberdeventure a home, gives 

us a glimpse of what Stone’s son’s life might have been like, had he survived. Land and slave 

ownership continued to define membership in Charles County’s elite into the nineteenth 

century. Alexander Scott began to set up his own household and legal practice in Charles 

County in 1794, after having lived in Philadelphia at the same time as Frederick. Land 

records show that Scott purchased over a thousand acres in Charles County in 1794 and 

1795, quickly establishing himself as a landowner. The Direct Federal Tax record of 1798 

gives us a glimpse of his wealth by the end of that decade. In addition to being a landowner, 

Scott held fifteen people in bondage, half of whom were considered of working age, 

between the ages of twelve and forty-nine. His mother’s slaveholdings, meanwhile, had 

grown from five people in 1783 to eight by 1798, likely all from births as most of the people 

she held in slavery in 1783 were women and children. 

Alexander Scott’s first political appointment was as a collector at Nanjemoy around 

1800–1801 during Thomas Jefferson’s administration. Scott sold land in Charles County by 

1805, though, including a parcel to Francis Newman, the owner of La Grange. Presumably 

it was at this time that he moved to Georgetown, where two African American men, Walter 

Thomas and Dennis Thomas, petitioned for their freedom, as documented in the website 

“O Say Can You See: Early Washington, DC, Law and Family” (www.earlywashingtondc.

org). Scott sued Walter Thomas’s and Dennis’s Thomas’s attorney, John Law, in Charles 

County Court for slander after Law accused Scott of, among other things, selling the men 

while their freedom petitions were before the US Circuit Court of the District of Columbia. 

The county court decided in Scott’s favor in 1819, but the affair damaged Scott’s political 

career. Scott died in 1838.1

1 McClure and Looney, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Main Series, 39:313; J.C.A. Stagg, ed., The 

Papers of James Madison Digital Edition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2010), 

Presidential Series, 5:506n, Retirement Series, 1:446, 2:278, 3:496, 595.
231

Conclusion with Suggestions for Further Research

Outstanding questions remain about the lives of the African Americans whose lives 

intersected with the Stone family. Can more of their origins be traced back in time through 

probate inventories, land records, and other documentation? What happened to those who 

emancipated themselves or attempted to do so, or who were manumitted by the Stone 

family? Might we find more people like Jack and Phil who resisted their new situations in 

Virginia? Where did Henry Semple and his wife Ibe live out their lives after their manumission by Stone’s daughters, and did their daughters, Kitty and Nancy, choose a different 

path? Do nineteenth-century records bear any trace of the people who were enslaved at 

Haberdeventure? While I could propose any number of avenues of investigation, more 

meaningful would be the research questions posed by descendants of the enslaved and by 

African American residents of Charles County and Southern Maryland.

233

Ap p e n d i x 1

Timeline of Thomas Stone, His Family, and Others 

with a Relationship to Haberdeventure

1743 Thomas Stone born at Poynton Manor, Durham Parish, Charles County, 

Maryland.

1751 Margaret Brown born at Rich Hill, Charles County, Maryland.

1763–65 Thomas Stone active in the Forensic Club in Annapolis, “an Assembly of 

young Gentlemen constituted for the improvement and Advancement of their 

Knowledge.”

1765 Thomas Stone admitted to the bar in the courts of Anne Arundel, Baltimore, 

Frederick, Prince George’s, and by 1766, Charles counties, as well as the 

Mayor’s Court of Annapolis.

1768 Thomas Stone admitted to the bar in Maryland’s Provincial Court.

1768 Believed to be the year that Thomas Stone, age twenty-five, and Margaret 

Brown, age seventeen, married.

1770 December Thomas Stone purchased the 442-acre core of Haberdeventure.

1771 Thomas and Margaret Stone’s first child, Margaret (Peggy), was born.

1772 February 27 A second child, Mildred, was born.

1773 March 18 David Stone, father of Thomas, died intestate at his home in Charles Co. His 

widow Elizabeth and sons Thomas and John Hoskins Stone were joint 

administrators of the estate.

1773 June Frederick Stone, brother of Thomas, died by June 12, when his will was 

recorded. Frederick named Thomas executor of his estate. 

1773 October 24 Daniel Jenifer Stone, brother of Thomas, died in Philadelphia, age twenty-one.

1773 Construction of the main house at Haberdeventure was completed or was 

nearly complete.

ca. 1773–75 Frederick, son of Thomas and Margaret (Brown) Stone, was born.

1774 June Thomas Stone was named one of eighteen members of Charles County’s first 

committee of correspondence, launching his public career. 

1774 November Charles County voters selected Thomas Stone as one of twelve county 

representatives to attend the first meeting of the Maryland Convention 

(Maryland’s provisional government) in Annapolis. Stone remained a 

member of the Convention until joining the Maryland Senate in 1777.

1775 Catherine Scott and her son, Alexander, by this time had joined the 

Haberdeventure household.

1775–76 Thomas Stone was one of several Maryland representatives in the Continental 

Congress, Philadelphia.

1776 ca. 

April–May

Margaret Stone likely was inoculated for smallpox upon her arrival in 

Philadelphia.

1776 October “Bet,” an enslaved African American woman, ran away from Stone’s 

Philadelphia household.

1776 December David Stone’s widow and Thomas Stone’s mother, Elizabeth (Jenifer), died by 

this date.

1777 After declining an appointment to Congress in February, Thomas Stone began 

what would be ten years of service as a Senator of the Western Shore.
234

Appendix 1

1778 May Samuel Stone, half-brother of Thomas and David Stone’s heir-at-law, died. He 

named Thomas executor of his will and guardian of his children.

1778 July Following a final account of David Stone’s estate (June 9), and an inventory of 

Samuel Stone’s estate (June 20), Thomas and John Hoskins Stone divided the 

enslaved people of their parents’ estate among heirs.

1778 September Thomas Stone served in Congress.

1781 September Walter Stone started clerkship in the Office of Finance, Philadelphia, under 

Robert Morris.

1782 Thomas Stone completed the purchase of a mill that he had formerly leased.

1783 May Thomas Stone purchased an Annapolis townhouse from Daniel of St. Thomas 

Jenifer.

1783 July Thomas Stone went to “the Springs” with his wife and Catherine Scott.

1784 March–May Thomas Stone attended Congress in Annapolis.

1784 Thomas Stone purchased a share in Baltimore Iron Works.

1784 Walter Stone now a Port Tobacco merchant.

1785 March Thomas Stone at Mount Vernon Conference on the navigation of the Potomac 

River.

1787 April 26 Thomas Stone declined an appointment to the Maryland delegation to revise 

the Articles of Confederation.

1787 June 3 Margaret Stone, age thirty-six, died in Annapolis.

1787 October 5 Thomas Stone, age forty-four, died in Alexandria, Virginia, awaiting passage 

to the West Indies. Michael Jenifer Stone and Gustavus Richard Brown 

became executors of his estate.

1791 September 6 Walter Stone died in Sweet Springs, Botetourt County, Virginia (now West 

Virginia).

1793 September 4 Frederick, son of Thomas and Margaret (Brown) Stone, around age eighteen, 

died in Princeton, New Jersey.

1793 October 18 Margaret and Mildred, daughters of Thomas and Margaret (Brown) Stone, 

manumitted Henry Semple, his wife Ibe, and their two daughters.

1793 November 

30

Margaret and Mildred Stone manumitted John. John may have been another 

name for Jack, born circa 1748.

1793 December 

15

Margaret Stone, age twenty-two, married Dr. John Moncure Daniel of 

Stafford County, Virginia.

1797 October Jack (Thomas) fled the household of Mildred (Stone) and her husband 

Travers Daniel near Stafford Courthouse, Virginia.

1798 Michael Jenifer Stone passed the administration of Thomas Stone’s estate to 

John Moncure Daniel and Travers Daniel.

1799 John Moncure Daniel manumitted Violette Thomas.

1799 Phil, whom Travers Daniel sold to an enslaver in Orange County, Virginia, was 

detained in Maryland.

1801 Catherine Scott died.

1808 Margaret (Stone) and Dr. Daniel had vacated Haberdeventure.

1808 or 1809 Grace Stone died, possibly at the home of Michael Jenifer Stone.

1809 Margaret (Stone) died.

1821 William Briscoe Stone moved to Haberdeventure.

1831 William Briscoe Stone and Gustavus Brown purchased property from 

Mildred Stone.

1837 Mildred Stone died.
235

Ap p e n d i x 2

Thomas Stone Lineage

Note: John Wearmouth’s “Thomas Stone (the Signer) Lineage,” an appendix in the 1988 HRS of 

Thomas Stone National Historic Site, is the source of information unless otherwise noted. In some 

cases, “facts” in Wearmouth’s lineage stand but documentation has been added.

William Stone (ca. 1603–ca. 1659/60) married Verlinda Graves and a son was

John Stone (ca. 1648–ca. 1697) and a son was

Thomas Stone (1677–1727) who married (1) Martha Hoskins (d. 1714) and (2) Katherine 

(Boughton) Thomas (d. 1750)1

David Stone (1709–73) was a son and principal heir of Thomas Stone (d. 1727). He married

(1) Sarah or Mary Hanson (d. by 1739)2 and their children were

Samuel (d. 1778)

David Jr.

Mary

Anne3

(2) Elizabeth Jenifer (d. by 1776)4 and their children were5

Frederick (d. 1773)

Thomas (1743–87) who married Margaret Eleanor Brown (1751–87)6

and their children were:

Margaret Eleanor (Peggy) (1771–1809), who on December 15, 1793, married 

Dr. John Moncure Daniel of Stafford Co., Va.7

1 “Thomas Stone (1677–1727)” and “Catharine Boughton (1676–1750)” in Early Colonial Settlers Early 

Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us.

2 Harry Wright Newman raised uncertainty about the identification of Thomas Stone’s first wife in The Stones 

of Poynton Manor (published by the author, 1937), 20. John Wearmouth provides the names “Sarah or Mary 

Hanson” in a lineage of Thomas Stone in the 1988 HRS.

3 Katherine Stone granted legacies to David Jr., Mary, and Anne, the younger children of her deceased husband, 

David Stone, in her will of 1750 (Prerogative Court, Wills, Liber 28, pp. 26–27, MSA).

4 Given two references to the estates of David, Elizabeth, and Daniel J. Stone, deceased, appearing in Michael 

Jenifer Stone’s day book at entries dated 1776 (one dated December 20), we learn that Elizabeth had died by the 

end of 1776, and not as late as 1778 as some secondary sources suggest (pp. 9, 10, Kremer Collection, SMSC). 

5 The birth order of the children of David and Elizabeth (Jenifer) Stone is not entirely certain. The order shown 

here is the order in which Frederick Stone named his siblings in his will of 1773 (Prerogative Court, Wills, Liber 

39, pp. 291–93, MSA). Frederick is believed to be the first born (Newman, The Stones of Poynton Manor, 20). 

6 Margaret (Brown) Stone’s birth year is deducted from her gravestone, which states that she was age 36 at 

death. 

7 J. Richard Rivoire cites Daniel family records for the marriage date (“Summary Report of Additional 

Research Findings,” 11).
236

Appendix 2

Mildred (Milly) (Feb. 27, 1772–1837), who between 1794 and 1797 married 

Travers Daniel of Stafford Co., Va.8

Frederick (ca. 1773–93)9

Catherine (d. 1801) who married Robert Scott of Prince William Co., Va. (b. 1749; by 

1772?)10

Alexander Scott (1770–1838) who married Elizabeth Blackwell of Fauquier Co., 

Va. (1781–1831) by 180211

John Hoskins (1745 or 1750–1804) who married Mary Couden of Annapolis12

Michael Jenifer (1747–1812) who married Mary (Polly) Hanson Briscoe in 179313

8 Mildred’s birth date is inscribed on her gravestone (Find Grave, www.findagrave.com/memorial/68602149/

mildred-daniel, accessed April 20, 2020). Rivoire cites Daniel family records for the 1791 marriage date 

(“Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 11). However, in an endnote, Rivoire admits contradictory 

evidence of a later marriage date (20n10). The name “Mildred Stone” appears in land records of 1793 and April 

1794 (Charles County Land Records, N#4: 165, 178, 182, MSA; patents for Addition to May Day Enlarged and 

Distrest Corrected, Patents IC#K:30, 41). By 1797, Mildred had married Travers Daniel and moved with her 

husband to Stafford County, Virginia (runaway notice by Travers Daniel Jr., for Jack, Maryland Gazette

[Annapolis], January 11, 1798). Confirming Mildred’s move out of Charles County, the 1798 Federal Direct Tax 

lists Charles County landowner Travers Daniel as a resident of Virginia (Archives of Maryland, 729:1382, MSA).

9 Frederick’s birth date is unrecorded, but we can approximate his birth year. Frederick was a minor when he 

died, according to a petition by his uncle and guardian, Michael Jenifer Stone, to the Orphans Court in December 

1798 (Charles County Orphans Court Proceedings, 1797–99, f. 443, MSA). Given that under common law, males 

entered their majority at the age of twenty-one, Frederick must have been born no earlier than twenty-one years 

before 1793, or 1772 (T. E. James, “The Age of Majority,” American Journal of Legal History, 4 [January 1960]: 

22–33). His sister Mildred was born in late February 1772, according to her gravestone (see note 8 above). Given 

even minimal spacing between births, Margaret (Brown) Stone must have given birth to Frederick in 1773 at the 

earliest. According to a death notice, Frederick was “about 18 years” old when he died, which suggests he could 

have been born as late as 1775 (Maryland Gazette [Annapolis], September 26, 1793).

10 Catherine (Stone) Scott died on March 20, 1801, according to her son’s bill of complaint in Alexander Scott v. 

Michael Jenifer Stone et al., Chancery Court, Chancery Papers, case 4647, MSA. Robert Scott’s birth year is 

taken from “Robert Scott, 1749–83,” Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck 

Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us. On questions about his death date, see Chapter 2.

11 Alexander Scott came of age on August 7, 1791, according to his bill of complaint in Alexander Scott v. 

Michael Jenifer Stone et al., Chancery Court, Chancery Papers, case 4647, MSA. References to Alexander in his 

father’s will, written in December 1770, confirm that Alexander was born by 1770 (“Robert Scott, 1749–83,” 

Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us; Stella Pickett Hardy, “Blackwell Family,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 23 

[January 1915]: 103). An importation record of four enslaved Virginia residents whom Alexander Scott held by 

marriage from 1802 attests to his married status by that date (Charles County Land Records, IB#5:247–8, MSA). 

Alexander’s death date of 1838 comes from Stagg, ed., Papers of James Madison Digital Edition, Retirement 

Series, 1:446.

12 “John Hoskins Stone,” in Papenfuse, BDML, 2:784. According to the entry in BDML, John Hoskins Stone was 

born in 1750. However, his brother Frederick’s last will and testament named John Hoskins Stone before Michael 

Jenifer Stone, lending some credence to the assertion in Newman’s genealogy of the Stone family that John 

Hoskins was, in fact, senior to Michael Jenifer Stone and born in 1745. Another indication that John Hoskins 

Stone was senior to Michael Jenifer Stone is that John Hoskins Stone was co-administrator with Thomas Stone 

on their father’s estate (Newman, The Stones of Poynton Manor, 28; final account of David Stone’s estate, 1778, 

Charles County Wills AF 7:170–71, MSA).

13 Michael Jenifer Stone married Mary (Polly) Hanson Briscoe on March 28, 1793, according to a typed record 

of Michael Jenifer Stone’s family in Box 1, Folder 35, Kremer Collection, SMSC, and Rivoire, “Summary 

Report of Additional Research Findings,” 7.
237

Appendix 2

Daniel Jenifer (ca. 1752–73)14

Elizabeth Ann (Betty Ann) (d. after 1805) who married Townsend Eden of St. 

Mary’s County, Md. (d. 1787)15

Walter (d. 1791)

Grace (d. 1809)

14 A death notice for Daniel Jenifer Stone in the Pennsylvania Chronicle (Philadelphia), November 1, 1773, 

stated that he died at the age of twenty-one.

15 Betty Ann (Stone) Eden’s death date is unknown. A letter by Betty Ann Eden to Michael Jenifer Stone, dated 

August 22, 1805, survives in the Stone Family Papers, MS 406, MdHS.

239

Ap p e n d i x 3

Thomas Stone’s Will and Codicil, 1787

“In the name of God Amen. I Thomas Stone being in a weak State of health and desirous of 

directing the disposition of my Estate and other matters do make this my last Will & Testament. 

Imprimis I desire that my body may be buried at Haberdeventure near to that of my dear Wife 

according to rites of the Protestant Church. Item I desire that all my just debts be paid in doing 

which my Executors will carefully examine the justice of the demands as I have few debts due 

from me except what are upon Bonds. Item I give and bequeath to my dear daughter Margaret 

Stone Negroes Bob Violet & all her children & Bett also the sum of two thousand pounds 

Current money to be paid as hereafter directed six silver table spoons & six tea spoons one best 

bed & furniture my chariot & carriage horses and one half her dear mothers clothes. Item I give 

and bequeath to my dear daughter Milly Stone Negroes Charity Phill young clear1 & Sall also 

two thousand pounds current money, six silver Table spoons six silver Tea spoons one best bed 

& furniture my clock, riding chair best mahogany Chairs one good chair horse & household 

furniture to the amount of fifty pounds Current money. Item to raise money to pay my daughters portions & to discharge my debts, if the debts due me are not sufficient, I direct that my 

house in Annapolis the lotts on the south side of the street my share of the Baltimore Ironworks, 

Books & furniture (except pictures) be sold by my Executors or the survivor of them or such of 

them as will Act, and that the money arising therefrom be applied to these purposes and if this 

is not sufficient that such other part of my personal or real Estate as my Executors shall think 

proper be sold for these purposes. Item all the rest and residue of my Estate real and personal 

except the legacy after mentioned I give & bequeath to my son Frederick to him and his heirs 

forever. Item I give to my brother Michael J. Stone what [he] owes me except what is due for 

Negroe Harry bought of Samuel Stones Estate & constitute him Executor of that Estate. Item. I 

constitute & appoint my Brother Michael J. Stone Guardian to my son Frederick & request his 

particular care of him. Lastly, I constitute my brother Michael J. Stone & my friend Doctr. Gust. 

