The Greenlee family was among the earliest pioneer families of the Timber Ridge settlement in present-day Rockbridge County, Virginia. James Greenlee and his wife, Mary McDowell, arrived with the McDowell family in 1737 and established themselves within the new settlement near the headwaters of the James River. Through Mary, the Greenlees were closely connected with one of the most prominent families in the early history of Rockbridge County.
The following account brings together the Greenlee family references in William Henry Foote’s Sketches of Virginia: Historical and Biographical, Second Series, arranging them by family relationship and historical setting.
James Greenlee and Mary McDowell
James Greenlee married Mary McDowell, daughter of Ephraim McDowell and his wife. Foote expressed uncertainty over whether the elder McDowells were born in Scotland and later moved to Ulster, Ireland, or were themselves born in Ireland.
In the fall of 1737 Ephraim McDowell and his wife traveled southward from Pennsylvania with their sons James and John, their daughter Mary, and her husband, James Greenlee. Pennsylvania had served as their point of entry after their emigration from the British dominions.
The family intended to settle in Beverley’s Manor in the Shenandoah Valley. James McDowell had visited the valley during the preceding summer and raised a crop of corn along the South River to provide food for the family during its first winter.
The Journey to Timber Ridge
After crossing the Blue Ridge at Wood’s Gap, the family camped for the night along Linville Creek. There they met Benjamin Burden, a land promoter who was attempting to secure a grant of 100,000 acres near the headwaters of the James River. The governor had conditioned the grant upon Burden’s locating one hundred settlers on the tract.
Burden offered each participating settler one hundred acres for building a cabin, together with the right to purchase additional land at a specified price. After learning that John McDowell possessed surveying instruments and knew how to use them, Burden offered him one thousand acres for helping to lay out the proposed grant. Ephraim McDowell, James McDowell, and James Greenlee were each to receive two hundred acres.
The following day Burden and John McDowell traveled to the home of Colonel John Lewis on Lewis Creek, near the site of Staunton, where they formalized their agreement. They then proceeded southwest through the valley and began surveying near the forks of the North River.
The members of the McDowell and Greenlee families settled near one another and erected cabins. Because a wooded ridge stood out amid surrounding land largely covered by grass and pea vines, the neighborhood became known as Timber Ridge.
James Greenlee and the Timber Ridge Church
James Greenlee became an active supporter of the Presbyterian congregation at Timber Ridge. The congregation’s earliest meetinghouse was a wooden structure standing near the community’s original burial ground.
In 1753 the Timber Ridge congregation united with New Providence in extending a call to Rev. John Brown, a graduate of the College of New Jersey at Princeton and a licentiate of the New Castle Presbytery. James Greenlee was among the men who signed the call requesting Brown to assume the pastoral care of the two congregations.
The congregations promised to support their minister through annual subscriptions. The surviving subscription list records a contribution of one pound from James Greenlee toward Brown’s support.
Mary Greenlee
Foote described Mary Greenlee as a woman of unusual intelligence, independence, shrewdness, and force of character. She was about twenty-six years old when she endured the difficult journey into the Shenandoah Valley and the labor of establishing a household in a new frontier settlement.
She retained her memory, spirit, and vivacity into advanced age despite the hardships and changes she experienced. Foote also referred to an early disappointment in love that he believed had exerted a lasting influence upon her character, although he supplied no details concerning the episode.
The Witchcraft Accusation
Mary’s intelligence, independence, and eccentricities aroused suspicion among some of her more superstitious neighbors. Foote wrote that many people of the period firmly believed in witches and attributed otherwise unexplained events to witchcraft.
During a quilting held at her house, Mary urged an industrious guest to eat more freely, joking that “the mare that does double work should be best fed.” Her remark was distorted into an accusation that Mary was a witch and that the other woman was the mare she rode during her supposed nighttime excursions.
Losses of livestock in the neighborhood encouraged the rumor, which spread with additional embellishments. According to Foote, Mary narrowly escaped being brought to trial for witchcraft under the old laws of Virginia.
Mary Greenlee’s Testimony in the Burden Land Suit
Mary Greenlee became an important witness in the prolonged litigation over Benjamin Burden’s land grant. The case, pursued by Burden’s heirs against Robert and Martha Hervey, eventually affected titles to land throughout the grant. Its testimony and proceedings filled two large folio volumes preserved in the clerk’s office at Staunton.
In April 1806 Mary underwent a lengthy examination that tested both her memory and her temper. When one of the examiners asked her age, she replied, “Ninety-five the 17th of this instant; and why do you ask me my age?—do you think I am in my dotage?”
Mary’s testimony, together with that of Colonel James McDowell, preserved much of the early history of the Timber Ridge settlement and the Burden grant.
Peggy Milhollen and the Cabin Rights
The testimony in the Burden litigation also described the activities of Peggy Milhollen, an Irish servant woman. Milhollen reportedly built a number of cabins and entered them upon the list used to establish cabin rights.
Her actions helped Burden approach the required number of cabins needed to secure his grant while also enabling her to obtain extensive landholdings. Foote wrote that she conducted the arrangement so skillfully that it escaped suspicion until long after the cabins had been registered.
Samuel Greenlee and Liberty Hall
Before the American Revolution, several families in the region sought advanced education for sons who might enter the ministry. A small grammar school was organized near Old Providence for that purpose.
Samuel Greenlee studied there alongside Samuel Doak, John Montgomery, Archibald Alexander, James Houston, William Tate, William Wilson, and other frontier youths. The school later moved to Mount Pleasant near Fairfield. In 1776 it was established at the Timber Ridge meetinghouse and given the name Liberty Hall, an institutional predecessor of Washington College.
Genealogy Notes
The spelling M’Dowell appears frequently in Foote’s nineteenth-century text. The modern surname form McDowell has been used throughout this account for consistency.
Foote identifies Mary Greenlee as the daughter of Ephraim McDowell and the sister of James and John McDowell. Through this relationship, the Greenlee family was connected with the later McDowell family of Rockbridge County, including Governor James McDowell.
Mary stated in April 1806 that she would be ninety-five on the seventeenth day of that month. Her testimony places her birth on or about April 17, 1711, if her statement and the reported date of the deposition are accurate.
Foote names Samuel Greenlee among the students of the early grammar school near Old Providence, but the passage does not state his parentage or specify his relationship to James and Mary Greenlee. He should not be assigned to a particular generation of their family without evidence from another record.
The account supplies no list of the children of James and Mary Greenlee. Land, probate, church, court, and cemetery records will be necessary to reconstruct their descendants and determine the exact place of Samuel Greenlee within the family.
Source
This family genealogy was compiled from references appearing throughout William Henry Foote’s Sketches of Virginia: Historical and Biographical. Foote’s scattered biographical, family, church, and settlement references have been brought together here and arranged by generation to make the genealogical relationships easier to follow.
Foote, William Henry. Sketches of Virginia: Historical and Biographical. Second Series. Second edition, revised. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1856. Available online at AccessGenealogy, Sketches of Virginia: Historical and Biographical. Accessed 9 August 2026.