My Genealogy Home Page:Information about John Wooldridge
John Wooldridge (b. 1678, d. 1757)
Notes for John Wooldridge:
In the Henrico County, Virginia, Court of March 1699, the "petn of John Woldredg against his Mistriss, Mrs. Eliza Kennon, for wages according to Indenture" was presented, then held through the subsequent three sessions.The petitioner sued in his own name (later Robert Hyde of York County became his lawyer) and was probably near 21 in 1699.The suit is the first record of a new man in that part of Virginia.1. JOHN WOOLDRIDGE (CA. 1678-1757), blacksmith, farmer and founder of a long-lived and farspread family.
Though not documented, family legend has it that the Wooldridges are from Scotland. Laurence B. Gardiner found in the Memphis genealogy library a paper on old homes of Shelby County, Tennessee, which says John Wooldridge Elam named his home East Lothian after the county of the settler's ancestors south of the Firth of Forth in Scotland, and that his brothers named their homes West Lothian and South Lothian. In 1982, L. Gardiner and William C. Wooldridge engaged Mrs. Kathleen B. Cory to search births in the surviving parish registers of Midlothian, Scotland, for the period 1660-1680, but she found no Wooldridges either there or in her survey of available printed indices to Scottish records of the 17th century, with the exception of a family in Edinburgh (Constantine Wooldridge married Margaret Akinstall, Oct. 24, 1644; Constantine Wooldridge or Woolredge joiner married Isobel Hart, Nov. 20, 1668).
In the early 1600's, at the same time that Jamestown, Virginia, was being settled, Ulster, Ireland, finally capitulated to England, and England brought in colonists from Scotland and England to colonize and subjugate Ulster. Presbyterian Scots immigrated to Ireland to take advantage of the opportunities there. However, after a brief period of time, the Scotch colonists began to suffer the dame discrimination as the native Irish. Presbyterian, they still had to pay taxes to the Church of England (in Scotland they paid taxes to the Church of Scotland, their on Presbyterian Church), which was Anglican. They could not hold political office, have certain jobs, paid extra taxes, and suffered other discriminations. So, in the late 1600's, these Presbyterian Scots-Irish began to immigrate to the New World.
A blacksmith in Ireland did quite well. He would have done the smithing work for about 200 families, covering about an 1800-acre area. All hardware needs would have been supplied by him--he would have been the local Walmart, making all metal kitchen utensils, nails, hinges, wheel hubs, keys, locks, farming tools, and so on. As an example, if a housewife needed a spatula, it would have cost her about a month's egg and butter money--the money she used to run her house. Smithing was a full-time job--12 to 16 hours a day, six days a week. A blacksmith had no time for nor financial need for farming.
John Wooldridge Sr., was bron about 1678 and immigrated from Scotland, Ireland or England (probably from Scotland) to Virginia in the New World probably in the 1690's as an indentured servant to Richard Kennon in Henrico County.
Eighteenth-century Virginia produced, besides statemen and presidents, a vigorious population of such farmers.They and their families filled up the Piedmont, fought the Revolution, and furnished both inspiration and audience for a generation of republican political discourse.They were the yeoman of the Jeffersonian ideal.Where did they come from and where did they go?What made them different.These small planters, perhaps 90% of the total, are familiar only in the aggregate.But it is possible by looking at several generations of a single family to add the insight of concrete detail to tables and averages.
John Wooldridge probably came to Virginia as a young man; a headright was claimed for him by another member of the Kennon family years later, and the 1699 reference to wages according to indenture suggests an artisan's contract for passage.He was thus part of, or at most a generation removed from, the high tide of immigration to the colony after 1650 as a result of which thousands of former servants, their terms completed, faced life on their own in Virginia by the turn of the century.While this background may have implied a family of middling station in Britain, in Virginia it meant starting from the bottom.But indented service or apprenticeship could be an opportunity:it apparently gave John a trade and a degree of literacy, and did not make him meek:he comes into the records demanding his due.
