Oldal 108 [108]
AMPIHILL
AR up the winding river named in honor of King
James, there stands upon the southern bank an old
brick house. With flanking outbuildings once used
He as ballroom and kitchen, with a garden once ter¬
4 220, raced and a brick-walled graveyard, it is a type of
the stately bygones of Virginia’s ancient aristocracy.
This is Ampthill, ancestral home of the Cary family, but famed
before that as the site of the first iron furnace ever operated in
America.
Known in colonial days as Falling Creek, The London Com¬
pany, at a cost of four thousand pounds sterling, in the year 1619
erected on this estate a forge to be used for smelting iron and lead.
John Berkeley, son of Sir John Berkeley, was placed in charge of
the works, and the iron made here was said to be as good as any
in the world. When the crushing year of 1622 came, with its
fateful tidings of the Indian massacre, only two of the twenty-four
settlers at Falling Creek were spared.
For many years the works were abandoned, but, April 20, 1687,
William Byrd was granted eighteen hundred acres of land, which
included the ill-fated iron furnace. On October 29, 1690, he
secured an additional grant of fifty-six hundred and forty-four
' acres, the reason given for the latter being that, "there having been
iron works at Falling Creek in the time of the company, and
Colonel Byrd having an intention to carry them on, and foreseeing
that abundance of wood might be necessary for so great a work,
he took up a large tract.”’
In 1733, the second William Byrd, on one of his adventurous
rides, bribed an Indian to drop secretly a tomahawk on the spot
where the mine was supposed to be. In his “History of the
Dividing Line,” Byrd tells the story: ‘‘We sent for an old Indian
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