The Warner Family of Warner Hall
The first Augustine Warner (1611-1674) arrived in Virginia in 1628 at the age of
seventeen, as one of a group of thirty-four brought in by Adam Thoroughgood.
It was seven years before Warner accumulated enough assets to make his
first land acquisition, patenting two hundred fifty acres in 1635.
He continued the typical pattern of seventeenth-century success in Virginia as a
merchant, investor in land, and statesman.
He rose through the colonial hierarchy to become a member of the House of
Burgesses in 1652 and then in 1659 a member of the Council, the highest office a
colonial Virginian could attain.
There he continued until his death in 1674.
He was prosperous enough by 1657 to send his son to school at the
Merchant Taylors School in London.
At about this time he moved across the York River to Gloucester County, where he
settled and built the first house at Warner Hall.
Augustine Warner died in 1674, at the great age, for a seventeenth-century
Virginian, of sixty-three, and was succeeded at Warner Hall by his only son, the
second Augustine Warner (1642-1681).
After his English education in London and at Cambridge, the younger
Augustine Warner returned to Virginia, and soon, by 1666, became a member of the
House of Burgesses, and then Speaker of the House in 1676.
In 1677 he took his seat on the Council, but his career was cut short by
his early death in 1681 at the age of thirty-nine.
A fascinating glimpse of Warner Hall and insight into the Warners’ activity as
merchants is afforded by the affidavit of their cousin John Townley, who was
overseer in charge at Warner Hall in September, 1676, when Bacon’s Rebellion
took place and Bacon invaded Warner Hall.
Townley tells how he had been entrusted with the guidance of the house
and family as overseer, and had “alsoe delivered to him by Inventory all the
household goods and other merchandizeing goods and stores in and belonging to
the sd Coll. Warner and laid up and stored in his said house and storehouses
thereto belonging, the Keyes of which houses and storehouses were demanded and
commanded from him by the said Bacon and those with him; wch Keyes being
afterwards in the hands & keeping of Capt. Wm. Bird.” According to his report,
Captain Bird shortly after coming to Warner Hall took a plate-handled scimitar
and black-fringed shoulder belt belonging to Warner and wore them while there,
and was still wearing them about a fortnight later when John Townley again saw
him at Col. Warner’s house at “Chieskake.”
He tells how Bird at Warner Hall opened the stores and chests and issued
the goods to the armed men, who carried them away.
He took particular notice that when Bird was delivering out the goods and
“mett with any ffine goods, as Silke ffine Hollands, or other ffine linnings,
silke Stockings Ribband, or the like he sent them into Bacons roome, where he
was often called in and was very Conversant.”
After the intruders were gone, John Townley, on the understanding that
they intended to return, packed of the remainder of the goods and put them on
board the ship Lady Frances, taking an inventory so that he knew what was
missing and that the true value of the purloined goods was 845 pounds 2
shillings sterling. His deposition,
which he sighs, is followed and confirmed by the testimony of William Blackburne
and William Sympson, servants, and Richard Scarlett, a freeman and sharer, all
living at Warner Hall. (81V351)
Besides the son Augustine Warner the second, the first Augustine Warner
(1611-1674) had at least two daughters.
One married David Cant, and the other, Sarah, married Lawrence Townley,
and was the ancestor of General Lee.
It has always been well recorded and understood that the second Augustine Warner
(1642-1681) had three sons, all of whom died unmarried, and three daughters, who
inherited the Warner property and left huge progenies.
What is less commonly noticed is that at least two, if not all three of
the sons survived their father, and were in possession until their deaths, so
that only then did the daughters and their husbands come into the bulk of the
property. We have exact dates for
only one of the sons, Augustine (1666-1687), the third of the name.
It seems that George Warner must have survived this brother, and been the
last Warner to own Warner Hall, for in a 1728 land grant the heirs of the three
sisters are referred to as the heirs of George Warner, suggesting that it was
from him the three sisters finally inherited.
The three were, of course, Mary Warner, who married in 1680 John Smith of
Purton, Mildred Warner, who married about 1690 Lawrence Washington, and
Elizabeth Warner, who married about 1691 John Lewis, and kept the Warner Hall
house itself in the division of the Warner properties after the brothers’
deaths. From Mary descends the
present Queen of England. Mildred
was the grandmother of George Washington.
Elizabeth was the grandmother of Fielding Lewis, who married first George
Washington’s cousin and second his sister, both ladies also being grandchildren
of Mildred Warner.
When it comes to ancestry, there has never been any mystery about Mildred Reade,
the wife of the second Augustine Warner.
The Reades trace back through Windebank and Dymoke, Champion of England,
to the blood royal. However, the
ancestry of the Warner family and the identity of Mary, wife of the first
Augustine Warner, were completely unknown until comparatively recently.
This always seemed odd, because the name Augustine Warner was
distinctive, he obviously came from an educated class, he used a coat of arms,
and it seemed reasonable to expect to find records.
It remained for a very able scholar, Mrs. Mary Derrickson McCurdy, of Chapel
Hill, North Carolina, to notice a clue in Raine’s edition (2883) of Dugdale’s
1664-5 Visitation of …Lancaster.
Mrs. McCurdy had been studying the Townley family, and came across a
chart in this visitation of a branch of the Townley family which included the
marriage of a Mary Townley to an Augustine Warner.
Proceeding from here, she developed a magnificent 3ssay in the July,
1973, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, which gives Augustine
Warner’s ancestry, identified his wife as Mary Townley, and shows several other
connections of the Townleys with the Warners and other early Virginia families.
It is from Mrs. McCurdy’s article that the account of Bacon’s invasion of
Warner Hall is copied (supra).
It is interesting to follow the given name Augustine through these families.
In the 1400’s there was an Augustine Boyce in Norwich, Co. Norfolk.
His grandson, Augustine Steward (1491-1571), frequently Mayor of Norwich,
in turn had a grandson, Augustine Sotherton (ca1550-1585), an Alderman of
Norwich. His daughter Elizabeth
Sotherton married Thomas Warner of Hoveton, near Norwich, and they were the
parents of our first Augustine Warner (1611-1674) in Virginia.
From his granddaughters, of course, the given name of Augustine has
continued to this day in the Smith and Washington families, but apparently not
in the Lewis family. On the other
hand, the name Warner persisted as a given name in the Washington and Lewis
families, but not with the Smiths.
Warner Hall stayed in the eldest male line of the Lewis family, through a
succession of eldest sons named Warner Lewis, until 1834, when it was finally
sold by a daughter of the last of them, Elizabeth Lewis (Mrs. Matthew Whiting
Brooke).
John A. Washington
February, 2001