Paris in the Summer

There's a first time for everything, and in this case, it's the first time for a guest-blogger on The Doughty Traveler. My uncle, George Autry, will be stepping in to steep you in a region that I just couldn't adequately describe. Beyond that, he needs no introduction. And so, without further ado...

My nephew, the blogger you know as the Navigator, visited my wife and I recently at our home in Paris. On his return to Falls Church, he set out to record his impressions of our charming locale, but, as he admitted to me subsequently in an email, was overwhelmed by the experience. Fearing that he would fail to do justice to the lush beauty, rich history, and quaint seductions of this favored corner of the globe, he asked me to supply a guest posting to the Doughty Traveler, since after all, it was my non-stop Paris boosterism that overwhelmed him in the first place.

Now, let’s clear up any misunderstanding at the outset. Although it is très amusant to mention my home in Paris and then bask in the envious reactions of my companions, I am not talking about the somewhat better-known European capital of the same name. And, though I am a proud native son of the Lone Star State, I am not talking about Paris, Texas. (I mention this because I know with virtual certainty that Paris, Texas was your first guess as soon as you realized this posting was not about Paris, France. There are at least 17 towns in the United States named Paris, and no one has ever heard of any of them except for Paris, Texas).

My Paris lies high on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge, where for numberless millennia buffalo paused to graze at the top of a long, gentle grade before descending through a low notch in the mountains westward into the valley of the Shenandoah. In recent times, the concentration of game passing through this narrow gap provided ample sustenance for the canny stalkers of the Sioux, who called this place home until about 1670. Then the fierce Susquehanna, pressed westward by the burgeoning European settlements about the Chesapeake and the Virginia tidewater, drove the more peaceful Sioux (along with the buffalo) into the far west. Therein lies one of history’s little noted coincidental ironies; the Yankee General George A. Custer, having made his spectacular reputation by tormenting the rebellious populace of these lands, met his ultimate defeat at the hands of the great-grandchildren of these displaced Sioux warriors. I can only imagine that their mood was not improved by the 200 year-old grudge.

The tenure of the Susquehanna tribe on these lands was to be short-lived, for within 50 years, the relentless Europeans had advanced to the gap in the mountains, giving it the name of Ashby’s Bent; Ashby, from the surname of the first white settler to roll his wagon laden with barrels of tobacco eastward down the long buffalo and Indian trail to the distant port of Belhaven (now Alexandria, Virginia), and Bent, from the Middle English word meaning a hillside field. Thomas Ashby and his descendants planted their family name on numerous landmarks throughout the region, but another name soon came to dominate the “Northern Neck” of Virginia.

The Northern Neck is a vast expanse of land, 5, 282,000 acres, the largest private land-hold to ever exist in the territory of the United States. The proprietor of this wilderness empire was Thomas, Sixth Lord Fairfax, whose maternal ancestors had backed the winning side in the English Civil War, three decades before the Sioux were driven from the lands he would later inherit. Born at Leeds Castle, England, in 1693, Fairfax spent his youth navigating the currents of British court politics, emerging at the far side with a clear seigniorial grant to all of the lands lying between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, from the coastline between their mouths, to a straight line drawn between their sources. The interesting aspect of this grant is that, at the time of its issuance, no one had any idea of exactly where the sources of these rivers lay. The grant was known as the Northern Neck because its known extent was a narrow neck of land between two close-lying rivers at the Northern limit of tidewater Virginia.

Lord Fairfax thus took on both an empire and a quest, namely, to map the limits of his trackless domain...


Coverage of Paris, VA, is to continue daily throughout the week. Tune back in for the next installment of Lord Fairfax and the Northern Neck tomorrow, an episode featuring military disaster, French heroes, the birth of nation, and more importantly, the birth of a tavern.