as ordered by the Council to produce
"rights" and pay the quit-rents for the 59,786 acres which he claimed in
this county.

Other similar actions by the Council show that large holdings were
developing there, also that the difficulty of establishing a frontier
democracy in contact with the area of expanding plantations, was very
real.[91:2] By the time of the occupation of the Shenandoah Valley,
therefore, the custom was established in this part of Virginia,[91:3] of
making grants of a thousand acres for each family settled. Speculative
planters, influential with the Governor and Council secured grants of
many thousand acres, conditioned upon seating a certain number of
families, and satisfying the requirements of planting. Thus what had
originally been intended as direct grants to the actual settler,
frequently became grants to great planters like Beverley, who promoted
the coming of Scotch-Irish and German settlers, or took advantage of
the natural drift into the Valley, to sell lands in their grants, as a
rule, reserving quit-rents. The liberal grants per family enabled these
speculative planters, while satisfying the terms of settlement, to hold
large portions of the grant for themselves. Under the lax requirements,
and probably still more lax enforcement, of the provisions for actual
cultivation or cattle-raising,[92:1] it was not difficult to hold such
wild land. These conditions rendered possible the extension of a measure
of aristocratic planter life in the course of time to the Piedmont and
Valley lands of Virginia. It must be added, however, that some of the
newcomers, both Germans and Scotch-Irish, like the Van Meters, Stover,
and Lewis, also showed an ability to act as promoters in locating
settlers and securing grants to themselves.

In the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley, lay part of the estate of
Lord Fairfax, some six million acres in extent, which came to the family
by dower from the old Culpeper and Arlington grant of Northern Neck. In
1748, the youthful Washington was surveying this estate along the upper
waters of the Potomac, finding a bed under the stars and learning the
life of the frontier.

Lord Fairfax established his own Greenway manor,[92:2] and divided his
domain into other manors, giving ninety-nine-year leases to settlers
already on the ground at twenty shillings annually per hundred acres;
while of the new-comers he exacted two shillings annual quit-rent for
this amount of land