By Mike Schoeffel
The first paragraph of the introduction to T.E. Campbell’s 1954 book Colonial Caroline reads as follows:
Caroline was the third most populous and affluent county in Virginia during the Revolution. The descendants of its early families contributed, perhaps as much as any other county in America, to the building of the United States. Unfortunately its history has been largely neglected.
With this in mind, Campbell set out to compile the county’s shunned-but-important past into a single volume “based on the Order Books of the Caroline court, the only complete records of the county in existence,” as he put it.
He largely succeeded in this goal, publishing Colonial Caroline, arguably the most thorough account of pre-Revolution Caroline in existence today. The book can be checked out at the Bowling Green and Ladysmith branches of the Caroline County Public Library.
Campbell writes with candor and wit as he reports on an antiquated way of life — complete with whipping posts, drunken juries, and fines for failing to attend church — that may seem entirely foreign and perhaps preposterous to readers from 21st century America used to contemporary customs.
The author recounts numerous fascinating stories in Colonial Caroline, four of which are detailed below. These accounts, selected because they jumped off the page — and, in some instances, because of their sheer humor — come from the chapter titled The Rule of Sir William Gooch (1727-1749).
The Plagues
In spring 1728, a spate of caterpillars descended upon land east of the Blue Ridge and decimated a large portion of plant life.
The settlers, being a fervently religious lot, believed God “sent these pests to punish them for their wickedness,” writes Campbell. Instead of taking a practical approach to solve the problem, Governor Gooch declared May 17, 1728 a “day of fasting and humiliation to deprecate the anger of the Almighty and save ye fruits of ye earth from destruction.”
It didn’t work.
The caterpillars still came in droves, and after eating their fill, a fantastic number of deer — half-starved from lack of vegetation — flocked to what remained of the farmers’ crops. These emaciated herbivores descended in such massive hoards that the “only solution was to kill.” Soon enough, wood lines across the region were strewn with bloodied corpses.
The rotting meat, in turn, attracted a wave of wolves which tore into the carcasses with lustful fervor. The dead deer did not appease the wolves’ collective appetite, however, thus the malevolent beasts turned to preying on livestock, as well as the occasional child and senior citizen.
Needless to say, the settlers now had a serious wolf problem on their hands.
The settlers entered to the woods armed to the teeth, throwing the wholly unsuccessful “fasting and humiliation” approach to the wind. The House of Burgesses passed a law that promised 100 pounds of tobacco per wolf scalp — approximately 70 pounds more than a man could earn “working from sun to sun.”
“In all sections of the colony men abandoned their work and became professional wolf hunters,” writes Campbell. “The two best known in Caroline were Adam Loving and Minor Winn.”
The wolves were systematically killed and forced out, and eventually life east of the Blue Ridge returned to a relatively normal state.
Tom: A Failed Pharmacist
Many slaves became amateur pharmacists in an attempt to gain liberation after Governor Gooch freed a slave who purportedly created a cure for venereal disease.
This approach backfired on a slave from Caroline known simply as “Tom.”
Far from possessing any medicinal properties, Tom’s concoction poisoned and killed four local slaves, known as Joe, Wick, Mingo, and Rover. Surprisingly, the House of Burgesses handed down a mild punishment to the well-meaning Tom.
“Instead of ordering him hanged,” writes Campbell. “They directed that he be transported to some place outside of the Virginia colony to prevent him from causing more trouble locally.”
Port Royal’s “Great Crime Wave”
Prior to the 1740’s, Caroline didn’t experience much crime.
The most serious crimes recorded in pre-1740s Caroline — minus a single murder in 1733 — were generally mild in nature, including swearing, non-attendance of church, drunkenness, and youthful pranks.
But Port Royal’s rise as a point for tobacco exportation brought in a level of riff-raff unprecedented in the county’s history. Perhaps no story better encapsulates the rampant swindling and conning present in 1740’s Port Royal than that of Alexander Sweeney.
Sweeney, of which little seems to be known, appeared on the streets one day and began selling gold bricks at a “modest price.” He made a decent number of sales thanks to what Campbell called an “atmosphere of reckless speculation,” before one customer discovered Sweeney’s bricks were made of nothing more than base metal.
Sweeney was arrested and labeled a “common cheat,” but was let go after Jacob and Charles Burriss posted 50 pounds of sterling as bond.
“The court released Sweeney,” writes Campbell. “With the admonition of ‘go your way and sin no more.’”
Campbell does not address whether Sweeney heeded this advice.
The Irreparable Rev. Brunskill
In Colonial Caroline, Campbell calls Rev. John Brunskill, rector at St. Margaret’s Parish, “probably the poorest excuse of a man to attempt to preach in the county’s 225-year history.”
The author proceeds to make a good case for his claim.
The reverend was reportedly an experienced drunken brawler at local taverns. His ruckus-causing resulted in numerous suits for assault and battery. He was also locked in a two-decade feud with Mace Pickett, “the parish bully.”
In addition to his “rowdyism, vanity, and outright graft,” Brunskill was also an incompetent businessman.
His first business failure, in 1735 at a grist mill in Reedy Creek, landed him in debt. He proceeded to compound his money issues by running up bills with foreign merchants and, when pressed for ash by these merchants, borrowed here-and-there from “prosperous parishioners to make token payments and forestall foreclosures.” After grabbing their money, he somehow convinced a local money-lender by the name of William Hunter to give him a loan.
Perhaps the reverend’s shortcomings as a businessman could have been forgiven had he been a valued leader of the church. But apparently he was an embarrassment on this front, too.
In 1739, he was cited to church authorities for failing to hold services “on a regular schedule anywhere in his parish.” Brunskill landed in more trouble five years later, when he was charged by church wardens for “abusing the glebe property entrusted to his care.” In 1745, he was indicted by the court for defying an order to hold service at a “chapel of ease” during a period of high water that kept a number of parishioners from attending service.
The most damning — and perhaps most hilarious — example of Brunskill’s shadiness occurred in 1734. Brunskill asked his neighbor, William Johnston, to purchase him a mirror that would reflect the human image “from crown of the hat to sole of the boot,” as the reverend put it, during Johnston’s trip to England. Johnston delivered the mirror to Brunskill, who was reportedly satisfied.
However, when pressed for payment, Brunskill claimed he owed nothing because the mirror had been broken before he received it. After Johnston’s death, a suit was brought against the reverend for reimbursement. Brunskill, who knew his chances of winning were slim, proceeded to bribe every member of the jury in a “frantic attempt to avoid the loss.”
Brunskill was fined 15 shillings for each bribery attempt. Campbell doesn’t go into detail about what ultimately became of the shifty reverend.
Colonial Caroline by T.E. Campbell was published by Dietz Press on July 30, 1954.
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