e of Masons.

CHAPTER 24: Yeaton-Fairfax house, south facade.

CHAPTER 25: Lafayette-Lawrason-Cazenove house and doorway detail.

CHAPTER 26: Alexandria Boarding School (1834) of Professor Hallowell.
_From an old print._

CHAPTER 27: Alexandria Lyceum, classic portico.

CHAPTER 28: Wax flowers under glass dome, made by Melissa Hussey Wood.

[Illustration]

PART ONE: PROLOGUE

An Account of the First Century of The Seaport of Alexandria

[Illustration: A typical Alexandria shipping merchant's home: Bernard
Chequire, called the "count," built his dwelling and storeroom under the
same roof]

[Illustration]

SITE AND ANTECEDENTS

In the middle of the seventeenth century when the English King, Charles
II, was generously settling Virginia land upon loyal subjects, what is
now the port of Alexandria was part of six thousand acres granted by the
Royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley, in the name of His Majesty, to
Robert Howsing. The grant was made in 1669 as a reward for bringing into
the colony one hundred and twenty persons "to inhabit."

Howsing did not want this land but John Alexander did. He had surveyed
the tract and knew its worth. Howsing doubtless thought himself well out
of it when Alexander paid six hundredweight of tobacco and took it off
his hands within a month.[1]

The growth and development of the colony of Virginia into a great
agricultural population occupied in the cultivation of tobacco was not
at all what the London Company had in mind. It visualized a colony of
towns. But the possibilities offered by the great rivers emptying into
Chesapeake Bay and the development of the tobacco trade were responsible
for a civilization unique to Englishmen. True that the establishment of
towns as trading centers was a recognized need--generally agitated by
the Burgesses and planters from interested motives--but little came of
it. Planters whose lands and domiciles lined the Virginia waterways
found the direct trade with English ships a facile, if expensive,
convenience. It was so easy to dispose of a cargo of tobacco and receive
at one's door in return delivery of a neat London sofa, greatcoat, or a
coach and harness. So instead of towns, great tobacco warehouses were
built at convenient centers where tobacco was collected, inspected, and
shipped. Such a warehouse was established by act of Assembly in 1730 and
1732[2] at the mouth of Great Hunting Creek, where it empties into the