Cooke,

Colonel John Travers Cooke, born in 1755 to Travers Cooke and Mary Doniphan, resided at West Farm along the Potomac River between Aquia and Chopawamsic Creeks in Stafford County, Virginia. He married Mary Thomson Mason, daughter of George Mason IV, at Gunston Hall on 18 November 1784. The couple had ten children.  

Cooke operated a ferry service from his plantation, which was connected by road to the town of Aquia. He raised tobacco and likely switched to wheat farming, as did most planters in the area, after the American Revolution. By 1812, he enslaved fifty-three people—the largest number of people in Stafford County—and had acquired 2,738 acres of land.  

Cooke’s involvement in county affairs included serving as a member of Stafford County’s militia. It is likely that he was also a Revolutionary War veteran, since a John Cooke of Virginia served as a captain in the 4th Continental Dragoons. 

Later, as one of Stafford County’s leading men, Cooke was appointed to settle the accounts of disbursements and rents for the tobacco warehouse at Aquia, served as a justice for the county court, and was named a trustee for the town of Woodstock by the General Assembly in 1792. In 1800, he was appointed to a standing committee to aid in the appointment of presidential electors. Cooke was a businessman, too. In the 1790s, he and Daniel Carroll Brent contracted with the federal government to cut freestone from Government Island to supply Pierre L’Enfant and other architects engaged in constructing the nation’s new capital, Washington, D.C. In 1804, they contracted with Benjamin Henry Latrobe while he was supervising the construction of the United States Capitol. Brent and Cooke collaborated in a few other ventures, including the operation of a flour mill, a store, a lumberyard, and a fishery.  

When Colonel John Cooke died without a will in 1819, the inventory and appraisal for his estate were recorded in Fredericksburg. His administrators sold West Farm to Withers Waller in 1825.  

By Cassandra Farrell