Fincastle United Methodist from hill at Godwin Cemetary -
click on picture for full view
We live next to the little town of Fincastle, Virginia located in Botetourt County in Southwest Virginia. It is an old town by this country's standards with several buildings remaining from the late 17 to early 1800's. Approximately ten miles away is Interstate 81 splitting Botetourt County and a little further is the city of Roanoke and the Roanoke Valley with a combined population of approximately 230,000. Botetourt County from the last census has a population of a little under 30,000 with Fincastle approximately 350. Botetourt County is one of the faster growing counties in Southwest Virginia due to it's location to Roanoke and Interstate 81. Below are sections from the book The Town of Fincastle Virginia by Francis J. Niederer, Hollins College, Virginia - The University Press of Virginia Charlottesville 1965 describing its early history.
"The town of Fincastle was founded and named in 1772,
when the act estabalishing it was passed by the Virginia General Assembly.
The name honored George Lord Fincastle, son of Lord Dunmore, Lieutenant Governor
of Virginia, whose family property in Perthshire, Scotland, included the site of
an old fort name Fincastle. The settlement in Virginia, known as Botetourt
Courthouse, was two years old at the time and growing fast. "
"Settllers had been coming to this area of southwestern
Virginia for some three or four decades. The land grant of 92,100 acres,
including 8,100 acres on Catawba Creek, which was made to Benjamin Borden in
1739, was the first of several large grants in the area from which smaller units
were almost immediately made available to the settlers. First generation
Scotch or Scotch-Irish immigrants dominated in the beginning; they numbered half
of the company of fifty-two Rangers for the Catawba and Roanoke vallleys in
1755. But soon German families and some German-Swiss, began to come in
numbers, many moving down from the northern counties of Virginia, or, like the
Soctch-Irish, down from Pennsylvania. Settlers also cmae from eastern
Virginia and Maryland, many of these of English birth or parentage, and there
was a sprinkling of French, Irish, Dutch, and Welsh. "
"Most of the preliminary planning for Fincastle was done in
the spring of 1770. The new county of Botetourt had been formed after the
division of Augusta in November, 1`769. Of its thirteen justices,
appointed in December by His Majesty's Commission of Peace at Williamsburg,
eight were Scotch-Irish, one was French, and the others were English or perhaps
Welsh. The justices held their first monthly meeting from February 13 to
15, 1770. There were already a good many houses at Miller's Mill, center
of the new county, and Israel Christian donated 45 acres of land to serve as
nucleus for a town. Two and a half acres of this were set aside for
a courthouse site and ten acres for prison bounds. The rest wsa laid out
in half-acre lots to be sold, and there was no lack of purchasers. "
"What about the dwellings in the early town? A
listing about 1784 of homeowners in and near Fincastle gives us a good
indication of the types of houses. Among the 59 buildings listed, there
are 26 "log dwelling houses", 21 "cabins to dwell in" plus 1
"duble cabin" and 11 "frame dwelling huses". The
largest group listed in 1784 is that of the "log dwelling
houses". German and German-Swiss immigrants had been erecting copies
of their native log houses in Pennsylvania, and the Scotch_Irish had quickly
adopted them. Among the 26 log dwellings described in the Fincastle list,
twelve had stone chimneys and two had brick. Roofs were shingled."
"There remain in Fincastle a few of the small log houses
which once clustered in the area around the town spring, a public site for water
supply since Indian days, and we may take Miss Mary Peck's house on the corner
of Carper Street as typical of the simplest plan. This tiny house (16 by
20 feet) was only recently covered with clapboards, and in the attic one can
still see rough-cut logs and an original casement window. In the
early days the single room on the ground floor was divided into living and
sleeping quarters by a wooden partition and a curtain. In one end wall
there was a large fireplace. At the other end there was a small dugout for
storage of food, and over this a narrow ladder led to the loft in which the
children slept. Similar construction was used in two houses on Back Street
between Monroe and Hancock: the old potter's shop and the Becky Holmes
house. Both of these were originally one story high and small; they have
been changed considerably. The Holmes house retains its original basement,
with its low ceiling resting on bark-covered logs, and its large
fireplace. Town legend holds that Israel Christian built this house and
that he later gave it to his slaves, the Holmeses. Supposely the first
Negro church services in Fincastle were held here."
"In addition to log houses, framed hoses were also being
erected by the pioneers as soon as sawn timber was available. Certainly by
1777 there was a sawmill in the Fincastle vicinty, for a court order of that
year proposed to "establish a road from the court house to William Ward's
sawmill, and another, Peter Shrader's, is mentioned in 1784. This 1784
list names ten "frame dwelling houses" all having stone or brick
chimneys. "
"Among the home owners credited with only a cabin in
1784 was Samuel McRoberts, who in 1792 built a home in the town on a plot
opposite the present St. Mark's Church. His log kitchen still stands,
giving us a well-preservred example of the construction of such outbuildings -
kitchens, smokehouses, granaries, barns. "
" Another impressive brick mansion,.....still occupied,
is Santillane, which stands on a little rise just southwest of the town of
Fincastle, Its builder and first owner was probably Colonel George
Hancock; a letter written by his daughter Peggy in 1805 is headed "Santillane,
Botetourt". It was Hancock's younger daughter, Judy, however, who had
caught the attention of William Clark when he rescued her from a balky horse,
and it was she for whom he named the Judith River in Montana. After
returning from his westward expedition he went to Fincastle to court and marry
Judy, and the citizens of the town took the opportunity to congratulate him with
an "address". Clark's partner, Meriwether Lewis, did not fare so
well in Fincastle. Miss Letitia Breckinridge departed for Richmond when
rumors spread that he was planning to court her."