Rd. Brown Executors of this my last Will & Testament & revoke all former Wills.” 

Witnesses: Stephen West, Sophia West, and Stephen West Jr. 

Proven in Charles County, October 9, 1787, by executors Michael J. Stone and Gustavus 

Richard Brown as the last will and testament of Thomas Stone.

Proven in Charles County, December 10, 1787, by witness Sophia West. 

“A Codicil to my last Will and Testament. It is my Will & desire that my daughters Peggy & Milly 

always have a right before marriage to reside at the House of Haberdeventure supporting 

themselves out of their own Estates except board while they live at Haberdeventure which they 

are to have out of the profits of the Income of the Estate left to Frederick if it will afford the 

same leaving sufficient for his maintenance & education which is to be determined by Brother 

Michl. J. Stone. It is my Will & desire that only the Interest or income of the Estates left my 

1 Thus in manuscript. Likely a reference to the younger Clare, daughter of Clare.
240

Appendix 3

Daughters be paid to them until marriage or arrival to twenty one years of age. Notwithstanding 

the devise in my will of my carriage & horses to my Daughter Peggy it is my will and desire that 

this devise shall not take effect unless my Executors upon consideration think it right that the 

articles should be delivered, & in case they should judge most prudent to convert them into 

money they are to do so & pay the money to my first Daughter Peggy. It is my Will & desire that 

my Brother Michl. J. Stone shall have a right to live at the house at Haberdeventure, & use the 

garden orchards & land he now uses without accounting to Frederick for the same the Houses 

to be kept in repair out of the profits of Fredericks Estate. It is my Will & desire that my Sister 

Mrs. Scott be allowed out of the profits of Frederick’s Estate such sum not exceeding fifteen 

pounds per year as my brother Michael J. Stone may think necessary for her more comfortable 

support until her son Ally comes of age. It is my Will and desire that my Sister Gracy be also 

allowed fifteen pounds per year out of the said Estate untill she be married but it is also my Will 

that the several incumbrances on Frederick’s Estate are upon the express condition that sufficient remain of the profits to maintain & educate him fully and if his Guardian is of opinion 

that the profits of his Estate will not educate him and pay the incomberances then his maintainance & education to be preferred & the incomberances to cease or be paid rateably In witness 

whereof I have set my hand this 20th July 1787.”

Witnesses: John Hoskins Stone, Walter Stone, and John Gilbert. 

Sworn in Charles County, October 9, 1787, by Michael J. Stone and Gustavus Richard Brown.

Sworn December 29, 1787, by witnesses John Gilbert and Walter Stone.

Deposition of Walter Stone, December 29, 1787. “This deponent further says that after a 

conversation with Thomas Stone Esqr. on the Subject of his will, [Thomas] wrote the codicil,” 

that Thomas “Generally appeared to recollect the State of his affairs and often put this deponent in mind of matters of his Estate that did not occur to this deponant, and on the other 

hand” when Walter offered information “respecting” Thomas’s estate that he always gave 

Walter “the best advice” and that “the said Thomas Stone appeared to understand what he was 

writing.” At about the time of the execution of the codicil he heard the said Thomas Stone 

“make a variety of observations respecting his will his affairs and the said codicil & these 

observations were generally just and proper,” and Walter does not remember “remarks or 

observations...irrational.”

Copy text: 1807 copy in Chancery Court, Chancery Papers, case 4647, Alexander Scott v. 

Michael Jenifer Stone et al., MSA. The text can also be found in Charles County Wills AH 

#9:459–62, MSA.
241

Ap p e n d i x 4

Probate Inventories of the Estate of Thomas Stone, 

Charles County, and Annapolis

Source: Carol Petravage, Historic Furnishings Report, Haberdeventure, Thomas Stone National Historic Site, Port Tobacco, Maryland 

(Harpers Ferry Center, National Park Service, 1999), pp. 14–22. Corrections by Amy Speckart.

In Inventory ofthe Goods and Chattels ofTho*. Stone Esq*, late ofCharles County

deceased appraised by us the subscribers in Current money dollars atseven shillings &

six pence -

£ s p

Bob 37 years 70 0 0

Jack 40 do 70

Phil 25 d° 80

Hany 25 d° 70

Tom Triplet 40 d° 70

Jerry Small 17 d° 55

Guss 17 d° 65

James 1 d° 6

Evans 4 d° 18

Violetta 23 d° 50

Ann 21 d° 50

Heth 18 d° 50

Clare 16 d° 50

Sall 22 d° 50

Eba 25 d° 50

Charity 13 d° 35

Nell 2d° 10

Patience 4d° 16

Gerrard 2d° 10

Charlotte 3 Months 5

2 Bay Geldings 9 years old 60

2 do d° 17 d° 10

1 sorrel Mare 11 d° 10

1 Horse d° 8£ 1 Colt 2 years old 6£ 14

2 Oven 10 £ 4 Cows and Calves a 60/ 22

5 Hogs.@ 30/. 12 Shoats @5/ 10 10

1 Chariot & harness £ 100 - 1 Phaeton & harness 40 £ 140

1 Riding Chair 45 £ part of old chair 20/ 46

1 old saddle & bridle 30/1 old plated bridle 10/ 2

1 Spinnet £ 9. Clock 25 £ 34

1 Dressing table & glass .3 £ 3

4 old Chairs 15/. 1 Carpet 4 £ 4 15

3 brass Candlesticks 2 pr. Candle snuffers 1 15

1 Tea Chest 25/. 1 pr An Irons 1/ 1 6

1 best feather bed & bed stead Curtains & furniture & mattress 30

J do do d° 16 £ 1 do d° 8 £ 24

1 d° do & furniture 7.10 — 7 10

Inventory of Thomas Stone's Charles County Estate (1788), Will book AH9, pp. 489-94
242

Appendix 4

2 Musketts & Bayetts @ 20/ 1 Gun 50/ 4 10

A parcel1 old gardain tools @30/3 pots & 1 d 25/ 2 15

12 patty pans 1 old stew pan 3 Milk pans & 1 old Coffee pot 7

45 ounces silver plate @ 8/4 per ounce 18 15

6 Table Cloths @ 15/. 13 Napkins @2/ 5 16

5 dishes 12 plates queens china 1 10

5 butter pots @2/. 4 gallons Maderia wine 40/ 2 10

2 gallons Rum & 2 Jugs 15/ 15

10 tbs 14 oz loafsugar @ 16d 3 lbs Coffee @ 1/6 19

1 lbs Hysons Tea 1 pint Vinegar 19

2 quarts honey @8/1 Case with 12 bottles 16/ 1

1 Barrel Barley 11/3 10 Ibs Rise 7/6 18 9

3 hair trunks 50/. 1 small glass broke 1/ 2 11

5 Weavers Slays @ 3/. 2 pr harnesses l/6d 13

1 Ox Chain @ 7/6. 1 pr Steeliards 7/6 15

1 pr large hand Mill stones 50/ 2 10

1 small cross cut saw @ 5/. 1 Curring knife 7/6 12 6

1 plough & old ax 10/. 1 old hoe & old spade 1/ 12

A parcel old Tubs @ 5/ 5

1 Phial Ippieacuaha [?] 3 9

1 steel Mill 55/ 1 large old pine Chest 7/ 3

2 flax Wheels damaged @ 7/6 15

1 Woolen Wheel 7/ 7

The deceas’d wearing Apparel 80

Wearing Apparel ofthe wife ofthe deceas’d 80

£1515 2

January 3, 1788 Catherine Scott, Walter Stone next of kin will Harrison, Daniel Jenifer Creditors 

March 31, 1788 Michael Jenifer Stone and Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown, joint executors of Thomas Stone, made oath to above 
243

Appendix 4

inventory of Thomas Stone'sAnnapolis estate (1788), Will book AH9, p. 494

An Inventory and appraisement ofthe Goods and Chattels of Thomas Stone, Esq' late of

Charles County deceased lying and being in Annarundel County in Current Money

dollars at 7/6 appraised this day ofJanuary 1788 -

[£ - English pounds (monetary); s - shillings; p = pence]

p. 1, col, t:

£ s p

2 walnut dining Tables & Covers 4 10 0

1 small Mahogany Tabic d° 1 10

1 Mahogany sideboard & Cover 7 10

1 Walnut dressing Table 1

1 Walnut breakfast Table 1 5

2 Mahogany knife Cases with 2

doz Ivory handled knives & forks

in each 6

1 Ink stand & sand box 1

P- 1., col- 2:

1 Mahogany Couch with red

gograin Cover halfwork 5

5 Mahogany old leather bottomed Chairs 3 15

5 Walnut d° d° 2 10

11 Green Windsor Chairs 3 6

1 large Mahogany gilt looking Glass 4

17 wine glasses broken setts

9 decanters, some damaged 1 15

p. 2. col. 1;

1 broken pitcher 1 cloth brush

2 small gilt leather trunks

1 lead letter presser 10

18 China Cups & 18 saucers

12 d° Tea Cups & 12 saucers 2

1 1/2 pint glass Tumbler, 12 China

Cups & 12 saucers 1
244

Appendix 4

1 old Japanned bread haskett & 4

waiters 2 China Chocolate Cups

& 7 do saucers 2 broken China pots

3 glass & 4 China salts damaged

2 China butter boats 1 broken China

cream jugg - 2 glass sugar dishes

tops wanting. 1 japanned, 1 Tin,

1 China Tea canester 1 5

1 large China bowl 8

1 sett old Castors, glass with silver

tops 1 Mahogany Tea board

1 dozen Table matts 1

1 old black Shagreen knife Case

4 gilt paper decanter stands 5

5 oyster knives, 1 pruning knife

1 pr old brass copper scales & weights

1 old Tin Case 2 Carpenters rules 7 6

1 pocket spye glass black leather cover

1 Horn Cup 1 Fever glass 1 pr

common Siezars 8

1 pr Tongs & shovel 1 pr brass Iron

mounted And Irons 1 pr very old

broken bellows 1 Fender 1 10

1 stained pine Table 6

3 pr tongs 1 shovel 1 prdoggs 15

1 large painted pine book Case 1 10

5 old Maps in frames

1 new d° without frames 1

1 Mahogany dining Table 5

1 old walnut desk with Lampes

1 old Mahogany Tea Chest 2 5 0

1 old Mahogany knife fray & 9 green

handled knives & forks 10

 1 small old pine Table 2

1 old pine chest containing 1 painted Tin Candle box

1 stone pott with some patent sage, 1 large old Tin

Canester 7 6

1 Common high post bedstead & 1 suit furniture check

Curtains 1 Mattress - 1 feather bed, 1 boulster, 1 pillow.

1 pr sheets, Isingle blanketts. 1 Cotton Counterpain 16

1 Cott -1 Mattress, 1 bed. 1 pr sheets

p. 2,col. 2:
245

Appendix 4

1 boulster, 1 pillow, 4 single blankets 7

1 small Maple dressing Table with

Callico cover 6

1 pr small and irons with brass [?]

1 fender 12

3 Callico window Curtains

2 old do 15

1 black leather trunk 1 queens ware

water bottle 2 6

1 pewter bedpan 1 pewter Chamber

pott 2 old earthen d° 15

11 Walnut red bottomed Chairs 4 2 6

1 silyer mounted sword 3

1 with a little red back

1 japaned sugar box 1 glass apparatus for impregnating water

with fixed air entirely damaged 7 6

1 Walnut dressing Table with green Cover 1 5

1 small Bed 15

3 old Scotch Carpels 10

1 Large new mattress 5

2 small pieces ofold fearnought used

as hearth Cloths & passage Carpet 10

2 single blanketts 16

1 old fire Screen worked 15

1 Iron fender 5
246

Appendix 4

p. 3, col. 1:

p. 3. col. 2:

1 old Mahogany dressing table

& old window Curtains 1

1 pr small and Irons & fender 3 9

1 close stool Chair without a pan

1 Bow d° with a pan 2 10

1 small pine Table old

3 hogarths prints 5

1 old bed & Mattrefs 1 10

2 Jack stands 1

12 new Mahogany Chairs with

hair bottoms 2 d° armed d° 24 10

2 new Mahogany Card Tables 5

2 Oval looking Glasses with gilt

frames 1 small d° with Sconces 20

1 pr brass and Irons -1 pr Tongs. 1 shovel

1 brass fender 6

4 window Curtains printed Cotton 3

1 Large Carpel 16

14 blue & white China dishes assorted

2 d° soup tureens 1 ofthem dam°

2 d° sauce d°

2 d° butter boats

3 d° baking dishes

1 d° salad d°

14 d° soup plates

45 d° dining d°

9 d° breakfast d°

22 d° desert d° 9

1 pine Cupboard 15

2 queens ware pudding dishes

1 old Tin Cancster 1 old sugar d° 2 6

4 small flag Chairs

1 old pine Table 1 Table brush

1 old painted Sugar box with Sugar broken and chopped

2 brass Candlesticks, 1 old Umbrella

1 Warming pan. damaged 15

1 old dutch Mattress, 1 bed. 1 pr sheets

1 pr blanketts, 1 silk Rugg 3
247

Appendix 4

4 flat irons, 1 old Chaffin dish

1 shovel, 1 pr Tongs 1 pr Common and Irons very sorry

1 Tin funnell

1 small gilt leathertrunk 1 Teapot

& old sugar without a top 1

3/4 of a box 30 lb Sperma Cati Candles 3 15

1/2 Barel Split peas 10

1 Pipe Madeira wine 90

4 bottles wine, 30 do Hock

6 do Claret 6

100 Bacon 3 15

500 lb Hay 1 5

7 bottles peach brandy 7

5 yds very old coarse cloth 5

1 old mended China bowl 1

4 sheets paper 1 old Japaned

plate warmer 6

4 old diaper Table Cloths 2 pr old sheets

2 old blanketts 1 old

Mattress 2 10

6 window blinds 1 Mail Pillion

1 small old hair trunk 10

1 pr Kitchen and Irons & 2 spits

1 watering pott & 1 pr Garden shears 1 10

2 old pine Tables 1 halfbushel

3 Tubs 1 pail & w Piggins 5

2 Iron Potts 1 pr flesh forks 2 ladles

1 frying pan 1 old grid Iron

1 Skillet 1 bread Toaster 1

1 shovel 1 pr Tongs old 1 Iron

pestle 2 pott hooks & 1 Crook

1 old Iron Tea kettle broken top 7 6

1 Large Copper boiler 2 old stew pans 1 old Coffee

pott 1 old

Chocolate pott 4 10

p. 4, col. 1:

3 Tin pans - 3 sauce pans 1 flower

box -1 cullinder - 1 Tin old Mugg

1 Tea Kettle 1 old Coffee Mill

1 fish Kettle 6

1 Tin funell 1 paper box 1 dripping

pan 2 old snuffer stands
248

Appendix 4

1 old Tin Kettle 3

2 old spades - 2 garden hoes & 1 rake

1 poll ax 1 wood saw 15

1 old wheel barrow - 1 pr old scales

1 Wooden Garden Roller, Iron frame 1

2 old [Caddows?]

1 Negroe Man named [?] 29 years old 60

1 Negroe Woman Rachael . . 40 35

1 Negroe Girl Betty . . 11 25

1 Negroe boy Jack .. 10 35

1 Old Negroe Woman Clare .. 60 1

2 pine book Cases 10 10

A parcel ofEmpty bottles 1 10 0

A parcel of various Lumber 2

14 Earthen potts & 1 jugg 15

1 Pockett pistol 10

1 Dressing Glass 15

1 Mattress 2 old blanketts 1

1 small bedstead 1

[£]501 5 9

Law Library containing 530 Volumes 454 1 4

Other Library containing 258 volumes

bound & 121 pamphlets unbound 85 5

1 Cow 6 1

1 New 2 old tooth brushes 2 6

1 Razor Case & 4 Razors 15

2 portrait Pictures 45 7 6

4 french plate Candlesticks 4

2 d° snuffer stands & 2 pr Snuffers 1

1 ditto small waiter 1

Plate

I Large Tankard

1 Large Coffee pott

6 Table Spoons

p. 4, col. 2:

[These entries continue from previous column ]

1 soup spoon Weighing 123 oz. 12 [?| O grs.