The Kennon establishment, Conjurers Neck, presided over by the widow Elizabeth Worsham Kennon after Richard Kennon's death in 1696, stood on the Appomattox River about five miles from present day Petersburg in Henrico (now Chesterfield) County.John remained in the vicinity.None of his children and few of his grandchildren ever moved north of the James (or east, or due South):the Southside beginning set the family's course westerly through the Southside Piedmont for several generations.
Without land, John plied his trade and saved his money.Not until March 1, 1712, when he was in his 30's, did he buy his first 100 acres, from Bartholomew Stovall, for five schillings.Before that, however, he was well set enough to marry, at about the age of 27.No record of his marriage survives, but the date is approximated from the dates of birth of the children beginning about 1705, the sons listed in apparent order in his will.The maiden name of his wife was probably MARTHA OSBORNE (ca. 1688-after 1757), name in the will, is unknown.The couple's association with families like the Osbornes, Wards and Branches points to a connection with people who had been resident much earlier in Virginia and who had already made places for themselves, although their original prominence was going into eclipse.In short, John Wooldridge seems to have made a good marriage, not into the local leadership but at least into solidly established clans.
Wooldridge was a blacksmith and had much to offer in his own right.Lamentations over the scarcity of blacksmiths and the high prices they exacted suggest a master of the trade would have no trouble making a living.Smithing in turn brought him in contact in a small way with coal, for that was the fuel used.
A colony of Huguenots came to Virginia in 1700, taking up land at Manakin at the western fringe of settlement on the southside of the James River.In 1701 coal was found in the area, as the story goes by a Huguenot youth, in search of a fowl he had brought down with his gun, clambering into a brushy declevity and happening on the black rocks.William Byrd patented land including a "cole mine" within the grant of the French refugees in 1704, and Abraham Salle, a leader of the settlement, patented land by "the cole pit road" in 1715.A contemporary wrote in about 1708 that the Manakin mine was "us'd by the Smith, for their Forges."If not already there, John Wooldridge soon joined the ranks of these "Smiths."Perhaps attracted by the coal, looking westwardly, he patented two 400 acre tracts in 1725 close up to the boundaries of the Huguenot settlement, near the present Chesterfield-Powhatan border.
Coal in the region preserved its early reputation for smithing, and perhaps a strategic location near good quality coal fostered Wooldridge's success.Certainly it was plentiful; on land he later held in the same area, wagon wheels turned it up in their ruts.There may have been a natural transition from the blacksmith's casual collection of coal for his fire to open pit mining of coal for sale.John's son Robert was involved in one early commercial coal development:John Pankey advertised in the Virginia Gazette to sell pit coal from Robert Wooldridge's pits lying at Warwick on the James River.The business continued in the family until well into the nineteenth century.Except for William Byrd's activities, not a great deal is known about the earliest commercial coal developments in Virginia, and the link between the blacksmith father of the early eighteenth century and the mine operator son of the late eighteenth is suggestive.
After taking a few years to seat his new Manakin lands, Wooldridge sold his old 100 acre tract, "land where Wooldridge lately dwelt," to Joseph Goode for 25 pounds in September 1729.The short move west brought closer connections to the Manakin Huguenots than Wooldridge was ready for.About 1732 his daughter Mary married Jacob Trabue, another at least occasional blacksmith who became interested in coal.Wooldridge objected.According to William Lacy, "About the year '46 John Wooldridge Sr. sent for me to write his will and told me then, when Jacob Trabue married his daughter he was much dissatisfied with the match and he then made a resolve never to make Jacob Trabue the better for anything he was worth, but after he found Trabue to be a good husband he was sorry for his rash promise and had concluded to let his daughter have the use of a Negro girl named Hannah and her increase during his daughter's life and after her death to her son Joseph Trabue.He said, "I will make my grandson equal to my other sons in everything except land," and so I wrote his will.Another will was drawn in 1757, then changed by insertion.The changes made it questionable; it was finally order to be probated on May 5, 1759, after the Justices heard "arguments of the counsel on both sides."The real beneficiary was a lawyer, John Fleming, who entered on page 65 of his fee book for October 1757 the sum of 10 schillings for advice on a will and in May 1759, 12 schillings sixpence for "arguing the matter of Wooldridge's will" for Jacob Trabue.