" The visitor to Fincastle today can easily use as a
guide the map made by John Wood in 1822. The streets follow the same
pattern and bear the same names, and the major landmarks - spring,
courthouse, and churches are still there. In fact, once locatged within
the confines of the map, the visitor seems at home in the small peaceful town of
the 1820's, its appearance almost unchanged by twentieth-century
intrusions. But the very neatness of the town today, matching the neatness
of the map, may mislead him. He may forget that then the streets were
unpaved and dusty, that most of the housese now so primly white and clapboarded
then revealed their homely construction, that most of the 103 lots so precisely
numbered and apportioned to their owners by Mr. Wood were still undeveloped, and
that the slopes of the gentle Virginia hills framing the settlement were still
untamed."
"By 1860 Fincastle had a population of 876 as against
703 in 1835, and the town took an active part in the war. One of the
twelve Botetourt companies engaged in combat was called the Fincastle
Rifles. The mills provided wool for uniforms, and wagons, saddles, and
harnesses were supplied by Fincastle manufacturers. The war did not alter
the aspect of Fincastle, but disastrous fires did - one in 1870 and another in
1871; many building were destroyed in the western end of town. ....In 1880
a new map of Fincastle was printed by Gray and Son of Philadelphia. This
shows expansion of the town to east, south, and west and 184 losts are noted, in
contrast to 103 drawn in 1822. The population figure, however, had gone
down to 675."
":Although Fincastle was one of the routes leading to
the famed Virginia spas of the nineteenth century - one of the earliest stones
in the Presbyterian graveyard bears the sad note of the death of Mrs. Maria
Pollock, wife of a Savannah physician, who, "in attempting a weary and
painful journey to the Springs to alleviate pulmonary Comsumpton," died at
Fincastle on August 7, 1814 - it was not until the end of that century that
Fincastle itself became a mecca for health seekers. But it had a brief
blossoming in the 1880's and 1890's, with a hundred or more visitors coming
annually from such for-off points as New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Opelousas,
Vicksburg, Macon, Florence and Mobile; St. Louis, Galveston, and Houston. Their
names and accounts of their activities filled the social columns of the Herald
in the summer months. Fincastle's climate, scenery and the hospitality of its
people, as a writer for the Herald mentions, combined to make it
"one of the most desirable retreats in the mountains of
Virginia." ...... By the summer of 1894 Fincastle was "quite a
lively town", and Hayth's Hotel was 'filled to full capacity since the
opening of the season" with "nearly if not quite one hundred
boarders", according to the social notes in the newspaper, "and those
stopping at private homes will probably swell the total number to a hundred and
forty." This was a sizable number of visitors for a town with a
population of 675 or fewer. "......The "most brilliant social
event" of the 1894 summer season was a "Mother Goose party" given
in Hayth's ballroom, which was beautifully decorated with ferns and garlands of
evergreens. The dominant New Orleans contingent took over. Miss Mary
Young had suggest the theme, Mrs Valades played the piano, and Mrs. Girault
impersonated Mother Goose. Dancing began at 8 P.M. and continued until
long past midnight, with diversions, chief of which was the awarding of
prizes. Miss Loretta McEnany, also of New Orleans, won a live goose as the
first prize for her costume of Little Bo-Peep, and Peachy Breckinridge of
Fincastle, who came as Little Boy Blue, won the gentlemen's first prize, a
stuffed alligator. "
"Expansion and boom, however, did not come. Summer
visitors dwindled in number and finally stopped coming to Fincastle. The
real-estate scheme failed for lack of investors, and only Herndon Street remains
to commemorate it. The railway never materialized beyond the making of a
few stretches of roadbed, and even the projected trolley line failed. Nor
did any nw industry enter to change the pattern of the
town. Fincastle remains a samll quiet community
rooted in the past. There is no great variety of architectural styles
within the town, but conservatism here shows taste and discretion, and the total
effect is one of great charm. Even the twentieth-century visitor can grasp
some of the character and personality which determined the life and growth of
Fincastle and keep a vivid memory of its pleasant homes, its peaceful streets
and its white steeples rising against a frame of low wooded Virginia
hills."....
Links To Botetourt County and Fincastle
www.bothistsoc.org Botetourt County Historical Society
http://co.botetourt.va.us/ Botetourt County official homepage
http://www.co.botetourt.va.us/history.html History of Botetourt County
http://www.gbgm-umc.org/fincastleumc/ Fincastle United Methodist Church - historic
http://logcabins.net/bnafter.html Before and After cabin restoral - pictures of Fincastle cabin
http://www.rootsweb.com/~vaboteto/botetot.htm Botetourt Geneology Web Page - interesting
http://www.hisfin.org/ Historic Fincastle Inc. webpage
http://politicalgraveyard.com/geo/VA/BO.html Interesting - political graveyard - past politicians of Botetourt
http://www.ls.net/~newriver/va/bot1794.htm interesting - Personal Property Tax list of Botetourt for 1794
http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/va/botetour.htm Official Botetourt County Geneology webpage - lists
http://www.iberian.com/Botetourt.html Iberain Pub. list of Botetourt Co. material for sale
http://www.cstone.net/~pti/greenfield/ Holladay-Bowyer House national Registry at Greenfield - excellent