Holmes, John

John Holmes was a farmer and blacksmith. Born in 1791 to a Quaker family, he lived his entire life in Loudoun County.  The Holmes family was an established Virginia clan, intermarrying with several well-known families, such as the Janneys and the Hoges.  They lived in the Goose Creek and North Fork area of Loudoun County, around what is now Waterford, Virginia. The tight-knit community founded by Quakers included skilled farmers who used John Binns's system of farming, or the Loudoun system, that favored crop rotation, deep plowing, and the use of lime, gypsum, and manure fertilizer long before that method gained popularity.

 Holmes was a middling farmer who owned a modest amount of land, where he grew clover seed, wheat, corn and oats and likely raised livestock. The inventory of John Holmes’ estate lists diverse blacksmithing tools such as irons and a large oven. Farmers like Holmes offered a combination of services, such as blacksmithing, fixing carriages and wagons, and sharpening saws and plows, to members of their community.

Holmes married Mary Rogers and they had four children, Nancy, Fenton, Albert, and Abigail.  Mary died young, leaving John to tend to the children on his own. Holmes took a second wife, Lydia Vansickler, on 17 February 1825. The couple had three children, Sarah, Mary, and Martha. Mary died at the age of five.

At the time of Holmes’s death in 1847, he was living on 180 acres of land, which he had inherited (likely from his father) to be used during his life, and after his death, by his children. The acreage, along with the adjoining Craven Farm, became the center of a chancery case in 1853. According to the case, the older children were not living on the property and the property eventually sold. Holmes’s daughters from his first marriage, Nancy and Abigail, had both married and moved to Ohio. Fenton lived with his wife and family in Prince William County. Albert married and moved to Delaware. Holmes’s daughters with his second wife Lydia, Sarah and Martha, were still minors at this point and living with their mother.

John Holmes is buried in North Fork Baptist Church Cemetery.

By Melissa Cannarozzi