In all, four of John's six children married Huguenots, and there followed other associations with the Huguenot outpost.John's youngest son, Robert, was godfather to hsi nephew William Trabue in 1739 and before 1744 married Magdalene Salle, granddaughter of Abraham Salle.Edward Wooldridge married Mary Flournoy and was godfather to his nephew, david trabue, in 1737; William married Sarah Flournoy and served as godfather to his niece, Marie Trabue, seven years later.
In 1736 Wooldridge bought 650 acres for 32 pounds 10 schillings, on the Buckingham road, seemingly adjoining his 1725 patent, from Henry Gary (of which 400 were given to his son Edward in 1753); in 1747 he patented 314 more acres, described as "on the French line" in his will.From this period if not earlier, he and his sons were directing their energies to the sovereign weed tobacco.They worked their holdings personally.In 1736, John, Sr. may had had two or three hands and John, Jr., one, but William and Thomas had none.The initial capital could have come from smithing, and Wooldridge did not necessarily give up the trade altogether when he started farming; he bequeathed his set of blacksmith tools to his son William. Nevertheless, after 1729, he is no longer styled "blacksmith," and by the time he died he was in the eyes of som "Mr. Wooldridge, a more honorific title then than now.The family home was named "Midlothian," perhaps (or perhaps not) in memory of a distant origin in lowland Scotland.
The movement from servant to artisan to planter bears witness to the opportunities in eighteenth century Virginia for people who started with nothing.Progress took time and longevity helped.Wooldridge was 33 before he owned his first acre and when the tax collector came in 1736, about 58 years old.Then he owed quit rents on 800 acres.His son William paid on an additional 100 acres owned by John Roberts, and John Wooldridge, Jr., paid on 300 just purchased from Samuel Burton.Not until 1747, at the age of 69, did John, Sr.'s holdings peak at 1764 acres, including 400 long held by his son, John.
But if progress was slow, it was attainable and probably commonplace.Success for a man in this epoch, to be sure, did not mean advancing from humble origins to a position of political leadership.Wooldridge did not rise socially in relation to his peers; they all rose together.The freedmen of 1700 became the yeomen of 1750, numerous, landed, and prosperous in relation to anything they had known before.Wooldridge's family in its beginnings in the latter half of the seventeenth century could not have been called propserous, but everyone in its meets that description for much of the eighteenth century.
Men who had, as they saw it, raised themselves from servitude to landed proprietors and established their sons on lands of their own may well have transmitted to their families a strong loyalty to the society in which they had succeeded.The Virginia economy was based on an agricultural laboring class which had made its way to prosperity by a half-century of tenacity and hard work.Such men are self-confident and resourceful.When England began to tighten the reins, she would find the Virginia yeomen, who might not seem to have much stake in the struggle, among the most refractory of the colonists.By then Joh Wooldridge was dead, but most of his grandsons of proper age, including on who had looked after him in the last years of his life and been rewarded with a 250 acre legacy, in one way or another took part on the side of the colonies.
More About John Wooldridge:
Burial: 1757, Virginia.
Occupation: Blacksmith.
Residence: Henrico County, Virginia.
More About John Wooldridge and Martha Osborne:
Marriage: Abt. 1704, Virginia.
Children of John Wooldridge and Martha Osborne are:
- +John Wooldridge, Jr., b. 1705, Henrico County, Virginia, d. 1783, Chesterfield, Virginia.
- +Thomas Wooldridge, b. 1707, Henrico County, Virginia, d. May 1762, Cumberland County, Virginia.
- +William Wooldridge, b. 1709, Henrico County, Virginia, d. 1798, Elbert County, Georgia.
- +Edward Wooldridge, b. 1711, Henrico County, Virginia, d. 1808, Chesterfield County, Virginia.
- +Mary Wooldridge, b. 1715, Henrico County, Virginia, d. 1789, Chesterfield County, Virginia.
- +Robert Wooldridge, b. 1719, Henrico County, Virginia, d. July 1794, Chesterfield County, Virginia.