Margaret Brent - Move To Virginia

Move To Virginia

Given Lord Baltimore's (and Governor Stone's) hostility to the Brent family, Giles and his young wife Mary moved to Chopawamsic Island in the Potomac River in 1649, then to Virginia's Northern Neck in 1650. The two sisters Margaret and Mary Brent also bought Virginia land starting in 1647, where they moved by 1650. Margaret Brent built a plantation called "Peace" in what was then Westmoreland County, Virginia. No records exist of her practice as an attorney in Virginia, but records do exist of her sagacious land investments, including in what during the following century became Old Town Alexandria, Virginia and Fredericksburg, Virginia, as well as George Washington's Mt. Vernon.

Margaret Brent held festive annual court leets for her people. Neither she nor her sister Mary ever married; they were among the very few unmarried English women of the time in the Chesapeake colony, when men outnumbered women there by 6:1 (but most were lower class indentured workers). Historian Lois Greene Carr has speculated the two sisters had taken vows of celibacy under Mary Ward's Institute in England.

In 1658 Mary Brent died, leaving her entire estate of 1000 acres (4 km2) to her sister. In 1663 Margaret Brent wrote her will. In 1670 she assigned one half of her 2,000 acres (8 km2) in Maryland to her nephew, James Clifton. Most of the remainder went to her brother Giles and his children. Her will was admitted into probate on May 19, 1671. She died at "Peace", in the newly created Stafford County, Virginia in 1671.

Exact dates of her birth and death are not known, in part because Brent family estates were burned by British raiders in the American Revolutionary War and War of 1812, and Union troops vandalized the family graveyard during the Civil War.