6 desert spoons @ 8/4 p. oz.
249

Appendix 4

11 Teaspoons

4 salt shovels

1 marrow spoon

1 pr Tea tongs

1 punch Ladle

1 Cream pott

1 punch strainer 51 10

£1150 8 1

Silver weighing 123 oz 120 

@ 8/4 per oz 

Creditors Cha. Wallace and Daniel of St. Thomas 

Jenifer 

next of kin Grace Stone W. Stone 

March 31, 1788 Micheal Jenifer Stone and 

Gustavus Richard Brown, executors, 

made oath to above 

251

Ap p e n d i x 5

Partial Transcription of David Stone’s Probate Inventory, 

1774, Showing Enslaved Individuals’ 

Names, Ages, and Family Groups 

Robbin, 68

Joe, 58

George, 45

Tom, 47

Ben, 29

Bill, 18

Beck, 65

Hannah, 50

Jesse, 10

Will, 8

Rose, 27

Mary, 7

Winny, 5

Basil, 3

Unnamed infant

Henny, 21

Sam, 5

Rob, 3

Nell, 1

Vick, 20

Bill, infant

Clare, 43

Nan, 14

Velet, 7

Ann, 5

Heth, 4

Harmer, 2

Clare, infant

Jean, 21

Gerrard, 5

Luce, 41

George, 13

Luce, 10

Monica, 35

Sukey, 9

Charles, 7

Linder, 4

Gusty, 2

Unnamed infant

Margrett, 33

[Billy? Betty?], 6 

Lawson, 4

Dick, 1

Lett, 24

Ruth, 5

Sall, 3

Clem, 21

Cil, 5

Leonard, infant

Patience, 9

Harry, 8

Rachall, 2

Source: Probate inventory of David Stone, 1774, Prerogative Court, Inventories Liber 117, f.91–99, Maryland State Archives.

253

Ap p e n d i x 6

Settlement between Thomas Stone and 

John Hoskins Stone for Michael Jenifer Stone’s Portion 

of the Estate of David Stone, Elizabeth (Jenifer) Stone, 

and Daniel Jenifer Stone, July 15, 1778

We Thomas Stone and John Hoskins Stone have paid to Michael Jenifer Stone the 

following effects of the Estates of David Stone Elizabeth Stone and Daniel Jenifer Stone 

vizt—Negroes Jesse1 at thirty pounds Young Luce2 at thirty pounds Nan3 at forty pounds 

Sil4 at five pounds Len5 at Nine pounds Nan’s young Child at four pounds Sam6 at fourteen 

pounds Bed at six pounds Watch at four pounds ten schillings in the whole amounting to 

one hundred and forty two pounds ten schillings Maryland currency being his share of the 

Estate above mentioned agreeable to a Settlement made this 15th day of July 1778

T:Stone

J. H. Stone7

Source: Edward C. Stone Collection of the Autographs of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, 

Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.

1 Jesse, son of Hannah, was about age fourteen when this settlement was drawn up in 1778. (Ages and parentage are based on the probate inventory of David Stone, Prerogative Court, Inventories, Liber 17, f. 91–96, sworn 

February 26, 1774, MSA.) Jesse appears numerous times in Michael Jenifer Stone’s surviving day book (Kremer 

Collection, SMSC). He accompanied Michael Jenifer Stone in a sojourn to Thomas Stone’s Nanjemoy plantation 

in the summer and fall of 1780. By 1786, Jesse had trained as a blacksmith, and presumably worked in Michael 

Jenifer Stone’s blacksmith shop in Port Tobacco (indenture, MS 406, MdHS). He was hired by two local men 

with close ties to Thomas and his brother, Gustavus Richard Brown and Daniel Jenifer (Michael Jenifer Stone 

day book, SMSC). His mother’s name, Hannah, comes up in correspondence between Michael Jenifer Stone and 

Walter Stone as an enslaved person whom Walter is interested in selling (Michael Jenifer Stone to Walter Stone, 

December 3, 1783, MS 406, MdHS).

2 “Young Luce,” age fourteen in 1778, was the daughter of Luce and sister of George. John Hoskins Stone in 

his correspondence refers to a man named George who runs errands for him between Annapolis and Port Tobacco 

(J. H. Stone to Walter Stone, October 30, 1785, and October 27, 1786, MS 406, MdHS).

3 Based on David Stone’s probate inventory, Nan would be eighteen in 1778 and a daughter of Clare, who lived 

in Thomas Stone’s Annapolis household. Nan’s sisters Violette, Ann, Heth, and Clare passed into Thomas Stone’s 

ownership and stayed in Charles County. The fate of another sister, Harmer, is currently unknown.

4 “Cil,” child of Clem, was deemed “a cripple” and five years of age in David Stone’s 1774 probate inventory. 

5 Likely Leonard, brother of Cil, son of Clem. Leonard was an “infant” in 1774. 

6 Sam, son of Henny, with younger siblings Rob and Nell, would have been nine years of age in 1778. 

7 Both Thomas Stone and John Hoskins Stone signed the document in their own hand. The handwriting of the 

rest of the document has not been identified (John Hoskins Stone?). Less than a month earlier, on June 9, 1778, 

Thomas Stone and John Hoskins Stone, their parents’ “surviving administrators,” had submitted their final 

account of the estates of David and Elizabeth Stone to the Prerogative Court (Charles County Register of Wills, 

1777–82, Wills AF Liber 7, f. 170–71, MSA). The consistency in the valuations of the slaves between the 1774 

probate inventory and the above settlement allows matching of the names between the two documents. 

255

Ap p e n d i x 7

Entries for Thomas Stone in 1782 and 1783 Tax Lists

All values in Maryland current money

1782 Tax Lists, Charles County

(General Assessments)

Scharf Collection, Maryland State Archives 

Port Tobacco Lower East Hundred

Owner Thomas Stone, Esq. 

Land Chandlers Hills 211 acres

Welcome 200 acres

Addition to May Day 120 acres £ 974 0 0

Enslaved people Males and females under 8 years 4 £ 40 0 0

Males and females ages 8 - 14 0

Males ages 14 - 45 5 £ 350 0 0

Females ages 14 - 36 5 £ 300 0 0

Males above 45 and females above 36 0

Plate 0

Stock Horses 9

Black cattle 48 £ 184 0 0

Value of other property £ 78 0 0

Total amount £ 1926 0 0

Assessment thereon £ 43 0 0

Number of free males above 

age 18

0

Total number of white 

inhabitants

0

Source: J. Richard Rivoire, “Summary Report of Additional Research Findings,” 1993, appendices 1 and 2. 

Corrections by Amy Speckart.
256

Appendix 7

1783 Tax Lists, Charles County

(General Assessments)

Scharf Collection, Maryland State Archives

Fifth District

Owner Thomas Stone, Esq. 

Land 887 acres £ 920 7 6

Enslaved people Males and females under 8 years 4 £ 59 0 0

Males and females ages 8 - 14 3 £ 75 0 0

Males ages 14 - 45 6 £ 420 0 0

Females ages 14 - 36 3 £ 180 0 0

Males above 45 and females above 36 5 £ 120

Plate 156 oz. £ 65 0 0

Stock Horses 8

Black cattle 22 £ 141 0 0

Value of other property £ 350 12 6

Total amount £ 2231 0 0

Assessment thereon £ 23 6 2

Total number of white 

inhabitants

7
257

Appendix 7

1783 Tax Lists, Charles County

(Land Assessments)

Scharf Collection, Maryland State Archives 

Fifth District

Name of land Haberdeventure and Hansons Plains Enlarged

Number of acres 442 acres

Value £ 607.15.0

[Value per acre]

Survey, resurvey, or escheat resurvey

Name of original survey same name

Situation, general quality, and soil Forest. Barren land

Improvements 1 good brick dwelling House Kitchen & nine other necessary houses

Quantity of wooded timber land 1/2 cleared

Name of land Bridgets Delight

Number of acres 63 acres

Value £ 47.5.0

[Value per acre]

Survey, resurvey, or escheat resurveyed

Name of original survey Bryfield

Situation, general quality, and soil Forest. stiff and poor

Improvements 3 old logged houses

Quantity of wooded timber land 28 acres wood

Name of land Simson’s Delight

Number of acres 260 acres

Value £ 195.0.0

[Value per acre]

Survey, resurvey, or escheat survey

Name of original survey same name

Situation, general quality, and soil Forest. poor and stiff

Improvements 1 dwelling house and 1 logged house

Quantity of wooded timber land 60 [acres] wood

Name of land Pryor’s Beginning and St. Nicholas

Number of acres 75 acres

Value £ 45.17.6

[Value per acre]

Survey, resurvey, or escheat survey

Name of original survey same name

Situation, general quality, and soil Forest. poor soil

Improvements no improvements

Quantity of wooded timber land mostly cleared
258

Appendix 7

Fifth District (continued)

Name of land Distrest

Number of acres 47 acres

Value £ 23.10

[Value per acre]

Survey, resurvey, or escheat survey

Name of original survey same name

Situation, general quality, and soil forest. poor barrens

Improvements no improvements

Quantity of wooded timber land all woods

Sixth District

Name of land Welcome

Number of acres 200 acres

Value £ 250

[Value per acre]

Survey, resurvey, or escheat

Name of original survey Welcome

Situation, general quality, and soil 1 mile from town. A light gravelly soil

Improvements an old tobacco house

Quantity of wooded timber land 200 acres arable, 20 woodland with rail timber

Name of land Shaws Barrens

Number of acres 52 acres

Value £ 32.10.0

[Value per acre]

Survey, resurvey, or escheat

Name of original survey Shaws Barrens

Situation, general quality, and soil 2 miles from Town. very poor stiff soil

Improvements no improvements

Quantity of wooded timber land 52 acres woodland properly called

Name of land Shaws Trouble

Number of acres 46 acres

Value £ 28.15.0

[Value per acre]

Survey, resurvey, or escheat Shaws Trouble

Name of original survey

Situation, general quality, and soil 2 miles from Town. very poor stiff soil

Improvements no improvements

Quantity of wooded timber land [blank]
259

Appendix 7

Sixth District (continued)

Name of land Moberly, part of

Number of acres 23 acres

Value £ 17.5.0

[Value per acre]

Survey, resurvey, or escheat

Name of original survey Moberly part of

Situation, general quality, and soil a very poor stiff soil, 3 miles from Town

Improvements a small dwelling house, a logged kitchen, a good tobacco house, + 

another building very small, 25 apple trees and a few peach

Quantity of wooded timber land 23 acres arable

Name of land Chandlers Hills with a mill seat

Number of acres 231 acres

Value £ 922.0.0

[Value per acre]

Survey, resurvey, or escheat

Name of original survey Chandlers Hills

Situation, general quality, and soil 1/2 mile from Town. a light gravelly soil and some parts hilly

Improvements A small brick dwelling house old and yet unfinished and much out of 

repair, a indifferent kitchen with a brick chimney, a corn house & a 

large barn, a water mill with two pair of stones and a small house 

inhabited by a miller

Quantity of wooded timber land Except a branches of wood this land is all arable

Name of land Addition to May Day

Number of acres 120 acres

Value £ [120.0.0?]

[Value per acre]

Survey, resurvey, or escheat

Name of original survey Addition to Mayday

Situation, general quality, and soil 3 miles from Town. A light gravely soil

Improvements no improvements

Quantity of wooded timber land 120 acres wood land with rail and board timber

261

Ap p e n d i x 8

Runaway Advertisements

Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), August 2, 1770. 

Courtesy of the Maryland State Archives.
262

Appendix 8

Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia), October 19, 1776. 

Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
263

Appendix 8

Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), January 11, 1798. 

Courtesy of the Maryland State Archives.
264

Appendix 8

Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), August 8, 1799. 

Courtesy of the Maryland State Archives.
265

Ap p e n d i x 9

Enslaved Persons in Thomas Stone’s Probate Inventories, 

with a Note on Other Documented Individuals

 Names are presented in alphabetical order. 

Approximate dates of birth are calculated from the ages given in the inventories of 

Thomas Stone’s estates in Charles County and Annapolis, Maryland State Archives. 

(See Appendix 4, “Probate Inventories of the Estate of Thomas Stone.”)

The valuations and locations are taken from Thomas Stone’s probate inventories unless 

otherwise noted.

 The inventories do not indicate family groups. 

Alternative spellings of the first name are put in parentheses. The surname Thomas is 

given in brackets if there is documentary evidence to suggest a family connection but no 

documentation to indicate that the individual self-identified with the family name. Only 

Gustavus Thomas and Violette Thomas have court-entered records of their Thomas 

surname. 

This list should be considered an evolving resource, with future research refining what we 

know about these individuals.

Ann [Thomas]

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 21

Approximate date of birth: 1767

Valuation in 1788: £50

Location: Charles County

Origin: David Stone’s estate in Durham Parish, Charles County. She was a daughter of Clare

(b. ca. 1728) and a sister of Nan, Violette Thomas, Heth, and Clare.

1

Family: Her mother Clare had extensive kinship ties in Charles County and beyond as a descendent of Elizabeth Thomas and Betty Mingo. In 1790, Ann, her four children, and Tom Triplet 

were sold to Joseph Edelin of Prince George’s County. The bill of sale does not refer to Ann 

and Tom as husband and wife, nor does it name the children. Like her sister Violette Thomas, 

Ann was to receive, according to Thomas Stone’s instructions, an allotment of pork in late 

1785.2

Occupation: Unknown. Thomas Stone was willing to hire her out in 1785 but discouraged her 

sale.3

1 Appendix 5, “Partial Transcription of the Probate Inventory of David Stone, 1774.”

2 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, December 21, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC. 

3 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, November 24, December 21, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC.
266

Appendix 9

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Initially retained in the estate. In 1790, Walter Stone, 

acting as attorney for Thomas Stone’s executors, sold Ann with her four children and Tom 

Triplet to Joseph Edelin of Prince George’s County.4

Ausmin (Osmin, Ozman)

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 29

Approximate date of birth: 1759

Valuation in 1788: £60

Location: Annapolis

Origin: Dr. Gustavus Brown’s estate.5

Family: Unknown

Occupation: Unknown. Ausmin’s presence in the Stones’ Annapolis household indicates that 

he had a domestic role. Before he came to the capital in 1786, he had been hired out to 

Turner, an overseer or tenant of Stone’s.6

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Not recorded

Betty

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 11

Approximate date of birth: 1777

Valuation in 1788: £25

Location: Annapolis

Origin: See family.

Family: Though the inventory does not indicate who were parents were, it is possible that Betty 

was a daughter of Rachael and a sister of Jack (Thomas), who were also part of Stone’s 

Annapolis household. 

Occupation: Domestic servant

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Betty may be “Bett” whom Thomas Stone bequeathed 

to his daughter Margaret in his will.

Bob

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 37

Approximate date of birth: 1751

Valuation in 1788: £70

Location: Charles County

4 Bill of sale, Walter Stone as attorney for Thomas Stone’s executors to Joseph Edelin, Charles County Land 

Records, K#4:114, Maryland State Archives (hereafter abbreviated as MSA). For a transcription, see Appendix 

15.

5 Dr. Gustavus Brown’s 1762 probate inventory includes a two-year-old named Ozman at Brown’s Nanjemoy 

estate (Petravage, “Historic Furnishings Report,” 27). 

6 Thomas Stone asked for Ausmin to come to Annapolis “as soon as his time is out with Turner” in a letter to 

Walter or Michael Jenifer Stone, December 21, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC. On Turner, see Chapter 4.
267

Appendix 9

Origin: Unknown. In 1774, Thomas Stone purchased a man named Bob from Francis Meek in 

Charles County. In 1782, Charles Goodrick’s siblings sold “back” to Thomas Stone a man 

called Bob. Was this the same person?7

Family: A husband or relative of Sall? In letters of late 1785, Thomas Stone mentioned Bob and 

Sall in quick succession to each other, as if one of them brought to mind the other. In 

November, Stone mentioned Bob and Sall in the same sentence: “I shall have some Negroes 

to hire next year Carpenter Tom for 1800 [pounds tobacco] with his tools... Bob 1200 d[itt]

o. Sal for any thing above her Victuals and Clothes.” A month later, Stone asked his brother 

Walter, “Can Sal and her Child be sold for a good price? I think it likely they may. Mick talks 

of buying Bob.” Stone came back to the subject later in the letter, adding that Sall was to be 

hired out “unless a good price can be got for sale of her—and Bob.” In this last reference, 

Stone placed a dash between the names of Sall and Bob, but again the two names appear 

one after the other. Whatever the nature of their connection, Thomas Stone split up Bob 

and Sall in his will. Bob, along with Violette, Violette’s children, and Bett, were to go to 

Margaret, while Sall was to be Mildred’s property.8

Occupation: Tradesman, based on Thomas Stone’s instruction to Walter Stone to hire out Bob 

with his tools cited above. 

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Bequeathed to Margaret Stone

Charity

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 13

Approximate date of birth: 1775

Valuation in 1788: £35

Location: Charles County

Origin: Unknown

Family: Unknown

Occupation: Unknown

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Bequeathed to Mildred Stone 

Charlotte

Age in 1788 according to inventory: Three months

Approximate date of birth: 1787

Valuation in 1788: £5

Location: Charles County

Origin: Charles County

Family: Unknown

7 Purchase of Bob by Thomas Stone from Francis Meek of Charles County, 1774, for £96 current money, Charles 

County Land Records S#3:533, MSA (Bob’s age not given); purchase of Bob by Thomas Stone from Charles 

Goodrick, 1782, for 17,000 pounds of crop tobacco, Charles County Land Records V#3:563, MSA. According to 

the deed, Goodrick’s siblings “sell back” Bob to Thomas Stone in this transaction. When did Stone sell Bob to 

Goodrick initially? Bob was not a part of Stone’s exchange with Goodrick of four slaves (a man named Henry, his 

wife Nan, a man called Joe, and a boy known as Clem) for Addition to May Day, a tract of 120 acres, in 1779 

(Charles County Land Records V#3:402–3, 423, MSA). Bob’s origins might be traced in Francis Meek’s family; 

Meek’s father bequeathed to him a male named Bob in 1765 (“Francis Meek [1693–1765],” Early Colonial 

Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us).

