Page, William B.

William Byrd Page was born in 1772 in Gloucester County, in southeastern Virginia, and died in 1818. He was the great-nephew of George Mason IV on his mother’s side. The Pages were a well-known family, among the original settlers of Virginia. William was a member of the Byrd family—also important in Virginia history—on his paternal grandmother’s side. Although William Byrd Page descended from prominent families, his personal life, finances, and holdings remain largely unclear. 

William's father, Mann Page, did not inherit the family lands in Gloucester. Instead, he established his own plantation, Mannsfield, near Fredericksburg in Spotsylvania County. He was among the one hundred richest men in Virginia in the late eighteenth century and had holdings in both Spotsylvania and Prince William counties. Following Page’s death in 1779, Mannsfield was left to his wife, Mary Mason Page, who later married Wilson Cary Selden. The four-thousand-acre property was later conveyed to her second husband’s father, though two thousand acres were deeded to her son, William Byrd Page. It is unclear what became of William and the property he was deeded following his mother’s death in 1787, since at the age of fifteen he was still under the guardianship of his mother’s second husband, Wilson Cary Selden.  

William Byrd Page married Anne Lee—daughter of the Revolutionary War hero “Light-Horse Harry” Lee—in 1797 in Alexandria, and the couple had eight children. William Byrd Page died in 1818 in Jefferson County in what is now West Virginia. It is unclear if his widow remarried; her life remains largely undocumented. 

Page appeared in the Mason family manuscript account book only once, on folio 52, and he seems to have left his debt with the Masons unsettled. In 1799, an entry for his “fee vs. Henry Jenkins (district court)” was noted. However, no further information about the case exists. 

by Dierdre Gottert