AMPTHILL 



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 

 as ballroom and kitchen, with a garden once ter- 

 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 Gary 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 