8 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, November 24, December 21, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC; Appendix 3.
268

Appendix 9

Occupation: n/a

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Unknown

Clare [Thomas]

Age in 1788 according to inventory: “60.” **Based on David Stone’s inventory, Clare was 57.

Approximate date of birth: 1728–1731 (latter date supplied from David Stone’s inventory)

Valuation in 1788: £1

Location: Annapolis

Origin: David Stone’s estate of Durham Parish, Charles County. According to a certificate 

recorded for her daughter Violette Thomas, Clare was the daughter of “Peg, commonly 

called Semple’s Peg, who was the daughter of Betty commonly called Betty Mingo.”9

Family: When an inventory was made of David Stone’s estate in 1774, Clare’s family at Poynton 

Manor included her daughters Nan, age 14, Violette, age 7, Ann, age 5, Heth, age 4, Harmer, 

age 2, and Clare, an infant. Remarkably, Clare, who was forty-three at the time, kept at least 

four of her six daughters with her as she passed into Thomas Stone’s ownership; Nan was 

allotted to Michael Jenifer Stone, and no other documentation survives about Harmer. In 

late 1785, Thomas Stone directed his brother Walter, “the children of Clare I would not 

sell.” This must be a reference to the elder Clare, as the younger Clare was only thirteen or 

so at the time.10

Occupation: Domestic servant, based on her location in Annapolis.

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Not recorded

Clare (“Young Clare,” “Little Clare”) [Thomas]

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 16

Approximate date of birth: 1772

Valuation in 1788: £50

Location: Charles County

Origin: David Stone’s estate in Durham Parish, Charles County. A daughter of Clare 

(b. ca. 1728–1731), her sisters were Nan, Violette Thomas, Ann, Heth, and Harmer.11

Family: None known apart from her birth family. Her mother Clare had extensive kinship ties 

in Charles County and beyond as a descendent of Elizabeth Thomas and Betty Mingo.

Occupation: Unknown. Clare was hired out in 1785 (when she was about 13), and Thomas 

Stone wished to continue to hire her out in 1786.12

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Bequeathed to Mildred Stone

9 Appendix 5, “Partial Transcription of the Probate Inventory of David Stone, 1774”; certificate of Violette 

Thomas, dated May 27, 1796, recorded October 16, 1799, Charles County Land Records IB#3:77, MSA (see 

Appendix 13 for a transcription). 

10 Appendix 6, “Settlement for...Michael Jenifer Stone’s Portion of the Estate”; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, 

November 24, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC.

11 Appendix 5, “Partial Transcription of the Probate Inventory of David Stone, 1774.”

12 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22, November 24, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC. 
269

Appendix 9

Evans

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 4

Approximate date of birth: 1784

Valuation in 1788: £16

Location: Charles County

Origin: Unknown

Family: Unknown

Occupation: n/a

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Unknown

Gerrard

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 2

Approximate date of birth: 1786

Valuation in 1788: £10

Location: Charles County

Origin: Unknown

Family: Unknown

Occupation: n/a

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Unknown

Gustavus (Guss) Thomas

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 17

Approximate date of birth: 1771

Valuation in 1788: £65

Location: Charles County

Origin: Born on David Stone’s estate in Durham Parish, Charles County, to Monica (born circa 

1739), who had four other children on David Stone’s estate in 1774 (Suckey, Charles, 

Linder, and an unnamed infant). According to testimony in a freedom suit, Monica was a 

daughter of Semple’s Peg, which would make her a sister of Clare.

13

Family: Unknown besides his birth family. Did he recognize Clare as his aunt, and Clare’s 

daughters (Nan, Violette, Ann, Heth, Harmer, and Clare) as his cousins? In 1792, Gustavus’s 

brother Charles Thomas filed a petition for freedom, claiming he was unlawfully held in 

bondage by Alexander Scott, in the General Court of the Western Shore, and won his suit in 

the same term as his brother (May 1798).14

Occupation: Unknown. In late 1785, Thomas Stone asked Walter Stone to hire out Guss “unless 

Guss can be sold.” Guss remained on the estate, though; in 1791, Michael Jenifer Stone 

directed Walter to hire out Guss by the month if he could not be hired by the year.15

13 Appendix 5, “Partial Transcription of the Probate Inventory of David Stone, 1774”; deposition of Richard 

Tuson, May 10, 1796, in Gustavus Thomas v. Lancelot (Lott) Mason, Judgment Records JG 31:67, MSA.

14 Charles Thomas v. Alexander Scott, General Court of the Western Shore, May 1798, JG 39: 659–63, MSA.

15 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, November 24, December 21, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC; Michael Jenifer 

Stone to Walter Stone, January 2, 1791, Thomas Stone National Historic Site manuscript collection. 
270

Appendix 9

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Retained in the estate. In 1791, Gustavus Thomas filed 

a freedom petition in the General Court of the Western Shore against the executors of 

Thomas Stone’s estate. The court ruled in Gustavus Thomas’s favor in May 1798.16

Harry

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 25

Approximate date of birth: 1763

Valuation in 1788: £70

Location: Charles County

Origin: Harry’s origins are speculative. Is this the same Harry who was recorded on David 

Stone’s estate, age 8, in 1774, born circa 1766? According to Thomas Stone’s will, Michael 

Jenifer Stone purchased a “Negroe Harry” from Samuel Stone’s estate but had yet to pay for 

the man in full to Thomas, Samuel’s executor. Does the Harry from Samuel Stone’s estate 

show up in Thomas’s inventory because Michael Jenifer Stone had not paid the full purchase price? Further muddying the waters, Thomas Stone sold a man named Harry (and his 

wife Nan) to Charles Goodrick in 1779. It also may be the case that the “Harry” in Thomas 

Stone’s inventory is Henry Semple. 17

Family: Unknown.

Occupation: Unknown.

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Unknown.

Henry Semple

Age in 1788 according to inventory: The name “Henry Semple” does not appear in the inventories, but Henry Semple’s deed of manumission refers to his “faithful service” to Thomas 

and Margaret Stone. See Harry.

Approximate date of birth: Unknown

Valuation in 1788: n/a

Location: Charles County?

Origin: Unknown. Semple was not a common name in Charles County at the time. Henry likely 

had a personal tie to the household of John Semple (d. 1773), a Scottish merchant who lived 

in Port Tobacco in the 1750s and early 1760s. (See Chapter 1.) 

Family: Husband of Ibe (Ebe), father of Kitty and Nancy. 

Occupation: Manservant? In the deed of manumission, Margaret and Mildred Stone acknowledged Henry’s “faithful service to our parents and brother.” 

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Not recorded. Emancipated with his wife and children 

by Margaret and Mildred Stone in 1793.18

16 Gustavus Thomas v. Thomas Stone’s executors, May 1798, General Court of the Western Shore, JG 39:653–

59. I am grateful to Owen E. Lourie, Historian at the Maryland State Archives, for sharing his research on 

freedom suits, which brought this case to my attention.

17 Probate inventory of David Stone, 1774, Prerogative Court Inventories, Liber 117, f. 91–96, MSA; will of 

Thomas Stone in Petravage, “Historic Furnishings Report,” 12; Thomas Stone to Charles Goodrick, Charles 

County Land Records V#3:402–3, 423, MSA.

18 Manumission of Henry Semple, “his wife Ibe, and their two children Kitty and Nancy,” October 15, 1793, 

Charles County Land Records, N#4:165, MSA.
271

Appendix 9

Heth [Thomas]

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 18

Approximate date of birth: 1770

Valuation in 1788: £50

Location: Charles County; possibly Annapolis

Origin: David Stone’s estate in Durham Parish, Charles County. A daughter of Clare

(b. ca. 1728), her sisters were Nan, Violette Thomas, Ann, and Clare.

Family: None known apart from her birth family. Her mother Clare had extensive kinship ties 

in Charles County and beyond as a descendent of Elizabeth Thomas and Betty Mingo.

Occupation: Domestic servant. In 1785, Thomas Stone suggested that Heth be hired out for 

£7.10.0. Two months later, he asked his brother Walter who had hired “Heth or Sall” as he 

wanted one of the two young women to join his Annapolis household.19

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Not documented.

Ibe (Ebe)

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 25

Approximate date of birth: 1763

Valuation in 1788: £50

Location: Charles County

Origin: Unknown. 

Family: Wife of Henry Semple, mother of Kitty and Nancy who were born between early 1788 

and 1793

Occupation: Unknown

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Not documented. Emancipated with her husband and 

children by Margaret and Mildred Stone in 1793.20

Jack

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 40

Approximate date of birth: 1748

Valuation in 1788: £70

Location: Charles County

Origin: Unknown

Family: Unknown. Was he the father of Jack Thomas?

19 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, November 24, 1785, January 15, 1786, Stone Family Papers, LC.

20 Manumission of Henry Semple, “his wife Ibe, and their two children Kitty and Nancy,” October 15, 1793, 

Charles County Land Records, N#4:165, MSA. Her name is spelled “Ebe” in Thomas Stone’s probate inventory. 
272

Appendix 9

Occupation: Servant. Jack was trusted with long-distance errands. Twice in August 1779, 

Michael Jenifer Stone gave “Jacke” traveling expenses for “going to Annapolis.” In 

December 1783, Thomas Stone sent Jack, who carried letters, and another “servant,” 

Webster, to Annapolis to retrieve his carriage and bring back clothes, medicine, and Jerry.

21

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Jack may be “John” whom Thomas Stone’s daughters 

in 1793 manumitted, at age 45, in consideration of his “obedience and fidelity.”22

Jack [Thomas?]

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 10

Approximate date of birth: 1778

Valuation in 1788: £35

Location: Annapolis

Origin: Unknown. See family.

Family: A runaway ad informs us that Jack was a son of Rachael. Was his father the elder Jack (b. 

1748)?

Occupation: Domestic servant

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Retained in the Stone family. In May 1797, Jack fled the 

household of Thomas Stone’s daughter, Margaret (Stone), and her husband Travers Daniel, 

in Stafford County, Virginia. Daniel suspected Jack may be in Annapolis or Baltimore; his 

mother, Rachael, had emancipated herself by moving from Annapolis to Baltimore. Daniel 

also publicized that Jack “may pass...for one of the Thomas family of negroes belonging to” 

Thomas Stone’s estate, raising the possibility that Jack and his mother were descendants of 

Elizabeth Thomas and Betty Mingo. According to the runaway advertisement, Jack, age 19, 

could “read a little.” The clothing that he took with him, namely “a greenish coloured great 

coat of elastic cloth, with buff cuffs and cape, a white casimer vest and breeches, a brown 

cloth vest, and a calico vest,” suggests his status was above that of a common field hand.23

James

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 1

Approximate date of birth: 1787

Valuation in 1788: £6

Location: Charles County

Origin: Unknown

Family: Unknown

Occupation: n/a

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Unknown

21 Debit on Thomas Stone’s account with Michael Jenifer Stone, Michael Jenifer Stone day book, Kremer 

Collection, SMSC, p. 12; Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, December 3, 1783, The Rosenbach, Philadelphia. 

Thomas Stone confirmed receipt of the “chariot + articles” from Annapolis in a letter to Walter Stone of 

December 9, 1783 (copy, Moncure Daniel Conway Papers, MS 277, Columbia University Rare Book and 

Manuscript Library, New York).

22 Manumission of John by Margaret and Mildred Stone, “as representatives” of their father and brother, 

November 30, 1793, Charles County Land Records N#4:178, MSA. 

23 Advertisement by Travers Daniel Jr., for Jack, dated October 28, 1797, in Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), 

January 11, 1798. See Appendix 8.
273

Appendix 9

Jerry Small

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 17

Approximate date of birth: 1771

Valuation in 1788: £55

Location: Charles County

Origin: Unknown.

Family: Unknown. 

Occupation: Servant? In December 1783, Thomas Stone wanted Jerry, then about the age of 12, 

to accompany Jack and another servant, Webster, on a journey from Annapolis to 

Haberdeventure. From this we learn that Jerry was in Annapolis, though we do not know 

how his time was split between Haberdeventure and Annapolis.24

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Unknown

Nell

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 2

Approximate date of birth: 1786

Valuation in 1788: £10

Location: Charles County

Origin: Unknown

Family: Unknown

Occupation: n/a

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Unknown

Patience

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 4

Approximate date of birth: 1784

Valuation in 1788: £16

Location: Charles County

Origin: Unknown

Family: Unknown

Occupation: Unknown

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Unknown

Phil

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 25

Approximate date of birth: 1763

Valuation in 1788: £80

Location: Charles County

Origin: Unknown

Family: None known

24 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, December 3, 1783, The Rosenbach, Philadelphia.
274

Appendix 9

Occupation: Artisan, based on his high valuation and importance at Stone’s mill. See Chapter 4. 

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Bequeathed to Mildred Stone. Port Tobacco merchant 

George Clements paid Mildred Stone for Phil’s hire in 1794. In 1799, the sheriff of Anne 

Arundel County advertised the detainment of a runaway “by the name of Phill, who says 

that he is the property of Baldwin Tolliver, living in Orange County, State of Virginia, and 

that he was bought of Travers Daniel; he is about 5 feet 10 inches high, about 35 years of age, 

and slim made; his cloathing is an old hat, gray cloth jacket, faced with blue, osnabrig shirt, 

striped country cloth trousers, and old shoes, and has lost his fore teeth below.” Future 

research should search the records of Mildred’s husband, Travers Daniel, in Virginia, to 

confirm Phil’s presence in that state.25

Rachael [Thomas?]

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 40

Approximate date of birth: 1748

Valuation in 1788: £35

Location: Annapolis

Origin: Unknown

Family: Though no family of Rachael’s is indicated in Thomas Stone’s Annapolis probate 

inventory, other evidence informs us that Jack, age 10 in the Annapolis household in 1788, 

was her son. Was an enslaved girl in the same household, Betty, age 11, her child, too? Nine 

years later, Jack fled the household of Thomas Stone’s son-in-law, Travers Daniel, in 

Stafford County, Virginia. Daniel suspected Jack would go to his mother, “Rachel,” “also a 

runaway” who had moved from Annapolis to Baltimore. Daniel also publicized that Jack 

“may pass...for one of the Thomas family of negroes belonging to” Thomas Stone’s estate. 

Because the freedom claims of the Thomas family were based on female lineage, Daniel’s 

statement suggests that Jack’s mother, Rachael, may have been a member of the Thomas 

family.26

Occupation: Domestic servant. Rachael was in a vulnerable position after Thomas and 

Margaret Stone died. Robert Couden, an Annapolis merchant and brother-in-law to John 

Hoskins Stone, arranged for Rachael’s hiring out for several years. In 1790, Michael Jenifer 

Stone, executor of Thomas Stone’s estate, asked Couden to arrange to “vendue her off—She 

will bring very little. But I can’t help it.” Rachael, then in her mid-40s, left Annapolis for 

Baltimore sometime between September 1791 and 1797.27

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Remained in Thomas Stone’s estate but emancipated 

herself by moving to Baltimore.

Sall

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 22

25 George Clements account with Michael Jenifer Stone, January 7, 1794–January 1, 1795, William Briscoe 

Stone Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University; Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), August 8, 1799. Appendix 8 

includes the advertisement for Phil.

26 Advertisement by Travers Daniel Jr., for Jack, dated October 28, 1797, in Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), 

January 11, 1798. The advertisement is reproduced in Appendix 8.

27 Account of Michael Jenifer Stone with Robert Couden, November 6, 1787–October 15, 1791, William Briscoe 

Stone Papers, Rubenstein Library, Duke University; Michael Jenifer Stone to Walter Stone, June 24, 1790, Stone 

Family Papers, LC. 
275

Appendix 9

Approximate date of birth: 1766

Valuation in 1788: £50

Location: Charles County; Annapolis?

Origin: Unknown

Family: Possibly a relative or domestic partner of Bob; see Bob. Sall was a mother by late 1785. 

In a letter to Walter Stone of December 1785, Thomas Stone asked, could “Sal and her 

child” could be “sold for a good price?” A month earlier he wanted to hire Sall out “for 

anything above her Victuals and Clothes.”28

Occupation: Cook; domestic servant. In early 1786, Thomas Stone asked for Sall or her sister 

Heth to be sent to him in Annapolis. In 1791, Michael Jenifer Stone wanted “Milly’s Sall” to 

work for him as a cook.29

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Bequeathed to Mildred Stone.

Tom Triplet

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 40

Approximate date of birth: 1748

Valuation in 1788: £70

Location: Charles County

Origin: Unknown. The name “Triplett” was common on the Northern Neck of Virginia, judging 

from the website Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern 

Neck Counties.

Family: Husband of Ann, who was a daughter of Clare. By 1790, Ann was the mother of four 

children whose names are unknown.

Occupation: Carpenter. Thomas Stone asked his brother Walter to hire out or sell Tom in late 

1785.30

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Sold by Thomas Stone’s executors with Ann and her 

four unnamed children to Joseph Edelin of Prince George’s County in 1790.31

Violette (Violet) Thomas

Age in 1788 according to inventory: 23

Approximate date of birth: 1765–7032

Valuation in 1788: £50

Location: Charles County

28 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, November 24, December 21, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC. 

