Francis Eppes - Jamestown Adventurer -10th Great-grandfather

WPA mural painted in 1939 by Edmund M. Archer in the Hopewell, Virginia, Post Office, titled: "Capt. Francis Eppes Making Friends with the Appomattox Indians."

 

 [10/26/20. I am wrong re our lineage into the Eppes family. It isn't through Roger Rainey. I've yet to find why our family has so many Eppes DNA matches. When I discover which wife was an Eppes, I'll change this blog. KC)

Francis Epes (later spelling Eppes ) and his wife Marie, our 10th great-grandparents, were not our earliest ancestors to set foot on American soil when they arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, before 1623, but they were nearly so. Virginia, still under the charter of the London Company of Virginia and not yet a royal colony, was founded in 1607 by adventurers hoping to find gold. When Francis and Marie arrived with his brothers William and Peter by 1623, it was in the midst of serious efforts to establish a permanent settlement, for the Native Americans had no wealth but land. I have often wondered why in high school we spent weeks studying the Pilgrim fathers up in Plymouth Colony, but gave short shrift to the cavaliers of Virginia.

Ashford, Kent, England

Francis Epes was born c.1597 in Ashford, County Kent, England (about 65 miles southeast of London and not far from Canterbury) and died in Virginia by 30 Sept. 1674. He was the son of John Epes the Elder (b.1550), a gentleman of Ashford, and Thomasine Fisher (our 11th great-grandparents. Baptized 14 May, 1597 in the parish church of Ashford, his lineage can be traced back to thirteenth century Kent. William, Francis, and Peter were the 5th, 6th, & 8th sons (10th, 11th, & 14th children) of John Epes. Captain William Epes, the older brother, moved with his wife Margaret from Virginia to St. Christopher's in the West Indies by 1630 and Peter left no descendants of record in the colony; and this is why I have no hesitation in naming Francis as our direct Eppes ancestor.
 

St. Mary the Virgin, Ashford, Kent, England, where Francis Epes was baptized and probably married.

Francis Epes married Marie (1602-c1644 or later) in England in 1620. She was probably a Kentish maid.

Imagining Jamestown c1614

In April 1625 Francis Epes was elected from Shirley Hundred to sit in the Assembly of James City in May of that year, when he began a career of public service. He gained patents to huge tracts of land in the Virginia Colony.

• He was an active officer (in grades Ensign through Colonel) in the Virginia Colonial Militia.
• He was appointed commissioner for the Upper Parts, 8 Aug. 1626, and commander of forces with Capt. Thomas Pawlett to attack the Weyanoke and Appomattox Indians 4 July 1627.
• In 1627 Francis was a member of the House of Burgesses for Shirley Hundred, Mr. Farrar's and Chaplaine's, 1631-32, and for Charles City County, 1639, as one of four persons "resident in Virginia and fit to be called to the Council there."
• He was appointed to the "Commission for a monthly Court in the Upper Parts," in March 1628.
• He served in the House of Burgesses for Charles City County, 1639/40 and 1645-46, and was a member of the Council in 1652.

Francis returned to England c.1629, taking Marie and two small sons, John and Francis II, with him, either to tend to the affairs of his father John Epes, recently deceased (but there were other sons); or to collect an inheritance (one would think his and his brothers' inheritances were distributed when they equipped themselves for their first voyage); or being an ambitious man, he went to arrange to increase his fortune in the New World.  Francis' third son Thomas was born in London and baptized there at St. Olave's, which later survived the Great London Fire of 1666.

St. Olave's in London is also where Samuel Pepys is buried

Francis Epes returned to Virginia by 1632 on the Hopewell, and claimed headrights for himself (it was legal to claim 50 acres for each voyage), his sons, and 30 new colonists, indentured servants, and 5 Negro women identified only by first names, probably acquired as slaves at a stop in the Caribbean, whose passages he paid. 34 persons x 50 acres = 1700 acres. He claimed his wife's headright of 50 acres at a later date. Francis expanded his land holdings in the New World at every opportunity.

Charles City County, Viginia

• In 26 Aug 1635, as Capt. Francis Epes, he was granted that 1700 acres in Charles City County on the Appomattox River at its confluence with the James River, which he named Hopewell Farms (now the modern town of Hopewell, Virginia). A portion of that property remained in the Eppes family until 1978, the longest held property by a single family line. It was acquired by the National Park Service in 1979 to extend the Petersburg National Battlefield site from the Civil War.
• He also held land on Shirley Hundred Island, now Eppes Island, and maintained his principle residence there.
• In 1653 he received another grant of 280 acres adjoining the larger grant in Charles City County for transporting 6 persons.

