Rhody, J

J. Rhody, also known as John Rhodes Jr., was born to John Rhodes Sr. and Mary Rhodes on 29 March 1745 in Christchurch Parish, Middlesex County, Virginia. In 1765, at the age of twenty-one, John Jr. purchased some Fairfax County land from Nathaniel Popejoy. Later that year, on 10 November 1765, Rhodes married Nancy Putnam in Fauquier County. John Jr. and Nancy had two children, Mary and Tholomiah.

Rhodes appears in the Fairfax County order books and Loudoun County minute order books in the 1760s and 1770s, serving as a witness or defendant in many local court cases.  When the North American colonies rebelled against the British government, Rhodes joined the rebellion and served as a fifer in the 2^nd Virginia Regiment of the Continental Line in the American Revolutionary War from January 1778 to October 1778.

After the war, the Loudoun County minute order books show that Rhodes remained in northern Virginia. In July 1794, Rhodes’s work brought him to the Raspberry Plain estate. There is no record of the specific services Rhodes performed for the Mason family, but after Rhodes’s duties were complete, the distance was too far away for him to return to his Fairfax home, so his overnight lodging in Loudoun was paid for by Stevens Thomson Mason via his overseer, Joseph Williams.

Though there is no information that reveals Rhodes’s specific occupation, he was most likely not a farmer as his estate did not include any farming implements at the time of his death. Rhodes’s estate inventory does provide an interesting insight into the daily life of what appears to have been a middling family in northern Virginia in the late eighteenth century. His estate included a spinning wheel and a variety of fabrics, including wool and comparatively expensive imported striped cotton.  The household had additional luxuries like a “Bureau” and a “Looking Glass” valued at $6.72. The inventory also indicates that each member of the Rhodes family had a bed, bedding, and bed clothes, valued together at $118.50. These items and values do indicate that while the Rhodes family would not have been considered wealthy, they had resources for a comfortable household with a few luxuries.

After 1796, there are no official records documenting John Rhodes’s life. His son, Tholomiah Rhodes, was taxed for owning property in Loudoun County in 1798. The Loudoun County personal property tax records for 1798, 1799, and 1800 show three males over the age of sixteen living in Tholomiah’s household; starting in 1801, the tax record only shows two males over the age of sixteen in the household. It could be that, if John’s health started to fail in 1797, Tholomiah took over the Rhodes household.

Rhodes left his estate in the care of his wife, Nancy, and her father, Robert Russell. While the exact date of Rhodes’s death is unknown, he died before 22 April 1804, the date his widow married Joseph Rowen in Alexandria, Virginia.

 

By Rachel Birch