29 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, January 15, 1786, Stone Family Papers, LC; Michael Jenifer Stone to [Walter 

Stone], January 2, 1791, Thomas Stone National Historic Site manuscript collection.

30 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, November 24, December 21, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC. 

31 Bill of sale, Walter Stone as attorney for Thomas Stone’s executors to Joseph Edelin, Charles County Land 

Records, K#4:114, MSA. The bill of sale indicates that three men—Thomas Stone, John Hoskins Stone, and 

Edward Edelin—were shareholders in “Carpenter Tom.” The document also stipulated that only Joseph Edelin 

and his “heirs and assigns” were to “hold” Tom; Tom’s resale was prohibited. For a transcription of the bill of 

sale, see Appendix 15.

32 Violette Thomas attested in 1799 that she was twenty-nine years old, which would make her younger than 

Thomas Stone’s probate inventory indicated (Charles County Land Records, IB#3:77, MSA).
276

Appendix 9

Origin: Born on David Stone’s estate in Durham Parish, Charles County. Violette, a “yellow” 

woman, claimed descent from “Clare, who was the daughter of Peg, commonly called 

Semple’s Peg, who was the daughter of Betty commonly called Betty Mingo.”33

Family: Her mother Clare had extensive kinship ties in Charles County and beyond as a descendent of Elizabeth Thomas and Betty Mingo. Her sisters were Nan (who came into the 

possession of Michael Jenifer Stone), Ann, Heth, and a younger Clare. Violette, a mother of 

at least one child by April 1785, had at least one additional child by the time Thomas Stone 

wrote his will. Stone recognized Violette as a head of household; in 1785, he directed that 

Violette receive an allotment of pork.34

Occupation: Unknown. Violette and her child were hired out in 1785 on a one-year term. When 

the end of her term approached, Thomas Stone asked his brother Walter to hire out Violette 

“at some proper place.” Thomas Stone did not want to sell Violette or her sisters.35

Disposition after Thomas Stone’s death: Bequeathed with “all her children” to Margaret Stone. 

In 1799, Violette Thomas became free by a deed of manumission signed by Margaret’s 

husband, John Moncure Daniel.36

Other Enslaved Individuals with a Connection 

to Thomas and Margaret Stone

In addition to the twenty-five enslaved people listed on Thomas Stone’s probate inventories, the names of another twelve people appear in records with an attachment to his estate. 

Only one indentured servant has been identified; in 1770, a native of Ireland named John 

Murdock fled from Thomas Stone, taking with him a stolen bay horse. Based on the available evidence, Stone and his wife relied heavily on enslaved labor.37

Peter is one of the first enslaved men whom Thomas Stone purchased, according to 

surviving documentation. Peter was reportedly “not above the age of twenty-five” and 

already in Stone’s possession (likely as a hired man) when Stone bought him from William 

Barnes and Thomas Smoot in Charles County in 1774. Michael Jenifer Stone made a 

reference to Peter in a letter of 1791, but Peter was not included in Thomas Stone’s 1788 

inventories.38

33 Certificate of Violette Thomas, dated May 27, 1796, recorded October 16, 1799, Charles County Land 

Records IB#3:77, MSA. Appendix 13 provides a transcription of the certificate.

34 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22, 1785, and Thomas Stone to Walter Stone or Michael Jenifer Stone, 

December 21, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC; Thomas Stone’s will, 1787, transcribed in Appendix 3.

35 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22 and November 24, and Thomas Stone to Walter Stone or Michael 

Jenifer Stone, December 21, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC. 

36 Deed of manumission for Violette Thomas, made March 27, 1797, recorded October 16, 1799, Charles County 

Land Records, IB#3:77, MSA. 

37 For the advertisement for John Murdock, see Appendix 8.

38 Charles County Land Records, S#3:523–24; Michael Jenifer Stone to [Walter Stone], January 2, 1791, 

Thomas Stone National Historic Site manuscript collection, in which Michael Jenifer Stone wrote, “I am sorry 

for Peter,” but the context of the remark is unknown.
277

Appendix 9

Bet absconded as a young woman from Thomas Stone’s Philadelphia household in 

October 1776. Her place of origin, and what became of her after she ran away, are 

unknown. The female “Bett” whom Thomas Stone referred to in his will likely was the 

much younger Betty, age ten, who worked in Stone’s Annapolis household.39

Margaret was at the mill in 1785, the same year that she died. Thomas Stone wrote 

to his brother from Annapolis, “I fear the poor creature suffered and am really sorry for 

her but I had no knowledge that she was in the least ill until I heard by Mrs Stone that she 

was very bad.” Before Margaret’s death, Stone expressed an interest in hiring her out to 

Thomas How Ridgate (“Ask Mr Ridgate to let me know if he will want Margaret”). An 

enslaved woman named Margaret, age thirty-three, was listed as a resident on David 

Stone’s estate in 1774, but there is no confirmation that this is the same Margaret who 

Thomas Stone claimed possession of. Another possibility is that the deceased woman was 

Margaret (b. 1723), the mother of a family held in bondage by the former Port Tobacco mill 

owner Roger Smith (d. 1768). This Margaret, who had at least seven children with her 

enslaved husband Roger by 1768, would have been sixty-five years old in 1785.40

Rachael and Lucy (Luce), the only recorded daughters of Margaret (Peg) and Roger 

in the estate of Roger Smith (d. 1768) of Charles County, are two other enslaved women 

who appear to have worked at or near the mill. The sisters were included in Thomas 

Stone’s lease and subsequent purchase of Roger Smith’s former property, a mill and two 

tracts called Chandlers Hill and Welcome. Chapter 4 provides information about these 

transactions. The birthdates of this Rachael and the Rachael (Thomas) in Thomas Stone’s 

probate inventory are four years apart. Given the imprecision with which ages of the 

enslaved were recorded in probate inventories, it is possible that they are the same person. 

The name Lucy, though, does not appear in Thomas Stone’s probate inventories of 1788.41

Thomas Stone hired Will from his sister, Catherine Scott, in 1777 and 1778, according to Catherine’s son. Their sister Grace Stone also held in bondage a man named Will, 

who likely came from their father’s estate. In 1785, Thomas Stone included “Will” among 

the enslaved people that he owed taxes on that year; it’s difficult to say who he was referring to.42

39 Chapter 3 discusses Bet and her circumstances in Philadelphia.

40 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, April 22, 1785 (“Margot at the mill”), November 24, 1785 (“Ask Mr 

Ridgate”), and Thomas Stone to Walter or Michael Jenifer Stone, December 21, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC; 

probate inventory of Roger Smith, taken August 2, 1768, recorded November 6, 1769, Charles County 

Inventories, 1766–73: 283–86, MSA; will of Roger Smith, May 18, 1768, proven June 21, 1768, Charles County 

Wills, AE6:28–30, MSA. 

41 Charles County Land Records V#3:210, 539–42, 588–89, MSA. According to Roger Smith’s probate inventory of 1768, Rachel was born in or around 1752 and her sister Lucy in or around 1760.

42 Alexander Scott’s bill of complaint, 1805, Chancery Court, Chancery Papers, case 4647, MSA; probate 

inventory of Grace Stone, Charles County Register of Wills, I&A 1808–1812:416; Thomas Stone to Walter 

Stone, April 22, 1785, Stone Family Papers, LC.
278

Appendix 9

Jeane entered a legal limbo during the Revolutionary War when the man who 

claimed her as property, Lloyd Dulany, a prominent Annapolis resident and a Loyalist, and 

his wife left for England in 1776. The state of Maryland confiscated Dulany’s estate and 

sold Jeane to Thomas Stone in 1782. Where or in what circumstances Jeane lived is 

unknown. 

Also during the Revolutionary War, Thomas Stone transferred a man named Harry, 

his wife Nan, another man named Joe, and a boy called Clem into the ownership of a 

Charles County planter named Charles Goodrick in partial payment for 120 acres of land. 

How the four people came under Thomas Stone’s control is not presently known.43

Lastly, a man named Webster accompanied Jack from Haberdeventure to Annapolis 

in December 1783 to bring back Thomas Stone’s carriage and other articles. Webster’s 

status as free or unfree is unknown.44

43 Charles County Land Records, V#3:402–3, 423, MSA.

44 Thomas Stone to Walter Stone, December 3, 1783, The Rosenbach, Philadelphia.
279

Ap p e n d i x 10

Known Family Groups among the Enslaved at 

Thomas Stone’s Properties

Clare (Thomas)

Nan

Violette Thomas

—Child by 1787

—Child by 1787

Ann, married to Tom Triplet

—Child by 1785

—Child by 1790

—Child by 1790

—Child by 1790

Heth

Clare 

Sall and Bob

Child by 1785

Rachael (wife of Jack?)

 Jack (Thomas?)

Betty?

Ibe and Henry Semple

Kitty (b. 1788–93)

Nancy (b. 1788–93)

Rachael and Lucy, sisters at the mill

281

Ap p e n d i x 11

Family Tree of Betty Mingo

Elizabeth Thomas Joseph Mingo

Peg (known as

Semple's Peg) Robin (b. ca. 1706)

Betty Mingo

(1689-ca. 1772)

Clare Monica

Sophia (Phia)

Judy or Judah

Robert Thomas

(won freedom suit,

1794)

Violette Thomas

(manumitted 1799)

Gustavus Thomas

(won freedom suit,

1798)

Nanny

283

Ap p e n d i x 12

Family Tree of Clare (Thomas)

Clare

Nan Violette Thomas Ann Heth Clare

Peg (known as

Semple's Peg)

Betty Mingo

Elizabeth Thomas

285

Ap p e n d i x 13

Transcription of Violette Thomas’s 1799 Deed of 

Manumission and 1796 Certificate

At the request of Violette Thomas the following deed of manumission was recorded this 

16th day of October Anno Domini to 1799

Know all men by these presents that I John M. Daniel do hereby promise to set my 

negro woman Violet free from all claims of my self, my heirs, executors, or assigns, after she 

has faithfully served me and my family, for two years from the present date, but I also 

hereby declare that I do not grant her her freedom from any belief that she is intitled to 

liberty by being descended of a free woman, but that I do it purely in consideration of, and 

as a reward for, her humility and obliging conduct towards my family. Witness my hand and 

seal this twenty seventh day of March one thousand, seven hundred and ninety seven.

Jno. M. Daniel

Witness: [Lob’s?] Thos. Watkins

At the request of Violette Thomas the following certificate was recorded this 16th day of 

October Anno Domini 1799.

Annapolis 27th May 1796. I certify that the bearer Violette Thomas a lusty yellow 

woman the common size and about twenty nine years of age (formerly the property of Miss 

Peggy Stone) is proved by a deposition taken concerning her right to freedom, to be of the 

Thomas Family who obtained their freedom in the General Court at October term 1794, as 

follows, viz, that she is the daughter of Clare, who was the daughter of Peg, commonly 

called Semple’s Peg, who was the daughter of Betty commonly called Betty Mingo.

G. Duvall

Source: Charles County Land Records IB#3:76–77, MSA.

287

Ap p e n d i x 14

“The Thomas Family”

From “O Say Can You See: Early Washington, DC, Law & Family Project,” http://earlywashingtondc.org/family-guides/Thomas.pdf.

The Thomas Family

The Thomas family from St. Mary's, Prince George's, and Charles Counties, Maryland, and Washington, DC, sued 

for their freedom between 1791-1810, claiming they were descended from a free woman named Elizabeth 

Thomas. These cases and the families who brought them were important in American history. 

w Robert Thomas v. Rev. Henry Pile (Charles County, MD, 1791)

w Daniel Thomas v. Henry Hamersley (Charles County, 1791)

w Eleanor Thomas, Priscilla Thomas, Matthew Thomas, John Thomas, Henry Thomas v. Benjamin Reeder 

(Charles County, 1791 ?)

w Gustavus Thomas v. Michael Jenifer Stone & Gustavus Richard Brown, executors of Thomas Stone 

(Charles County, 1791)

w John Thomas v. Raphael Boarman (Charles County, MD, 1792 ?)

w Elizabeth Thomas v. Raphael Boarman (Charles County, 1792)

w Ann Thomas v. Raphael Boarman (Charles County, 1792)

w Henry Thomas v. Raphael Boarman (Charles County, 1792)

w Archy Thomas v. Raphael Boarman (Charles County, 1792)

w Harry Thomas v. Raphael Boarman (Charles County, 1792)

w Priscilla Thomas v. Raphael Boarman (Charles County, 1792)

w Betsey Thomas v. Raphael Boarman (Charles County, 1792)

w Rhenny Thomas v. Raphael Boarman (Charles County, 1792)

w Nelly Thomas v. Raphael Boarman (Charles County, 1792)

w Louisa Thomas v. Raphael Boarman (Charles County, 1792)

w Lawson Thomas v. William Campbell (Charles County, 1792 ?)

w Charles Thomas v. Alexander Scott (Charles County, 1792)

w George Thomas v. Sarah Stone (Charles County, 1792)

w Lucy Thomas v. David Stone (Charles County, 1792)

w Sarah Thomas v. David Stone (Charles County, 1792)

w Thomas Thomas v. Anne Stone (Charles County, 1792)

w Ann Thomas, Jarrett Thomas, John Thomas v. Clement Briscoe (St. Mary's County, 1792)

w Richard Thomas v. Thomas Attaway Reeder (St. Mary's County, 1793)

w David Thomas v. Nicholas Blacklock (St. Mary's County, 1793 ?)

w Gustavus Thomas v. Lancelot Mason (Charles County, 1793)

w Judy Thomas v. Rev. Henry Pile (Charles County, MD, 1794/5)
Appendix 14

288

earlywashingtondc.org 

w William Thomas v. Edmund Plowdon, executor of Ignatius Wheeler (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Jesse Thomas v. Edmund Plowdon, executor of Ignatius Wheeler (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Teressa Thomas v. Richard Barnes (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Susanna Thomas v. Joseph Hall (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Juda Thomas v. Joseph Hall (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w John Thomas v. Joseph Hall (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Luke Thomas v. Joseph Hall (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Charity Thomas v. Joseph Hall (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w David Thomas v. Joseph Hall (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Stephen Thomas v. Joseph Hall (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w William Thomas v. Betty Ann Eden (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Jeremiah Thomas v. Betty Ann Eden (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Margaret Thomas v. Betty Ann Eden (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Teresia Thomas v. Betty Ann Eden (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Henry Thomas v. Betty Ann Eden (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Eliza Thomas v. Betty Ann Eden (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Matilda Thomas v. Betty Ann Eden (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Peter Thomas v. Betty Ann Eden (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Ann Thomas v. Betty Ann Eden (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Mary Thomas v. Betty Ann Eden (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Charles Thomas v. Betty Ann Eden (St. Mary's County, MD, 1797)

w Peter Thomas v. Samuel Hamilton (Prince George's County, MD, 1797)

w Stephen Thomas v. John Ashton (Prince George's County, MD, 1797)

w Charles Thomas v. Clement Smith (Prince George's County, MD, 1797)

w Peter Thomas v. Creedy Hamilton (Washington, DC, 1809)

w Walter & Dennis Thomas v. Alexander Scott (Washington, DC, 1809)

w Peter Thomas v. Christiana Hamilton (Washington, DC, 1810)

If you have any information to contribute to the project about this family, please let us know.

William G. Thomas III  wgthomas3@gmail.com  (402) 472-2414
289

Appendix 14

earlywashingtondc.org 

The Thomas Family

The Thomas family tree is based on court records from the National Archives in Washington, DC, the Maryland 

State Archives in Annapolis, and Thomas F. Brown and Leah C. Sims, "'To Swear Him Free': Ethnic Memory as 

Social Capital in Eighteenth-Century Freedom Petitions," in Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives, ed. Debra 

Meyers and Melanie Perreault (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006).

• Elizabeth Thomas – a Welsh woman

+ Joseph Mingo – arrived in Charles County, MD, prior to 1680

o Lewis Mingo – b. abt 1681

o Elizabeth "Betty" Mingo – d. abt 1772

 + Harry Cooper ?

§ Margaret "Peg" Thomas

- Henry Thomas – b. abt 1745

- Margaret "Peg" Thomas

• Richard Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1793 against Thomas Attaway 

Reeder

• Peter Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1797 against Samuel Hamilton

• Lawson Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1792 against William Campbell

- Monica Thomas

• Gustavus Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1791 against Thomas Stone

• Charles Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1792 against Alexander Scott

- Betty Thomas

• George Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1792 against Sarah Stone

• Lucy Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1792 against David Stone

• Sarah Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1792 against David Stone

§ Thomas Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1792 against Anne 

Stone

- Clare Thomas

• Jenny Thomas

§ Gustavus Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1793 against 

Lancelot Mason

§ Robin Mingo
290

Appendix 14

earlywashingtondc.org 

§ Sophia Thomas

- Judah "Judy" Thomas – b. abt 1752

• Robert Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1791 against Rev. Henry Pile

- Eleanor Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1791 against Benjamin Reeder

§ Nanny Cooper

- John Thomas – filed freedom suit abt 1792 against Raphael Boarman

§ Jenny Thomas

- Henry Thomas – b. abt 1745

- Jenny Thomas

• Daniel Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1791 against Henry Hamersley

§ Sarah Thomas

- Letty Thomas

• Richard Thomas

• Jerry Thomas

• Eleanor Thomas

• David Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1793 against Nicholas Blacklock

• Ann Thomas – filed freedom suit in 1792

- Richard Thomas

o Charles Mingo

 + Mary Curtis

§ Jonathan Curtis

If you have any information to contribute to the project about this family, please let us know.

