Mason, William T.T.

William Temple Thomson Mason was born on 24 July 1782, the third child of Thomson Mason and his second wife, Elizabeth Westwood Wallace. Between both wives, Thomson had six sons and two daughters. “Temple” was a half brother of Stevens Thomson Mason of Raspberry Plain and a nephew of George Mason IV of Gunston Hall.  

William T.T. Mason married Ann Eliza Carroll, who was related to the prominent Carroll family of Maryland, in Annapolis, Maryland, on 16 June 1812. He took her back to his home, Temple Hall, in Loudoun County. Temple Hall, built c. 1810, still stands close to U.S. Route 15 between Leesburg and Lucketts. Starting with daughter Temple Anna, born in 1813, he and Ann had eleven children together. Ann died on 20 September 1851. 

Mason welcomed French Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette, along with President John Quincy Adams and former President James Monroe, to Temple Hall during Lafayette’s 1825 tour of the United States to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution. While visiting, Lafayette, Adams, and Monroe participated in the baptisms of Mason’s youngest daughters. Lafayette became Mary Mason’s godfather, while Adams and Monroe became joint godfathers to Maria Louisa Mason. 

William T.T. Mason farmed his property, using enslaved labor to grow crops including wheat. In 1818, he loaned fifty-six bushels of wheat to his nephew Armistead T. Mason “for seed the wheat to be returned.” After Armistead’s death in 1819, William contributed to running Raspberry Plain and continued to record some of the plantation’s transactions in the Mason family manuscript account book. The 1820 U.S. census counted twenty-two enslaved people of all ages on Mason’s farm. He sold Temple Hall and moved to Washington, D.C., in 1857. 

In his will of 25 April 1860, William T.T. Mason bequeathed an enslaved girl named Florence, who was five or six years old at the time, to his granddaughter Anne E.T. Magill, and two enslaved females to be selected from his estate to his daughter Mary Carter Mason. William directed that the remaining enslaved people included in his estate be “appraised and divided into four equal parts in value” to be given to his children [Nicholas] Carroll, William, Charles, and [Maria] Louisa. These allocations may never have come to pass, since William T.T. Mason’s will was not proved in court until 1 August 1865. By that time, the Emancipation Proclamation and Confederate capitulation had already freed Florence, her mother Rosina, the enslaved male Dick and his mother Susan (also mentioned in the will), and the rest of the enslaved people Mason held in bondage.  

William T.T. Mason died in Washington, D.C., on 5 April 1862 at the age of 79. His remains were taken back to Virginia and buried in the St. James Episcopal Cemetery in Leesburg, near the grave of his wife. 

By Tom Seabrook