William Byrd III (Image courtesy Virginia Museum of History & Culture)
A saying goes that the first generation makes the money, the second maintains it and the third blows it.
For the Byrd family of Colonial Virginia, this proved true.
What we now consider to be central Richmond grew out of an 18th-century crowdsourcing effort by the financially embarrassed William Byrd III. None of the Byrds referred to themselves by Roman numerals; historians use them for keeping track.
WB3’s profligate spending extended to siring children — he fathered 15 of them by two wives. His dedication to living large despite enormous debts and increasingly desperate measures to pay them off couldn’t be sustained. His great happiness involved rolling dice.
The immense wealth of the Byrds grew through inheritance, industry and instigation. The foundations of their fortune came through lands inherited from the first Byrd’s uncle, Thomas Stegge; the trade of furs and hides with native tribes; tobacco; property acquisition; and the importation of indentured servants and slaves, whom they also sold.
The second William Byrd, the “Black Swan of Westover,” was well educated, a prolific and versatile writer, and casually cruel to almost everyone. He built the Westover Plantation house regarded now as one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in the country, which featured a library of 4,000 titles. He reluctantly ceded 50 of his 179,000 acres to establish a town at the falls of the James River, and in September 1733, he and Maj. William Mayo laid out the foundation of two “large cities,” one called Richmond near “Shaco’s” (Shockoe), the other at the point of the Appomattox River to be named Petersburg.
While they lived in London, Byrd II’s first wife, Lucy Parke, died of smallpox. Byrd, 51, soon married an heiress, Mary Taylor, age 25. They returned to Westover and produced three daughters and the third William Byrd.
The father materially showered WB3, but Mary’s fear of smallpox prevented him from an education in England. He instead learned with his sisters and neighboring children and didn’t leave Virginia until after his father’s 1744 death.
Then in London, he took up gambling and bet on horse racing.
“View of North Front of Belvidere, Richmond,” a watercolor painting of William Byrd III’s Richmond residence on a bluff above the James River, by Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Image courtesy Maryland Center for History and Culture)
Back home, Byrd at age 21 married Elizabeth Hill Carter in a near-royal union that joined two of Virginia’s renowned Colonial families. The couple’s four sons and one daughter didn’t reflect on the unhappy marriage. They lived at Belvidere (or Belvidera), an estate perched upon bluffs overlooking the James River rapids, in the location of today’s Pine, China, Belvidere and Spring streets.
Byrd inherited vast acreages, hundreds of slaves, a double forge, a mill, a canal, warehouses, tenements, several fisheries and a ferry. Around 1740, a fire struck Westover that required extensive repairs. All these aspects required administrative coordination and perhaps overwhelmed WB3’s capabilities. His widowed mother, remaining at Westover, supported him materially as her only son, though she possessed no love for his wife.
Duties sent him away, as a justice of the peace in both Halifax and Charles City counties. He represented Lunenburg County in the House of Burgesses from 1752-54 until receiving appointment to the Governor’s Council, where he sat until its last meeting in May 1775.
Byrd in 1758 became colonel of the 2nd Virginia Regiment, and the following year, he succeeded George Washington as commander of the 1st Virginia Regiment (the monument to which at Park and Meadow in the Fan was removed in 2020).
He participated in the French and Indian War but never led in a fight. While on the march, though, he spent huge sums on creature comforts for the soldiers — and himself — with help from his mother. A failed campaign against the Cherokee moved Byrd to resign his command in September 1761.
Elizabeth Carter Byrd remained at Belvidere, kept company by the roar of the James River and her servants and slaves. She wrote to her absent husband, “I am afraid my youth & life will be buried in retirement and dissatisfaction.”
In August 1756, John Kirkpatrick gossiped by letter to George Washington that Byrd had “repudiated his wife who is now in Delirium for his Behaviour, and is Resolved to make a campaign under Lord Loudoun [John Campbell, the fourth Earl of Loudoun, for whom the county is named, the commander of Virginia forces in the French and Indian War] … with a design never to return to Virginia.”
