Capt. John Matthews, who married Betsy Archer, (the daughter of
Sampson) settled where Major Matthews lives, below the Natural
bridge.

Among others who came to Virginia at this time, was an Irish girl
named Polly Mulhollin. On her arrival she was hired to James Bell to
pay her passage; and with whom she remained during the period her
servitude was to continue. At its expiration she attired herself in
the habit of a man; and with hunting shirt and mocassons, went into
Burden's grant, for the purpose of making improvements and acquiring a
title to land. Here she erected thirty cabins, by virtue of which she
held one hundred acres adjoining each. When Benjamin Burden the
younger, came on to make deeds to those who held cabin rights, he was
astonished to see so many in the name of Mulhollin. Investigation led
to a discovery of the mystery, to the great mirth of the other
claimants. She resumed her christian name and feminine dress, and many
of [45] her respectable descendants still reside within the limits of
Burden's grant.[11]

When in 1752 Robert Dinwiddie came over as governor of Virginia, he
was accompanied by many adventurers; among whom was John Stuart,[12]
an intimate friend of Dinwiddie, who had married the widow of John
Paul (son of Hugh, bishop of Nottingham.) John Paul, a partizan of the
house of Stuart, had perished in the siege of Dalrymple castle in
1745, leaving three children--John, who became a Roman catholic priest
and died on the eastern shore of Maryland--Audley, who was for ten
years an officer in the British colonial forces,--and Polly, who
married Geo. Matthews, afterwards governor of Georgia. Mrs. Paul
(formerly Jane Lynn, of the Lynns of Loch-Lynn, a sister to the wife
of John Lewis) had issue, by Stuart, John, since known as Col. Stuart
of Greenbrier, and Betsy, who became the wife of Col. Richard Woods of
Albemarle.

The greater part of those, who thus ventured "on the untried
being" of a wilderness life, were Scottish presbyterian dissenters;
a class of religionists, of all others perhaps, the most remarkable
for rigid morality. They brought with them, their religious
principles, and sectional prepossessions; and acting upon those
principles acquired for their infant colony a moral and devotional
character rarely possessed by similar establishments. While these
sectional prepossessions, imbibed by their descendants, gave to their
religious persuasions, an ascendency in that section of count