Learning The History — Fielding Lewis

Fielding Lewis was born July 7, 1725, at Warner Hall in Gloucester County, Virginia, to

John and Frances Fielding Lewis, the third of seven children. His uncle Robert Lewis

was the grandfather of famed explorer Meriwether Lewis.

Lewis owned and leased ships that carried tobacco, produce, wood products and

European-made goods to the West Indies, then returned to Virginia with fruit, sugar and

salt, rum and occasionally slaves. Profits from trade were good because Fredericksburg

was close to the wealth of the Virginia Piedmont.

After the wedding, Betty moved into a large brick house in Fredericksburg where she

and Fielding lived together for the next 25 years. In 1751, Betty gave birth to their first

child, Fielding Jr., followed by ten more children over a twenty-year period. Only six

children survived adulthood.

In 1752, Lewis asked his brother-in-law and good friend, George Washington, to survey

861 acres, the core of a 1,322-acre plantation just outside Fredericksburg, which would

become Kenmore. Lewis then bought the tract and began a career as a planter, which

would enable him to sell his own produce. His slaves would soon number more than 80.

They and their white overseers planted the area’s staples: corn, wheat and tobacco.

In 1760 Lewis began a third career by entering politics and was elected to the Virginia

House of Burgesses through 1768. Those were the years of British taxation on imports

to the American colonies. Lewis was in attendance when Patrick Henry, The Voice of

the Revolution, delivered his famous Stamp Act speech in Williamsburg in 1765: “If this

be treason, make the most of it.”

In 1769, Fielding and Betty started construction of a large Georgian mansion at

Kenmore, where he and Betty could raise their large family. But the rift over taxes

placed on the colonies led to postponements and delays in their house plans, since

such items as paint, glass and hardware came from England. The house would not be

completed until 1775.

In 1772, George Washington purchased a house from Michael Robinson in

Fredericksburg, Virginia for his mother. Mary Ball Washington spent her last seventeen

years in this comfortable home. The white framed house sits on the corner of Charles

and Lewis Streets and was within walking distance to Kenmore, home of Mary’s

daughter Betty Fielding Lewis. In March 1773, Fielding Lewis joined Virginia’s Committee of Correspondence, the first of several colonial committees that gathered intelligence from British sources. In 1775, the Lewis family finally moved into the new Georgian-style brick mansion at Kenmore – two stories, eight rooms, about 4,700 square feet plus a full cellar. In the spacious interior, the plaster designs on the 12-foot- high ceilings combine baroque, neoclassical and rococo elements, and the exterior of 317,000 bricks is pristine.

Many people lived and worked on the plantation, including the Lewises, 4 of their 8

surviving children and over 80 slaves. The house was built by skilled tradesmen,

indentured servants and enslaved African Americans. In Tidewater Virginia, homes like

Kenmore were not unusual but most of the homes of its type were destroyed in the Civil

War.

Unfortunately, the family almost immediately entered a period of financial difficulty

because of the War. Fielding Lewis was in charge of the militia in Spotsylvania County

with the rank of colonel, and provided saltpeter, sulphur, powder and lead for the

manufacture of ammunition. He also supplied salt, flour, bacon and clothing from his

store in Fredericksburg to the soldiers and later provided for them when they were

wounded.

Colonel Lewis also made great sacrifices to aid his brother-in-law and friend, George

Washington. In June 1775, after Congress appointed Washington commander in chief

of the Continental Army, Lewis was appointed to establish and equip a factory to make

small arms for the colony in Fredericksburg, the first such factory in America.

Virginia’s third revolutionary convention contributed the first 25,000 pounds, but most of

the operating funds came from Colonel Lewis. His first letter to Washington about “our little manufactory,” dated February 1776, said they had “been mostly repairing old guns,” but expected production of muskets to begin in March, with a ten-gun-a-day quota.

A January 1781 letter to Thomas Jefferson from Charles Dick, the gunnery’s manager,

noted that at least 1,001 “good guns” had been fashioned and that “the gentlemen of

this town and even the ladies have very spiritually attended at the gunnery and assisted

to make up already above 2000 cartridges and bullets.”

Unfortunately, the patriotic zeal which distinguished Colonel Lewis also ruined him financially. He advanced increasingly large sums from his personal account for the

expenses of the Fredericksburg Gunnery as well as for outfitting ships. Kenmore was

heavily mortgaged to meet the costs of all these patriotic enterprises. He also lost a

great deal of money during the war because he could not carry on his mercantile

business.

By this time, Lewis’ health was failing, probably because of a respiratory ailment. He

claimed that the commonwealth of Virginia owed him about 35,000 pounds, equivalent

to more than $2 million today. “I have destroyed myself greatly,” Lewis wrote to Colonel

George Brooke, treasurer of Virginia, in February 1781.

Fielding Lewis died in December 1781, just two months after the defeat of Cornwallis at

Yorktown. At the time of his death, he was still owed £7000 but it was never repaid.

As a widow with four minor children, Betty Washington Lewis remained at Kenmore for

another fourteen years although the property was inherited by Fielding’s oldest son

John. She struggled financially and at times resorted to renting out some of her slaves.

She tried running a small boarding school at Kenmore, but again money had to be

raised and piece after piece of the land was sold to obtain it.

Also, her brother Samuel Washington’s orphaned sixteen-year-old daughter Harriot

Washington lived with Betty from 1792 until 1796 when she married Andrew Parks, a

merchant in Fredericksburg. George Washington was her guardian upon the death of

her father.

During the last two years of her life, Betty lived at Mill Brook, a smaller farm about

twelve miles south of Fredericksburg along the Po River. In many ways, the property

suited her more than Kenmore because it had better farmland and a mill that generated

a small but steady income.

Betty Washington Lewis died March 31, 1797, at age 64, while visiting her daughter,

Betty Lewis Carter, at the Western View Plantation in Culpeper County, Virginia, and is

buried there.

Betty and her husband are commemorated with street names in the Ferry Farm

subdivision – Fielding Circle and Betty Lewis Drive.

Despite postwar appeals by friends to the House of Delegates and Governor Patrick

Henry, the Lewis family was never compensated for Fielding’s enormous advances of

energy and money in the cause of the American Revolution. The Lewis children, in need

of money, sold Kenmore in 1797.

After many changes of ownership and divisions of acreage, Kenmore was slated for

destruction or division into apartments in 1921. But Fredericksburg’s Vivian Minor

Fleming decided that Kenmore had to be saved. In 1925, the Kenmore Association

(now the George Washington Foundation) bought the property for $30,000. In 1970, the

National Park Service designated Kenmore as a National Historic Landmark.