On July 25, 1760, Elizabeth Byrd died. The circumstances are murky. Though the general verdict was suicide, some lore maintains that at Belvidere, she clambered onto a highboy to retrieve letters sent by her husband’s mistresses, and the heavy furniture toppled and crushed her.
Byrd’s “friends” included Peyton and Peter Randolph; Charles Turnbull, a Petersburg merchant; and Byrd’s brothers-in-law, Charles Carter and John Page. By 1767, they sold for Byrd some £40,000 in both land and slaves. The amount totaled a great sum unconvertible into current currency, but Byrd’s ballooning debts eclipsed the money’s value.
While quartered for the winter of 1760 in Philadelphia, WB3 met Mary Willing, a daughter of the former mayor. They wed on Jan. 29, 1761, moving the next year to Westover. The couple sired four sons and six daughters.
His dedication to living large despite enormous debts and increasingly desperate measures to pay them off couldn’t be sustained.
Byrd became embroiled in a 1766 scandal when an audit revealed that the recently deceased John Robinson, speaker of the House of Burgesses and treasurer of Virginia, lent from public coffers more than £100,000 to financially straitened friends. Byrd received £14,921 — the most of any of them.
WB3, and/or his trust, in 1768 hit upon the not unusual Colonial idea of a lottery. The prizes included businesses and river islands, as well as lots in Richmond and Rocky Ridge, what is today Old Manchester. Tracts of 100 acres each spread to most of today’s North Side, Near West End and Fan District and along the river out to the present Three Chopt Road. Ticket sales in Virginia and England were to raise £50,000 from 839 “fortunate adventurers,” as publicity designated the winners.
The plan tanked. As Drew St. J. Carneal wrote in his “Richmond’s Fan District,” “Many of the fortunate adventurers, particularly those who had won less valuable prizes, did not come forward promptly to claim and record their deeds.” The lottery didn’t alter Richmond immediately, though more than a century of control by the Byrd family of operations along the James ended.
“Byrd sold additional lands, mortgaged slaves and all of the Westover silver,” describes Emory G. Evans in the Encyclopedia Virginia, “and finally sold for £15,500 the English estate that he had inherited from his mother. Even these efforts did not cover his debts, some of which burdened the Byrd estate well into the nineteenth century.”
Evans recounts mounting problems as two of Byrd’s sons “ran amok at the College of William and Mary, destroyed property, and threatened the institution’s president; and the death of his mother in 1771 left him owing £5,000 to his children by his first wife.”
Then came the Revolution. Byrd wrote of having little sympathy for the “frantick patriotism” of many Virginia leaders and counseled moderation and remaining loyal to the crown.
Image courtesy The Valentine
In his July 16, 1774, will, Byrd laid out plans for disposing of what remained of an estate that “thro’ my own folly and inattention to accounts the carelessness of some intrusted with the management thereof and the vilany of others, is still greatly incumbered with Debts which imbitters every moment of my Life.”
The next year, Byrd offered his military services to the crown, while his son Francis Otway Byrd joined the Revolution on the Colonists’ side. Then in November 1775, John Murray, royal governor and the fourth earl of Dunmore, issued a proclamation declaring martial law and offering freedom to indentured servants and slaves who rallied to the British cause.
This went too far for Byrd, who then sought a major generalcy in the Continental Army.
No response came.
Deprived of his reputation and most of his family fortune, and without political power in Virginia, the 48-year-old took his life at Westover on Jan. 1 or 2, 1777.
He wanted burial at old Westover Church, but his grave is unmarked.
Belvidere, for years an abused rental property, burned in 1857.
Following the 1814 death of WB3’s widow, Westover passed from Byrd hands. Privately owned today, the gardens and grounds are open daily, with interior tours scheduled by appointment.
