Existing comment:
When 22-year-old William Jones arrived here in the early 1770s, this was still a wilderness. The frontier had passed only decades before. The farms that had been carved out of the vast forests to grow tobacco had exhausted the soil and mostly grown over. By 1772, the area was already known as "the Wilderness."
Jones, with the help of his brother and probably some slaves, started clearing what would become Ellwood. Every tree cut by hand. Every stump pulled with ropes, chains, and animals. Though he would come to own more than 5,000 acres, only 400 of those would be cleared and put into production. |