William G. Thomas III  wgthomas3@gmail.com  (402) 472-2414
291

Ap p e n d i x 15

Transcription of Bill of Sale 

for Ann, Tom, and Children, 1790

At the request of Joseph Edelin the Following Bill of Sale was Recorded this 28th day of 

June Anno Domini 1790. Maryland Charles County to wit March 25th 1790. Know all men 

by these presents. that I, Walter Stone Attorney for Michael Jenifer Stone and Gustavus 

Richard Brown Executors of the Estate of Thomas Stone Esquire for and in consideration 

of the Sum of one Hundred and Ten pounds Maryland Currency to me in hand paid or 

Secured to be paid, the receipt whereof I the said Walter Stone Attorney as aforesaid do 

hereby Acknowledge: have given Granted, Bargained and Sold, and do by these presents, 

give, grant, Bargain and Sell, unto Joseph Edelin of Prince Georges County, one negroe 

Woman called Ann, and her four children; to have and to hold the said negroe Ann and her 

four children for the only proper use and behoof of him the said Joseph Edelin his Heirs 

and assigns, the right and property of and in the said negroes Ann and her four children to 

the said Joseph Edelin his heirs and Assigns, against all manner of Persons whatsoever, will 

forever Warrant and defend. and the said Walter Stone attorney as aforesaid have also 

given, granted, bargained and sold and by these presents do give grant bargain and sell unto 

the said Joseph Edelin his Heirs and assigns all the right, title Interest and property of 

Thomas Stone Esquire of Colonel John Hoskins Stone and of Edward Edelin in and to one 

negroe man called Tom, a Carpenter to have and hold the said carpenter Tom for the only 

proper use and behoof of him the said Joseph Edelin his heirs and assigns. In witness 

whereof I have hereunto fixed my hand and seal the date and year first above written.

Test. James A. Corr Walter Stone, attorney for

David Griffith M J Stone & G. R. Brown, 

Exrs. of T. Stone

On the back of the aforegoing Bill of Sale was thus written to wit...on the Thirteenth day of 

May 1790 came Walter Stone Attorney for Michael Jenifer Stone and Gustavus Richard 

Brown Executors of Thomas Stone Esquire...and acknowledge the negroes Ann and her 

four children and Carpenter Tom therein mentioned to be the right and Property of Joseph 

Edelin, his heirs and assigns therein mentioned.

Source: Charles County Land Records, K#4:114, MSA.

293

Ap p e n d i x 16

Transcription of Grace Stone’s Account with John and 

Walter Stone, November 23, 1790, to September 30, 1791

Dr Miss Grace Stone, In Acct with John & Walter Stone

1790 Currency

November 23 To 51⁄2 yd kersey a 4/. Thread 1/. 2 doz buttons a 8d 1 4 4

31⁄2 yd. Osnabrig a 1/6. Thread 1/. 1p. yarn hose 2/9 9

December 8th 6 yds plains a 3/9. thread 1/. 1 p yarn hose 2/9 for Sall 1 6 3

16 Sundries for Negroe Sall Vizt

5 yds Osnabrig a 1/8. 11⁄2 yd. Linsey a 2/9/ 12 51⁄2 

1 p. Shoes 8/4. 1 oz thread 6d 8 10

25 2 1⁄2 yd Blk pealong a 7/6. 2 pr Shoes a 7/6. 1 hank Silk 10d 1 14 7

1791

January 3 1 p. hose 3⁄4. 1⁄2 yd Rapping a 2/4 for Jim 4 6

11 paid for making a Shirt for Bill 1 6

13 Eleanar Davis 17 8

5 yds osnabrig a 1/6. thread 1/. 8 6

18 6 yds Rolls for Winny 7/. 7

19 1 yd. wh. flannel 3/. Tea & Sugar 3/8 for Winny 6 8

22 1 p Shoes for Bill 11/3 11 3

February 2 8 yds Cotton a 2/9. Thread 1/. for 3 Children 1 3

cash paid Midwife’s fee for Winny 15

9 21⁄2 yd kersey a 3/. 1 oz thread 6d for Basil 8

22 21⁄4 yds kersey a 4/. buttons 8d. thread 1/. for Bill 10 8

March 18 paid for making a pair breeches for ditto 3

26 cash pd for Cutting out do do 1 3

April 4 1 hat for Bill 7/6. 1/4 yd. plains for ditto 11d 1⁄4 8 51⁄4

25 1 yd osnabrig for Basil 1/8. 1 8

June 7 7 yds osnabrig 1 1/8. 1⁄4 osnabrig .. 1/3 for Bill 12 11

Septem. 24 31⁄2 yd. osnabrig for Sall 6 11⁄2

26 R. Fergusson 23⁄4 yd. modr a 10/6 1 8 102

ditto 4 yds Crape a 4/6. 18

Henry Barnes 10 yds ditto a 4/6 2 5

4 hks. Silk a 10d. Thread 1/. 63⁄4 yd. Calimanco a 2/3 19 61⁄4

2 yds. Brown holland a 2/4 4 8

November

December 

16

January

13

February 2

March

April

Septem.

26

Currency

23
294

Appendix 16

Cr

1791 £ 18 18 8

Septem 30 To balance ... 7 2 5

Contra

1791

Feb.y 3 By Richard Mitchell for hire of Will 8 1 3

May 10 By George Simpson 1 Month’s hire of ditto 1 17 6

By Cash recd. of Barton Flannigan and 

part of Bill’s hire

1 17 6

Sep. 30 By Balance p Debit 7 2 5

£ 18 18 8

Glossary

Kersey: A kind of coarse narrow cloth, woven from long wool and usually 

ribbed.

Osnaburg: As a mass noun: a kind of coarse linen (and later cotton) cloth 

originally made at Osnabrück, used especially for making rough hard-wearing 

clothing, or for furnishings, sacks, tents, and so forth. As a count noun (usually 

in plural, sometimes treated as singular): a quantity of this; (also) an item or 

items made of such cloth, especially (formerly) clothing given to servants or 

slaves.

Pelong: A kind of silk fabric.

Crape: A thin transparent gauze-like fabric, plain woven, without any twill, of 

highly twisted raw silk or other staple, and mechanically embossed, so as to have a 

crisped or minutely wrinkled surface.

Calimanco: A woolen stuff of Flanders, glossy on the surface, and woven with a 

satin twill and chequered in the warp, so that the checks are seen on one side only; 

much used in the eighteenth century.

Holland: A linen fabric, originally called, from the province of Holland in the 

Netherlands, Holland cloth. When unbleached, it is called brown Holland.

Document Source: William Briscoe Stone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. 

Word definitions supplied from the Oxford English Dictionary Online.

Transcriber: Crystal O’Connor

May 10
295

Ap p e n d i x 17 

Probate Inventory of Grace Stone, 1811

Inventory of the goods, chattels and personal estate of Grace Stone late of Charles County 

deceased, appraised...this 12th day of June 1811

Winney “about” age 39 160.00

Child age 1 50.00

Harry age 25 340.00

Ann age 16 260.00

Charles age 14 280.00

Basil age 12 220.00

Luce “I guess” age 85 —

4 old trunks 2.00

1 old bed + 2 pillows 4.50

1 small pitcher 0.20

2 old books 0.50

wearing apparel 5.00

_________

Total $1522.20

Appraisers John B. Wills and Will Vincent

Sworn by administrator of the will, John [E.?] Ford, on August 14, 1811

Source: Charles County Register of Wills, Inventories and Accounts 1808–12, p. 416, MSA.

297

Ap p e n d i x 18

Agreement between Walter Stone and Thomas Ostro 

(Osston), January 10, 1787

Articles of Agreement made this day between Walter Stone for Thomas Stone & Thomas 

Ostro Witnesseth that the said Ostro covenants & Obliges himself to take charge of manage 

& Conduct the said Stone’s Mill near Port Tobacco & a field adjoining to the road together 

with such Stock as shall be Comitted to him, and Negroe Phil—for the year 1787, and to 

raise hogs at said place & to find Horses to work said field for which said Ostro is to be 

allowed one tenth part of the Clear profits of said Mill, one fifth part of the pork raised—

provided not above five thousand weight is to be raised in any one year, and one half the 

clear profits of the said Land, and the said Ostro binds & obliges himself to conduct the 

said Mill & property diligently & faithfully, & to Obey the said Stone’s directions respecting 

the same & In all things to act as a faithfull carefull & Thrifty manager for said Stone & to 

do Justice to all customers coming to said Mill & to keep the same in good and proper 

repair, and the said Ostro obliges himself to treat and use the Negroes of the said Stone 

which may be at the Mill with care and humanity, & to have no Drinking or Gaming at the 

Mill & the said Stone shall have free liberty to turn off the said Ostro at any time if his in 

any manner misbehaves himself & of which the said Stone shall be Sole Judge—and to 

render at the End of every four Months on oath, if required by the Stone a fair faithfull and 

Just account to the said Stone of all and every thing appertaining unto the Mill, In witness 

whereof the parties have hereunto set their this 10th day of Jany 1787

Thomas Osston

Witness WStone

Rd. Tubman
298

Appendix 18

Inventory of the Goods at the Mill1

2 Mill Peckers2

1 Chain

4 Cows & 1 Yearling 

3 old Plows

1 Sow & 4 Shoats

1 narrow Ax

1 Sorrel Mare & 1 Colt

1 pr Hinges

1 Skew Bald Horse3

1 Whip Saw

Fredereck’s Mare

2 old Hilling hoes

2 oxen

1 adz

1 Coulter4

1 Cart

1 Pot & Dutchoven

1 Hand Saw

Rd. Tubman Thomas Osston

NB. 1 pr Hand Mill Stones

Source: Wanamaker Scrapbook, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

1 Inventory is in a different hand.

2 Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter abbreviated as OED): A mill-pick (also millpeck) was “an iron tool for 

producing a corrugated surface on a mill stone.” The word dates to the fourteenth century.

3 OED: Skewbald is an adjective, especially with horses, meaning “irregularly marked with white and brown or 

red, or some similar color.”

4 OED: A coulter is the “iron blade in front of the share in a plough; it makes a vertical cut in the soil, which is 

then sliced horizontally by the share.”
299

Ap p e n d i x 19

Legal History Research Methods and Results

by Amy Speckart, PhD, and Edward A. Bradley, PhD

Introduction by Amy Speckart, PhD

The Scope of Work for the Thomas Stone National Historic Site Historic Resource 

Study called for documentation of Thomas Stone’s legal career “as a means for 

determining [Stone’s] role, influence, and relationships in Charles County and 

beyond.” As this brief introductory essay will make clear, I took a collaborative approach to 

crafting and executing a research plan for examining court records at the Maryland State 

Archives. I will explain key research selection decisions, identify the research goals, and 

discuss unexpected discoveries and obstacles. 

Early on, I sought the advice of Paul D. Halliday, Professor of History at the 

University of Virginia, author of a landmark work in English Atlantic legal history, Habeus 

Corpus: From England to Empire (2010), on how to start the process of acquiring data on 

Stone’s legal career. Professor Halliday suggested a method of sampling court records that 

he had recently used in the former British colony of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Choose three 

years, Professor Halliday suggested, and read across those years in a selection of higher and 

lower courts, looking for evidence of Stone’s appearances.

Owen E. Lourie, Historian at the Maryland State Archives, suggested ways for Dr. 

Edward A. Bradley, a research professional I had hired to conduct work at the Maryland 

State Archives, and me to refine this approach based on the available records. Mr. Lourie 

suggested starting with the higher courts—the Provincial Court and the General Courts of 

the Eastern and Western Shores. The quality of the records for the higher courts is higher 

and more consistent than for the county courts. Mr. Lourie further suggested starting our 

work with dockets in which we could find references to Thomas Stone much more quickly, 

in the dockets’ abbreviated notation form, than thumbing through pages of judgments. 

Taking into account the records that were available, Dr. Bradley and I selected three 

years to document the beginning, middle, and end of Thomas Stone’s legal career—1771, 

1779, and 1786. After examining the higher courts, our next priority was the county courts 

to which Stone was admitted, starting with Stone’s home county, Charles County, and 

Prince George’s County. Given that no Charles County court records from between 1781 

and 1787 survive, Mr. Lourie assured us that Prince George’s County would be a good 

stand-in for Charles for 1786. Our third priority was Baltimore County, Frederick County, 

and the Mayor’s Court of Annapolis. 
300

Appendix 19

Dr. Bradley conducted the research itself, carefully examining dockets to find 

Thomas Stone’s appearances. For each appearance of “TS” as counsel Dr. Bradley 

recorded in spreadsheets the information provided by the dockets, which includes, for 

every suit, the names of the plaintiff and defendant, counsels’ initials, county of origin, and 

a description of the case in abbreviated form. Dr. Bradley also took photographs of each 

appearance of “TS.” The spreadsheets and the photographs will be submitted to the OAH 

and NPS with other research notes for this HRS.

One weakness of this docket stripping approach is positively identifying each 

occurrence of the initials “TS” as a reference to Thomas Stone. How do we know that the 

initials “TS” on the dockets refer to Thomas Stone? (I thank Mr. Lourie for raising this 

question.) A comprehensive study of lawyers in colonial Maryland, Alan F. Day’s A Social 

Study of Lawyers in Maryland, 1660–1775 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), particularly its appendix of biographies, gave us some assurance that there were no other lawyers 

in the higher courts with the initials “TS” during Stone’s lifetime, but Day ended his examination of court records in 1775. Another source of assurance is that a court clerk would 

have distinguished between two men with the same initials. For instance, clerks wrote 

down “Jgs” to refer to Thomas Jennings, presumably in order to avoid confusion with 

Thomas Johnson, another prominent lawyer active at the time. Otherwise I trusted Dr. 

Bradley’s judgment as he spent day after day in the Maryland State Archives reading room, 

examining the manuscript record. His biggest challenge with respect to the initials was not 

separating various forms of “TS” but in distinguishing the letters “TS” from “TJ,” and this 

was most difficult for the Provincial Court record of 1771. By 1779, Stone had gained more 

notoriety, and the “TS” appears in more distinct form. Dr. Bradley and I are reasonably 

confident that our results document Thomas Stone’s appearances in the higher courts in 

three selected years.

As it turned out, Dr. Bradley’s meticulous work documenting the appearance of 

Thomas Stone’s initials on the dockets of the higher courts absorbed all the research hours 

that I had budgeted for his work. In fact, we did not finish a complete sample of the year 

1786 in the General Court of the Western Shore; Dr. Bradley made a full record of Stone’s 

appearances at the May session, but we ran short on time and did not record the October 

session. Thomas Stone had more cases by far come before the May 1786 session of the 

General Court of the Western Shore than any other session Dr. Bradley examined (247 in 

May 1786, in contrast to 63 in May 1779 and 27 in the Provincial Court in September 1771). 

Possible reasons for the heavier caseload include debt collection after the close of the 

Revolutionary War and Thomas Stone’s full-time residence in Annapolis, giving him more 

time to plead cases in the general court. Dr. Bradley and I did not foresee such a dramatic 

rise in Stone’s higher-court caseload when we made our research plan. 
301

Appendix 19

From the higher-court dockets alone, Dr. Bradley harvested far more data than 

could be analyzed for this HRS given time constraints. Nonetheless, a more comprehensive 

project should consider examining the Chancery Court (created in 1776, with no docket 

until 1784) plus the county courts. The best complement to this study would observe the 

same sampling techniques in order to identify patterns in Thomas Stone’s law practice. 

Report by Edward A. Bradley, PhD

The research at the Maryland State Archives aimed at detecting patterns in Thomas Stone’s 

legal career through an analysis of Maryland court records—specifically, dockets from the 

Provincial Court (1771), the General Court of the Eastern Shore (1779 and 1786), and the 

General Court of the Western Shore (1779 and May 1786). This research method posed 

several challenges—including incomplete (or nonexistent) listings of forms of action, 

obscure legal abbreviations, and multiple spellings of an individual’s surname. 

Nevertheless, based on this sample, we discerned that the large majority of Stone’s cases 

involved debt or property (ejectment, trespass, etc.) matters; he worked on relatively few 

criminal cases or petition for freedom cases. Stone seemed particularly active during the 

GCWS May 1786 term, as his caseload was heavy at that time. As would be expected for a 

resident of Charles County, a large portion of Stone’s casework originated either in Charles 

County or in neighboring Prince George’s County. Research in Prince George’s County 

court records might be worthwhile.

The following is a breakdown of our research under the categories of Forms of 

Action, Counsel in Stone’s Cases, Stone’s Co-counsels, Stone’s Repeat Clients, County of 

Origin, and Monetary Value of judgments/settlements. Commentary (in italics) is interspersed throughout.

Initials have been matched to individuals based on knowledge of the period and 

Day’s A Social Study of Lawyers in Maryland, 1660–1775, Appendix B, “Biographical 

Appendix.” 

Total Number of Docket Appearances by “TS”

Provincial Court, September 1771: 27

General Court of the Eastern Shore, 1779: 19 

April 1779: 10

September 1779: 9

General Court of the Eastern Shore, 1786: 17

April 1786: 13

September 1786: 4

General Court of the Western Shore, 1779: 150

May 1779: 63

October 1779: 87
302

Appendix 19

General Court of the Western Shore, 1786: [247+]*

May 1786: 247

*Data not recorded for October 1786 session of General Court of the Western Shore

Forms of Action in Thomas Stone’s Cases

Many cases (164 out of the total 460 recorded) did not have a form of action listed. It is safe to 

assume that a considerable percentage of these cases involved debt, ejectment, or trespass.

