Lacey, Israel

Israel Lacey (spelled Lacy in the Mason family manuscript account book) was born in 1762 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and moved to Loudoun County in 1783. His parents were Joseph Jesse Lacey and Matilda Hicks. He married Elizabeth Westwood Armistead in 1798 in Loudoun County.  

Lacey was a Quaker who attended the Nottingham Monthly Meeting in Oxford, Pennsylvania, and later the Fairfax Monthly Meeting, though he was perhaps reluctant to embrace all tenets of Quaker belief. When he moved to Loudoun County, leaders in the Fairfax Monthly Meeting noted that “he still is not excited to attend the meetings.” The Fairfax Monthly Meeting also noted Lacey’s refusal to free his newly purchased enslaved boys at “a proper age.” While some Quakers in Virginia tolerated slavery in their community, many adamantly opposed the institution.  

Lacey held more than twenty-five enslaved people in bondage at the time of his death in 1817. This high number of enslaved people indicates that Lacey was a planter who had a large estate or that, like some other Quakers, he retained the formal title to enslaved people while allowing them to be functionally free because state law would have forced them to leave Virginia within a year after emancipation. His will indicates that he built a mill on his property in partnership with his son-in-law William Cooke. Lacey also served as a director of the Little River Turnpike Company. The Little River Turnpike, a private toll road, ran from Alexandria to Aldie and still carries traffic as part of U.S. Route 50. 

Lacey died in 1817 in Loudoun County around the age of fifty-five. There are no records of his burial. In his will, he left everything he owned to be divided equally among his children. 

by Brant P. Morin