  

  Epes owned property first at Shirley Hundred, adding to his holdings with 1700 acres across the James at present-day Hopewell, where the Appomatox River empties into the James.

Back to the Hopewell Post Office mural. An unknown author wrote the following:

In the mural design that Archer submitted to the U.S. Treasury Department in 1939, he portrayed  Captain Francis Eppes shaking hands with the chief of the Appomattox Indians in a friendly, cooperative manner. The mural depicts the arrival of Eppes on his ship the Hopewell, seen in the left background, for which his farm and the surrounding city were later named.  Founded in 1635, Appomattox Manor is considered the oldest English Colonial Land Grant in the United States to continue in the same family. The work continued a long tradition of romanticizing first encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples. Growing up in Virginia, Archer most likely had some familiarity with the tale of Eppes' arrival that he sought to illustrate in the painting. However, the story conveyed in the mural hid the tense intercultural relations between the early English settlers of Virginia and the indigenous Americans, thus replacing the historical testimonies of immense bloodshed with the naïve façade of a gentleman’s agreement. . . .

This year [1635] marks both Eppes’ assured prominence in Charles County henceforth because of the recognition England gave to his ownership of that land [of 1700 acres], and a turning point for the Appomattox Indians who continued to defend their claims. 

The Appomattox were an Algonquin-speaking tribe and part of the original five tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy. According to John Smith, an early explorer and documenter of the Chesapeake region, the Appomattox had 60 warriors in 1607. By 1616, that number doubled to 120. However, their numbers significantly dwindled in the coming decades, and the tribe was considered extinct by 1722. Their early encounters with colonists had been peaceful until 1613 when Sir Thomas Dale pushed the tribe away from the mouth of the Appomattox River in order to create the town of City Point.

Archer’s mural illustrates an agreement with the local Appomattox to share the land at City Point, the land in Charles County that Eppes had received from England and that later became the city of Hopewell. Yet in actuality, the natives had no involvement in the official proceedings that granted land to colonists. The illustration offers a blissful illusion of mutual satisfaction when, in fact, the English Colonists and Native tribes in the Chesapeake region had been waging a series of wars known as the Anglo-Powhatan Wars for two decades prior to the land grant of 1635.

The Anglo-Powhatan Wars originated from early contentions with the English colonists who settled in Jamestown. The first conflict occurred in 1609 and lasted until 1614 with the marriage between John Rolfe and Pocahontas, leaving the colonists and Powhatan Confederacy on an uneasy footing. These early attacks sowed the seeds for the later Virginia frontier conflicts that began with the Indian Massacre of 1622, an organized Indian raid on English colonists that killed a third of the colony’s population; continued during the resulting prolonged periods of war in 1622–1632, 1644–1646, and 1675–1677, and ended with the Treaty of Middle Plantation in 1677, in which the natives swore fidelity to the English Empire. Agreements between the Indians and the colonists were saturated with distrust and cultural misunderstanding amid the strains of this era. Archer was ignorant of this tense period of conflict that he idealized as a time of cordial agreement between the colonists and Powhatan Indians.

Eppes’ relations with the indigenous populations were no better than those of the typical colonist. The relationship between Francis Eppes and the Appomattox could not be described as friendly in the aftermath of the warring period between 1622 and 1632. Eppes’ return to North America in 1631 was not his first encounter with the native populations of the Chesapeake. In 1627, he had led an assault against the Weyanokes and the Appomattox. Thus, the image of Eppes “making friends” with the Appomattox seems highly unlikely in the wake of warfare and the appropriation of lands by the English and colonial governments without Native consent.

What was it that made Francis Epes a wealthy landholder? Why, tobacco, of course.

Tobacco harvesting

You may be wondering which of Francis' sons is our direct ancestor. It is Francis Eppes II (1627 Virginia - 1678 Henrico Co. VA), our 9th great-grandfather, who married Mary Wells (1623-1660). But that's another story. Eventually, in 1720 a Sarah Eppes married Roger Rainey, to become our 7th great-grandparents, bringing the Rainey and Eppes lines together.