Moffett, Robert

Robert Moffett, born on 3 October 1783, in the village of Waterford, in Loudoun County, was the son of Captain Josiah Moffett and his wife Elizabeth. Robert Moffett was the second or third of at least four children Josiah had with three wives. Moffett himself apparently married twice, first to Bethsina McGeath and then to Ellen Mead. However, the only evidence for the marriage to McGeath is an 1891 obituary of their son Armstead Moffett, who was born in 1814, two years before Moffett’s marriage to Mead and eight before McGeath’s to Gainer Rhodes Pierce. Divorce, uncommon in Virginia in the early nineteenth century but not unheard of, was usually accomplished with a legislative petition. However, no such petition regarding a divorce between Moffett and McGeath exists, so it is possible that another Robert Moffett fathered Armstead or that he was born out of wedlock.

Moffett’s 1816 marriage to Ellen Mead resulted in four children: William Mead (1817-1838), Mary Ellen (1821-1876), Anne Elizabeth (or Ann Eliza, 1825-1895), and Martha Virginia (1826-1859). Moffett was a successful farmer; by 1850, just a few years before his death, he owned 1,250 acres of land, 850 “improved” and 400 “unimproved,” valued at $56,000. By this point, his household included only his youngest daughter, Martha Virginia; his wife had died in 1842, and the other children were either dead or married. Martha Virginia, known as Virginia, married Francis Preston the following year.

Moffett was also an enslaver. In 1820, he held fourteen people in captivity, and by 1830, that number had grown to seventeen. In 1815, Moffett took an advertisement in the Alexandria Gazette offering a reward for the return of an enslaved teenager named Simon who had liberated himself from a property in Loudoun; it is unknown whether he was recaptured. Moffett also rented slaves, including a man named William Lee; Lee was well-known throughout northern Virginia and had acquaintances on Mary Mason’s property.

Moffett appears on folio 107 of the Mason family manuscript account book as a tax collector.  His role as a deputy sheriff of Loudoun County explains why. In colonial America, sheriffs and their deputies were appointed and were responsible for maintaining jails, serving process papers, protecting the peace, and collecting personal property and land taxes on behalf of the state, roles that did not change significantly until the mid-nineteenth century. It was only with the adoption of the 1851Virginia constitution that sheriff became an elected position. Although a 1786 Virginia law directed local courts to appoint commissioners to collect taxes, Moffett had this responsibility in the 1810s and 1820s, suggesting that he was either also a commissioner, that the responsibility of collecting taxes remained with the sheriff’s office in Loudoun after 1786, or that the title given to commissioners was “deputy sheriff.” Taxes were collected each year by December, following a March or April assessment, although late payments were common.

Robert Moffett died on 10 May 1853 at the age of sixty-nine and was interred at the Fairfax Friends Cemetery in Waterford, Loudoun, where his headstone still stands.

By Adam Nubbe