Provincial Court, September 1771

Debt: 4

Ejectment: 5

Replevin: 1

Trespass: 5

General Court of the Eastern Shore, April and September 1779

Debt: 2

Ejectment: 4

Trespass: 6

General Court of the Eastern Shore, April and September 1786

Ejectment: 9

Replevin: 1

Scire Facias: 2

General Court of the Western Shore, May and October 1779

Assault: 6

Debt: 24

Ejectment: 44

False Imprisonment: 4

Replevin: 9

Scire Facias: 2

Slander: 6

Trespass: 15 

Trover: 2

General Court of the Western Shore, May 1786 

Debt: 95

Ejectment: 23

Petition for Freedom: 5

Replevin: 7

Scire Facias: 12

Trespass: 3
303

Appendix 19

Counsel in Thomas Stone’s Cases

Initials-only listings indicate that more than one Stone contemporary had those initials.*

* The initials “JH” and “JTC” were difficult to distinguish from one another.

Provincial Court 1771

Samuel Chase (SC): 11 appearances (6 plaintiff, 5 defense)

George Corbin (GC): 1 appearance (defense)

JH: 9 appearances (1 plaintiff, 8 defense)

Thomas Jennings (Jgs): 11 appearances (8 plaintiff, 3 defense)

Thomas Johnson (TJ): 12 appearances (8 plaintiff, 4 defense)

William Paca (WP): 3 appearances (1 plaintiff, 2 defense)

John Rogers (JR): 9 appearances (6 plaintiff, 3 defense)

James Tilghman or James Tilghman III (Til): 2 appearances (2 defense)

General Court of the Eastern Shore 1779 

Francis Curtis (FC): 1 appearance (defense)

G: 9 appearances (7 plaintiff, 2 defense)

RG: 6 appearances (5 plaintiff, 1 defense) 

RGG: 3 appearances (3 plaintiff)

JH: 1 appearance (1 plaintiff)

Thomas Jennings (Jgs): 3 appearances (3 defense)

Luther Martin (LM): 5 appearances (2 plaintiff, 3 defense) 

Joseph Nicholson Jr. (JN): 3 appearances (3 defense)

Josiah Polk (JP): 1 appearance (defense)

PS: 1 appearance (defense)

Gustavus Scott (GS): 2 appearances (1 plaintiff, 1 defense)

JW (not in list of TS contemporaries): 1 appearance (plaintiff)

Robert Wright (RW): 5 appearances (5 defense)

Solomon Wright (SWt): 1 appearance (plaintiff)

General Court of the Eastern Shore 1786

G: 1 appearance (plaintiff)

RG: 10 appearances (2 plaintiff, 8 defense) 

WH: 4 appearances (2 plaintiff, 2 defense)

Peregrine Leatherbury (PL): 4 appearances (4 defense)

Luther Martin (LM): 9 appearances (6 plaintiff, 3 defense) 

Gustavus Scott (GS): 3 appearances (1 plaintiff, 2 defense)

WT: 1 appearance (plaintiff)

Robert Wright (RW): 2 appearances (2 plaintiff)

General Court of the Western Shore 1779 

JSC: 1 appearance (defense)

WC: 6 appearances (2 plaintiff, 4 defense)

Jeremiah Townley Chase (JTC): 12 appearances (6 plaintiff, 6 defense)
304

Appendix 19

Samuel Chase (SC): 34 appearances (23 plaintiff, 11 defense)

Francis Curtis (FC): 2 appearances (2 defense) 

G: 40 appearances (24 plaintiff, 16 defense)

JH: 36 appearances (12 plaintiff, 24 defense)

Thomas Bedingfield Hands (TH): 1 appearance (defense)

Thomas Jennings (Jgs): 23 appearances (10 plaintiff, 13 defense)

Luther Martin (LM): 3 appearances (1 plaintiff, 2 defense)

Joseph Nicholson Jr. (JN): 5 appearances (3 plaintiff, 2 defense)

PP (not in list of TS contemporaries): 2 appearances (2 plaintiff)

RR (not in list of TS contemporaries): 4 appearances (2 plaintiff, 2 defense)

John Rogers (JR): 25 appearances (17 plaintiff, 8 defense)

John Allen Thomas (JAT): 1 appearance (plaintiff)

W: 1 appearance plaintiff)

JW (not in list of TS contemporaries): 7 appearances (5 plaintiff, 2 defense)

General Court of the Western Shore 1786

JA (not in list of TS contemporaries): 1 appearance (defense)

JC (not in list of TS contemporaries): 2 appearances (2 defense)

Jeremiah Townley Chase (JTC): 27 appearances (16 plaintiff, 11 defense)

Samuel Chase (SC): 47 appearances (21 plaintiff, 26 defense)

Francis Curtis (FC): 4 appearances (1 plaintiff, 3 defense)

GD (not in list of TS contemporaries): 19 appearances (8 plaintiff, 11 defendant)

JD (not in list of TS contemporaries): 2 appearances (2 defense)

WD (not in list of TS contemporaries): 5 appearances (4 plaintiff, 1 defense)

JH: 21 appearances (10 plaintiff, 11 defense)

ZH (not in list of TS contemporaries): 1 appearance (plaintiff)

Aquila Hall (AH): 1 appearance (defense)

Thomas Jennings (Jgs): 66 appearances (39 plaintiff, 27 defense)

EK (not in list of TS contemporaries): 1 appearance (defense)

DM (not in list of TS contemporaries): 7 appearances (3 plaintiff, 4 defense)

Luther Martin (LM): 43 appearances (22 plaintiff, 21 defense)

PP (not in list of TS contemporaries): 3 appearances (1 plaintiff, 2 defense)

Robert Pitt (RP): 34 appearances (28 plaintiff, 6 defense)

RR (not in list of TS contemporaries): 29 appearances (13 plaintiff, 16 defense)

MS (not in list of TS contemporaries): 22 appearances (15 plaintiff, 7 defense)

RS (not in list of TS contemporaries): 9 appearances (5 plaintiff, 4 defense)

T (not in list of TS contemporaries): 1 appearance (defense)

John Allen Thomas (JAT): 32 appearances (17 plaintiff, 15 defense)
305

Appendix 19

Thomas Stone’s Co-Counsels

Initials-only listings indicate that more than one Stone contemporary had those initials.*

* The initials “JH” and “JTC” were difficult to distinguish from one another.

Provincial Court 1771

Samuel Chase (SC): 2 co-counsel appearances

George Corbin (GC): 1 co-counsel appearance

JH: 5 co-counsel appearances

Thomas Jennings (Jgs): 3 co-counsel appearances

Thomas Johnson (TJ): 3 co-counsel appearances

John Rogers (JR): 3 co-counsel appearances

General Court of the Eastern Shore 1779

G: 4 co-counsel appearances

RG: 3 co-counsel appearances

RGG: 2 co-counsel appearances

Thomas Jennings (Jgs): 1 co-counsel appearance

Luther Martin (LM): 5 co-counsel appearances

General Court of the Eastern Shore 1786

RG: 9 co-counsel appearances

WH: 1 co-counsel appearance

Luther Martin (LM): 6 co-counsel appearances

Gustavus Scott (GS): 1 co-counsel appearance

WT: 1 co-counsel appearance

General Court of the Western Shore 1779 

WC: 2 co-counsel appearances

Jeremiah Townley Chase (JTC): 2 co-counsel appearances

Samuel Chase (SC): 4 co-counsel appearances

Francis Curtis (FC): 1 co-counsel appearance

G: 26 co-counsel appearances

JH: 5 co-counsel appearances

Thomas Bedingfield Hands (TH): 1 co-counsel appearance

Thomas Jennings (Jgs): 2 co-counsel appearances

Joseph Nicholson Jr. (JN): 4 co-counsel appearances

John Rogers (JR): 7 co-counsel appearances

RR (not in list of TS contemporaries): 4 co-counsel appearances

W: 1 co-counsel appearance

JW (not in list of TS contemporaries): 7 co-counsel appearances

General Court of the Western Shore 1786

JC (not in list of TS contemporaries): 1 co-counsel appearance

Jeremiah Townley Chase (JTC): 10 co-counsel appearances
306

Appendix 19

Samuel Chase (SC): 35 co-counsel appearances

Francis Curtis (FC): 2 co-counsel appearances

GD (not in list of TS contemporaries): 2 co-counsel appearances

JH: 4 co-counsel appearances

Thomas Jennings (Jgs): 4 co-counsel appearances

Luther Martin (LM): 16 co-counsel appearances

Robert Pitt (RP): 1 co-counsel appearance

RR (not in list of TS contemporaries): 8 co-counsel appearances

MS (not in list of TS contemporaries): 6 co-counsel appearances

RS (not in list of TS contemporaries): 1 co-counsel appearance

John Allen Thomas (JAT): 5 co-counsel appearances

Thomas Stone’s Repeat Clients

Provincial Court 1771

Davis, Henry (2 appearances)

Edwards, Martha (2 appearances)

Kingsbury/Kingsberry, John (2 appearances)

Marshall, James (2 appearances)

General Court of the Eastern Shore 1779

Caulk, Judith (for James) (2 appearances)

Chase, Samuel (2 appearances)

Earle, Richard Tilghman (5 appearances)

Handy, Henry (2 appearances)

McComb, Eleazer (2 appearances)

General Court of the Eastern Shore 1786

Chase, Samuel (2 appearances)

Hall, Francis (2 appearances)

Llewellin, John (Lessee) (2 appearances)

Macubbin, Nicholas (2 appearances)

Summers, James (Tenant) (2 appearances) 

Thomas, William (2 appearances)

General Court of the Western Shore 1779 (3 or More Appearances)

Allen, Bennett (7 appearances)

Calvert, Benedict (11 appearances)

Carroll, Charles (6 appearances)

Gauntt/Gaunt, Fielder (4 appearances)

Howard, James (4 appearances)

Key, Philip (4 appearances)

Lord Proprietary, or wife of (6 appearances)

Somerhill, William (5 appearances)
307

Appendix 19

Urquhart, Alexander (4 appearances)

Thomas Stone represented fifty (50) clients at least twice in the GCWS 1786 session.

General Court of the Western Shore May 1786 (3 or More Appearances)

Armstrong, James (3 appearances)

Beckwith, William (3 appearances)

Bowie, William Sprig (3 appearances)

Contee, Alexander (& Company) (3 appearances)

Contee, Thomas (11 appearances)

Deakins, William (4 appearances)

Fowler, Thomas (administrator of Hazeldine) (8 appearances)

Grahame, Asenath (7 appearances)

Hall, Philip (4 appearances)

Hudson, Jonathan (9 appearances)

Lee, Richard (administrator for Philip) (4 appearances)

Mason, George (6 appearances)

McFadon, Alexander (3 appearances)

O’Neal/O’Neil, Bernard (4 appearances)

Reeder, Thomas A. (3 appearances)

Steward, Richardson (3 appearances)

Watson, Henry (3 appearances)

West, Stephen (25 appearances)

Wilcoxen, William (3 appearances)

Wilks, Joseph (3 appearances)

Thomas Stone represented forty-eight clients at least twice in the GCWS May 1779 session.

County of Origin

Provincial Court 1771

Charles (13 appearances: 5 Ejectment, 3 Trespass, 2 Debt, 1 Replevin, 2 Not Listed)

Frederick (4 appearances: 1 Debt, 3 Not Listed)

Prince George’s (3 appearances: 1 Debt, 2 Not Listed)

Queen Anne’s (1 appearance: Not Listed)

Saint Mary’s (6 appearances: 2 Trespass, 4 Not Listed) 

General Court of the Eastern Shore 1779

Cecil (1 appearance: Debt)

Dorchester (1 appearance: Not Listed)

Kent (2 appearances: Not Listed)

Queen Anne’s (6 appearances: 4 Trespass, 1 Ejectment, 1 Not Listed)

Somerset (4 appearances: 2 Trespass, 1 Debt, 1 Not Listed)

Talbot (3 appearances: 3 Ejectment)

Worcester (2 appearances: Not Listed)
308

Appendix 19

General Court of the Eastern Shore 1786

Caroline (2 appearances: 1 Ejectment, 1 Not Listed)

Cecil (3 appearances: 3 Ejectment)

Dorchester (1 appearance: 1 Replevin)

Kent (3 appearances: 2 Scire Facias, 1 Not Listed)

Queen Anne’s (2 appearances: 2 Ejectment)

Talbot (3 appearances: 3 Ejectment)

Worcester (3 appearances: Not Listed)

General Court of the Western Shore 1779

Anne Arundel (26 appearances: 8 Ejectment, 6 Debt, 4 Replevin, 2 Trover, 1 Trespass, 1 Assault, 

4 Not Listed)

Baltimore (8 appearances: 2 Debt, 2 Ejectment, 1 Debt/Replevin, 3 Not Listed)

Calvert (2 appearances: 2 Ejectment)

Charles (28 appearances: 11 Ejectment, 1 Assault, 16 Not Listed)

Frederick (18 appearances: 5 Ejectment, 4 Debt, 1 False Imprisonment, 8 Not Listed)

Harford (3 appearances: 3 Ejectment)

Kent (1 appearance: 1 Ejectment)

Montgomery (4 appearances: 3 Ejectment, 1 False Imprisonment)

Prince George’s (20 appearances: 9 Trespass, 7 Ejectment, 1 Debt, 1 Replevin, 2 Not Listed)

Saint Mary’s (29 appearances: 6 Debt, 6 Slander, 4 Assault, 2 Ejectment, 2 Replevin, 2 Scire 

Facias, 1 Debt/Replevin, 1 Trespass, 5 Not Listed)

Not Listed (11 appearances: 4 Trespass, 3 Debt, 2 False Imprisonment, 2 Not Listed)

Sixteen out of twenty appearances in Prince George’s County cases involved either Trespass or 

Ejectment.

General Court of the Western Shore 1786 

Anne Arundel (36 appearances: 13 Debt, 5 Ejectment, 4 Scire Facias, 2 Replevin, 12 Not Listed) 

Baltimore (30 appearances: 8 Debt, 5 Ejectment, 17 Not Listed)

Calvert (6 appearances: 2 Ejectment, 1 Debt, 1 Scire Facias, 2 Not Listed)

Charles (27 appearances: 7 Debt, 2 Petition for Freedom, 1 Ejectment, 1 Trespass, 16 Not 

Listed)

Frederick (11 appearances: 5 Debt, 1 Scire Facias, 1 Trespass, 4 Not Listed)

Harford (4 appearances: 1 Ejectment, 1 Replevin, 2 Not Listed)

Montgomery (29 appearances: 22 Debt, 2 Petition for Freedom, 5 Not Listed)

Prince George’s (77 appearances: 32 Debt, 5 Ejectment, 4 Scire Facias, 2 Debt/Replevin, 2 

Replevin, 1 Debt/Scire Facias, 1 Trespass, 30 Not Listed)

Saint Mary’s (14 appearances: 4 Debt, 1 Ejectment, 1 Petition for Freedom, 1 Scire Facias, 7 Not 

Listed)

Washington County (3 appearances: 2 Ejectment, 1 Debt)

Not Listed (11 appearances: 11 Not Listed)

Twenty-two out of twenty-nine Montgomery County cases involved debt.

Thirty-four out of seventy-seven Prince George’s County cases involved debt—probably more 

than thirty-four, as thirty cases did not have a form of action listed. 
309

Appendix 19

Monetary Value

Provincial Court 1771

Wallace and Waters v. Kingsbury (“confessed for 30£”)

Wootton v. Davis (“[Debt] 200£”)

Wootton v. Davis (“[Debt] 500£”)

General Court of the Eastern Shore 1779

West and Hobson v. Jones (“Judgment for 3000£ [Sterling]” and “[Defendant] amerced [50 

pounds of tobacco]”)

Jamieson, Johnston, and Brooke v. Thompson (“[Defendant] amerced [50 pounds of tobacco]”)

Earle v. Bryan (“Bryan fined [7 shillings, 6 pence]”)

General Court of the Eastern Shore 1786

None

General Court of the Western Shore 1779

Allen v. French (“[Debt] 200,000 [pounds?] [tobacco])

Wedershandt v. Meadows (“The [plaintiff] agrees to release this [Judgment] on payment of 250£

pounds...and the cost of suit”)

Plater v. Bruce (“[Sheriff] [Frederick] amd. 5£. - Sept. Ct. 1773. fur. amd. 5£. Sept. 1774. - fur. 

amd. 50£ nisi 2d day of last Ct. - fur. amd. 50£ nisi this Ct. Nar - [Sheriff] further amd. 

[Damages] & Cost Nisi 2d day next Ct.”)

Gaunt v. Christ (“False [Imprisonment]; Cepi; Sher. amd. 100£. Nisi 2d day next Ct.”)

General Court of the Western Shore May 1786

Hughes v. Cox (“[Judgment conferred?] for 2538:9.4£ [?] [& Co.?] to be retd. on payt. of 1269.4£

S [?] with [?] from 29th July 1783 & [?] paymts. if any to be all”)

Hughes v. Bowie (“[Judgment conferred?] for 2538:9.4£ [?] [& Co.?] to be retd. on payt. of 

1269.4£ S [?] with [?] from 29th July 1783 & [?] paymts. if any to be all”)

Hughes v. Cox (“[Judgment conferred?] for 2538:9.4£ [?] [& Co.?] to be retd. on payt. of 1269.4£

S [?] with [?] from 29th July 1783 & [?] paymts. if any to be all”)

Sothoron v. West (“confd. for 77.11.6£”)

Fowler v. Williams (“[Judgment]. for Principal & Costs & 10.1.2£ for 3 1/2 years Int.”)

Dorsey v. Jacques and Couden (“[Fiat?] to be rel. on payt. of 500£ [?] & Costs with Int on the 

same till paid”)

Mason v. Rutland (“[Judgment]. [conferred?] for 3234£ [?] & Costs”)

Washington v. Ireland (“Judt. for 1863.5£ [?] & Costs to be [reld.?] on payt. of [principal] Int & 

Costs of suit”)

Grahame v. Garn and Russell (“[Damages?] 330.17.3£ [Sterling]; [?] for £62.0.7 denial of 

[residue?]”)

Fowler v. Wheeler (“[Judgment confirmed?] for 56.9.2£ Cur & Co.”)

Fowler v. Dorsey (“[Judgment] for 86.12.5£ Cur & Cost; signed 3d June 1786; Writ of Error filed 

12th Feb. 1787; Cost 526 [Tobacco]”)

Hall v. Jacob (“Co. 595 [Tobacco]”)

Lyles v. Eversfield (“[Amd.?] 1000 [Tobacco]”)
310

Appendix 19

Mattingly v. Roberts (“Casa for Costs - 5332 [Tobacco]”)

Grahame v. Rogers and Rogers (“[Damages?] 547.3.2£ - Costs 549 [?] [Tobacco]”)

Ferguson v. Patterson (“Casa for Costs 549”)

Grahame v. Russell (“[Damages?] 3819.13.4£ [Sterling] Co. 1000”)

Paul v. Edelen (“[Debt] 63250 [?] - Co. 993 [?]”)

Paul v. Stonesheet (“[Debt] 63250 [?] - Co. 668 [?]”)

Clagett v. Weems (“[Damages?] 126.14.1£ Co. 1274 [?]”)

Fowler v. Philpot (“Atta. [Damages?] 3653.3.5£ Co. 720”)

Lee v. Whitaker (“[Damages?] 1/4[99.10.8£?] - Co. 605 [?]”)

Lee v. Young (“[Damages?] 122.15.5£ - Co. 605 [?]”)

Lee v. Williamson (“[Damages?] 10£ - Co. 605 [?]; [?]”)

Lee v. Rogers (“[Damages?] 354.7.5£; Co. 605 [?]”)

Fenwick and Wife v. Aisquith (“Fifa [Debt?] 76700 & .696.15£ [Tobacco?] - Costs 8461 [?] & 

£34.13.3 [Contd.?] Cur - To lie in this office”)

Grahame v. Moore (“[Damages?] 307.1.9£ - Co. 673 [?] [Tobacco?]”)

Hudson v. Hawkins (“[Debt] 69605 [Tobacco?]”)

Gordon et al v. Busey (“[Debt] 5960 [Tobacco?] & 480.13£”)

Murdock v. Marbury et al (“[Debt] 800£”)

Murdock v. Hanson (“[Debt] 1646£”)

Murdock v. Tolson (“[Debt] 1646£”)

Matthews v. Bowie (“[Debt] 800£”)

Anderton v. Hollyday (“[Debt] 607.17.10£”)

Scott v. Rutland (“[Debt] 367.10£”)

Dick v. Hardy (“[Debt] 70000 [pounds?] [Tobacco?]”)

Dick v. Jenkins (“[Debt] 70000 [pounds?] [Tobacco?]”)

Contee v. Burgess (“[Debt] 800£”)

Contee v. Barnes (“[Debt] 800£ [Sterling]”)

Walker v. Brown and Wife (“[Debt] 282.7£”)

Contee v. Mackall (“[Debt] 800£”)

Yerbury and Waldron v. Rutland (“[Debt] 2054.9.6£ [Sterling]”)

Brooks v. Worthington (“[Debt] 1000£”)

Gordon et al v. Watson (“[Debt] 300.3.8£”)

Gordon et al v. Beckwith (“[Debt] 300.3.8£”)

Gordon et al v. Watson (“[Debt] 300.3.8£”)

Gordon et al v. Beckwith (“[Debt] 300.3.8£”)

Gordon et al v. Watson (“[Debt] 300.3.8£”)

Gordon et al v. Beckwith (“[Debt] 300.3.8£”)

Russell v. O’Neill and Deakins (“[Debt] [lb.?] 57000 [Tobacco] - value £3000”)

Barnes v. Maddock (“[Debt] 378.5.8£ Cur & 135.17.6£ [Sterling]”)

Cuninghame, Bogle, and Findlay v. Orme (“[Debt] 244.7.9£”)

Cuninghame, Bogle, and Findlay v. Huntt (“[Debt] 286.3.2£”)

Hayes v. Wilcoxen (“[Debt] 486.5.8£”)

Smith v. Wilcoxen (“[Debt] 1500£”)
311

Appendix 19

Hayes and Hayes v. Wilcoxen (“[Debt] 600£”)

Gordon et al v. Luckett (“[Debt] 249.17.10£”)

Gordon et al v. Dent (“[Debt] 748.4.10£”)

Gordon et al v. Chase (“[Debt] 972.3.10£”)

Gordon et al v. Craik (“892.7£”)

Gordon et al v. Blandford (“[Debt] 210.17.2£”)

Gordon et al v. Lee (“[Debt] 417.0.3£”)

Boarman v. Contee (“[Debt] 870.5.5£”)

Galloway v. Hudson (“[Debt] 2533.2.3£”)

Ridley and Pringle v. Hudson (“[Debt] [lb.?] 48057 [Tobacco]”)

Ridley and Pringle v. Hudson (“[Debt] 145£”)
312

1 Haberdeventure (1077 acres, patented in 1787), made up of the following tracts:

a. Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains Enlarged

b. Hanson’s Plains 

c. Part of Hansonton 

d. Bridget’s Delight 

e. Simpson’s Delight 

f. Part of St. Nicholas 

g. Part of Betty’s Delight and Prior’s Beginning

2 Plenty (510 acres, patented 1787), made up of the following tracts:

h. Part of Chandlers Hills

i. Welcome

3 Land purchased from Thomas Hopewell (1784)

j. Mobberly

k. Hopewell’s Discovery

l. Shaw’s Trouble

m. Shaw’s Barrons

4 Part of St. Nicholas, exchanged by Thomas Stone in 1783 for a part of St. Nicholas lying on the west side 

of Port Tobacco-Piscataway Road

5 Port Tobacco Great Mill (20 acres with mill seat, leased 1777, purchased 1782)

6 Mobberly Enlarged (285 acres, patented by Thomas Stone’s heirs in 1806)

7 Addition to May Day Enlarged (196 acres, patented by Thomas Stone’s heirs in 1794)

n. Addition to May Day

8 Distrest Corrected (60 acres, patented by Thomas Stone’s heirs in 1794)

o. Distrest 

9 Rose Hill, Gustavus Richard Brown’s residence (447 acres, patented 1789)

Map of Charles County land owned by Thomas Stone and his heirs, 1770–1806.

Data supplied by Donald E. Zimmer. Drawn by M. Roy Cartography. Also appears as Figure 5 on page 29 of the main report.
313

Ap p e n d i x 20

Documentation for the Map of Charles County Land 

Owned by Thomas Stone and His Heirs, 1770–1806

Note: The numbers, letters, and colors used throughout this appendix 

correspond to the map in Figure 5, on page 29 of the main manuscript 

(repeated here on page 312 for ease of reference).

1 Thomas Stone obtained a patent for Haberdeventure with 1077 acres in 1787 after a survey 

conducted in 1784 and 1785 (Patent Records IC#C:62, MSA S1195-480). The patent 

included the following tracts:

a. Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains Enlarged, 442 acres, purchased by Thomas 

Stone from his uncle Daniel Jenifer in 1770 (Charles County Land Records S#3:127). 

Jenifer created the 442-acre tract by patent in 1768 by combining 150 acres of 

Haberdeventure and 75 acres of Hanson’s Plains (both of which he had purchased in 

1763 from Joseph Hanson Harrison and his wife Mary) with vacant land (Harrison 

and wife to Jenifer, 1763, Charles County Land Records L#3:339; patented 1768, 

Patent Records BC & GS 37:94, MSA S1195-481). The 1763 deed acknowledged the 

possibility of a legal challenge to the transfer of land for up to seven years. Jenifer 

therefore may not have had clear title to sell the property until July 1770. The resurvey for the 1787 patent adjusted the size of the whole to 432 acres.

b. Hanson’s Plains contained 75 acres according to the 1763 deed between the 

Harrisons and Jenifer (Charles County Land Records, L#3:339). 

c. Part of Hansonton, 277 acres, purchased by Thomas Stone from William Harrison in 

1785 (Charles County Land Records, Z#3:131). The resurvey for the 1787 patent 

adjusted the acreage to 272 acres. 

d. Bridget’s Delight, 63 acres, 1779, bought of Robert Fergusson (Charles County Land 

Records, V#3:411). Fergusson held power of attorney from Henry Riddell, Glassford 

and Company’s chief factor in Maryland who had left for Scotland by March 1778. 

Riddell acquired Bridget’s Delight in 1776 when William Lindsay, who owned a pew 

in Port Tobacco parish church, defaulted on a debt. (Stone purchased a total of three 

tracts that were formerly held by William Lindsay; see Simpson’s Delight and 

Distrest.)1

e. Simpson’s Delight, 260-300 acres, purchased in 1779 and 1782 from William Lindsay 

Jr. of Charles County and Sherbourne Stewart of Great Britain (V#3:435, 591, 592). 

The resurvey for the 1787 measured the size at 276 acres. Like Bridget’s Delight, the 

1 Richard K. MacMaster and David C. Skaggs, eds., “The Letterbooks of Alexander Hamilton, Piscataway 

Factor,” Maryland Historical Magazine 61 (June 1966): 153n, 61 (December 1966): 310n; “Henry Riddell 

(1746–after 1777)” and “William Lindsey [i.e., Lindsay], by 1726–1779),” Early Colonial Settlers of Southern 

Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us, accessed October 9, 2019; 

William Lindsay to Henry “Riddle,” November 21, 1776, Charles County Land Records, V#3:130. Fergusson 

recorded his power of attorney from Riddell in Charles County court in September 1779 (Charles County Land 

Records V#3:415).
314

Appendix 20

title for Simpson’s Delight fell out of the possession of the Lindsay family and into the 

hands of merchants. Within weeks of the death of William Lindsay in February 1779, 

Thomas Stone wrote to Mr. Matthew Blair, attorney for Cunningham, Findlay, and 

Company, “There is a Tract of Land called Simpson’s Delight near Me containing 

between 250 + 300 acres which is claimed by Sherbourne Stewart Heir of John 

Stewart Merchant in London. This Land I would willingly buy.” Late that year, 

Lindsay’s son William Jr. sold his claim to 260 acres of Simpson’s Delight to Thomas 

Stone for £100 Maryland currency. In July 1782, Michael Jenifer Stone acquired full 

title to the property (300 acres by patent) for his brother Thomas in two transactions, 

one with Maryland’s commissioners for confiscated property and another with 

Sherbourne Stewart in Britain. William Lindsay Jr. was living on Simpson’s Delight 

when he conveyed it to Stone (V#3:435).2

f. Part of St. Nicholas, 73 acres in 1787 patent, conveyed by Gustavus Richard Brown in 

1778 (Charles County Land Records V#3:260, 273). See St. Nicholas below.

g. Thomas Stone acquired part of Betty’s Delight, 8 acres, and Prior’s Beginning, 

10 acres from Gustavus Richard Brown in 1778 (Charles County Land Records, 

V#3:260, 273). 

2 Thomas Stone patented Plenty in 1787 with 510 acres (Patent Records IC#B:638, MSA 

S1195-1237), made up of the following two tracts:

h. Part of Chandlers Hills, 310 acres, bought of Henry Smith in 1777 and Ignatius 

Wheeler Jr. and his wife Henrietta (Smith) Wheeler, widow of Roger Smith in 1782 

(Charles County Land Records V#3: 205, 588; 1787 Plenty patent for measurement) 

i. Welcome, 200 acres, bought of Henry Smith in 1777 and Ignatius Adams in 1778 

(Charles County Land Records V#3: 205, 293, 588-9)

Why Thomas Stone excluded the mill from Plenty has not yet been explained.

3 Land purchased from Thomas Hopewell, 1784 (Charles County Land Records Z#3:80).

j. Mobberly, 45 acres

k. Hopewell’s Discovery, 51 acres

l. Shaw’s Trouble, 46 acres

m. Shaw’s Barrons, 52 acres

2 Thomas Stone continued in his letter to Matthew Blair of February 17, 1779, “I would give 21/ Sterling [i.e., 

£1.1.0 sterling per acre] in London for the Land provided a Title can be made by proper powers from Mr. Stewart 

to some persons here” (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, in Jefferson, “Thomas Stone: A Chronology of 

Select Primary Sources”). Blair is identified as an attorney for Cunninghame, Findlay, and Company in Stone’s 

deed for Distrest, 1779, Charles County Land Records V#3:344 (see also MacMaster and Skaggs, eds., “The 

Letterbooks of Alexander Hamilton, Piscataway Factor,” Maryland Historical Magazine 62 [June 1967]: 144n). 

For the early history of Simpson’s Delight, see “Alexander Simpson (1629–70),” in Early Colonial Settlers of 

Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties, www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us, accessed March 11, 

2021; and Charles County Court Proceedings, 1671–74, in Archives of Maryland, 60:476–78, 523–25, which 

describes Simpson’s Delight as “lying in the Woods” on the west side of Port Tobacco Creek “neare an old Indian 

field” (523). 
315

Appendix 20

4 Part of St. Nicholas. Thomas Stone in 1783 exchanged with Thomas Semmes the portion of 

St. Nicholas lying on the west side of Port Tobacco-Piscataway Road for part of 

Haberdeventure and Hanson’s Plains lying on the east side of the road to form the surviving 

eastern boundary of Haberdeventure (Charles County Land Records Z#3:50).3

5 Port Tobacco Great Mill with mill seat, 20 acres. In late 1776, upon signing a lease with one 

of Roger Smith’s heirs, Thomas Stone initiated his acquisition of the mill, the land on which 

it stood (part of Chandlers Hills), and two enslaved women, Rachael and Luce, who may 

have worked at the mill. In 1782, Stone acquired legal ownership of the land and the women 

and secured the remaining thirteen years of the eighty-year lease of the twenty-acre mill seat 

and water mill (Charles County Land Records, V#3:539, 588, 590). See Chapter 4 for details 

about Thomas Stone’s acquisition of the mill. Who owned and controlled the mill immediately after Thomas Stone’s death is uncertain.

6 Mobberly Enlarged, 285 acres. In 1789, Michael Jenifer Stone as guardian to Thomas 

Stone’s heir-at-law, Frederick Stone, requested a survey of Mobberly Enlarged, which 

consolidated Thomas Stone’s purchases from Thomas Hopewell, added a fifth tract, Shaw’s 

Folly, and incorporated vacant land. Maryland’s land office returned the certificate for 

Mobberly Enlarged in 1789, but another seventeen years passed before Frederick’s next-ofkin, Margaret (Stone) Daniel and Mildred (Stone) Daniel and their husbands applied for a 

patent for Mobberly Enlarged (Patent Records IC#R:475, MSA S1195-759). 

7 Addition to May Day Enlarged expanded Thomas Stone’s 1779 purchase of (n), Addition 

to May Day, made up of 120 acres (Charles County Land Records V#3:402-3). In partial 

payment for the land, Stone sold to Goodrick four enslaved people (Harry, his wife Nan, Joe, 

and Clem). Frederick Stone’s guardian, Michael Jenifer Stone, commissioned a survey of 

these 120 acres in 1789, and the Land Office issued a patent to Frederick in 1791 (Patent 

Records IC#F:473, MSA S1195-46). A year later, Michael Jenifer Stone initiated a survey of an 

“enlarged” Addition to May Day, which became 196 acres, and Frederick’s sisters Margaret 

and Mildred obtained the patent in 1794 (Patent Records IC#K:41, MSA S1195-48). 

8 Thomas Stone acquired a 47-acre tract aptly named Distrest (o) from his neighbor Ann 

Lindsay, the widow of William Lindsay, in April 1779 (Charles County Land Records 

V#3:344; see also Bridget’s Delight and Simpson’s Delight above). With the purchase, Stone 

paid off William Lindsay’s mortgage of the land to Cunninghame, Findlay, and Company. 

Stone did not include Distrest in the 1784–85 survey of Haberdeventure. In 1786, Stone 

initiated a survey to expand Distrest’s boundaries. The Land Office returned a certificate for 

Distrest Corrected at 60 acres on April 5, 1787. Stone died later that year. Stone’s surviving 

heirs, Margaret and Mildred Stone, acquired the patent of Distrest Corrected in 1794 

(Patent Record IC#K:30; MSA S1195-328).

9 Rose Hill, 447 acres, patented 1789. Owned by Gustavus Richard Brown.

3 Thomas Stone discusses the St. Nicholas property in a letter to Maryland’s Commissioners for Confiscated 

Property in a letter dated July 17, 1782, Houghton Library, Harvard University, transcription in Jefferson, 

“Thomas Stone: A Chronology of Select Primary Sources.”

317

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