[2] Basically, settlers who developed the once-forested Northern Neck Proprietary land into farms (and their heirs) for more than a century paid quitrents to the designated agent for Lord Fairfax's descendants.
Meanwhile, other German emigrants from Pennsylvania continued south past the Shenandoah Valley into North Carolina to avoid disputes after they developed farms.
By 1745 the sixth Lord Fairfax, a bachelor, took a trip to the Virginia colony, settled there in 1747 and died at his Greenway Court hunting lodge in 1781.
[3] Immediately before the American Revolutionary War, one of Lord Fairfax's surveyors in western Virginia was Thomas Marshall, now better known as the father of Supreme Court justice John Marshall, and who at the time lived in central Virginia on part of Lord Fairfax' Leeds Manor tract, on land leased from Richard Henry Lee.
Virginia officials secured the Proprietary's land office books in 1785, and the following year under governor Patrick Henry began selling them to settlers.
While in England in 1792-1793, James Markham Marshall (the future chief justice's younger brother) agreed to buy the Fairfax family's claim to the Leeds Manor and South Branch tracts (which totaled 215,000 acres) from Martin for 20,000 pounds sterling, with closing scheduled for February 1, 1794.
Trial judge St. George Tucker only ruled that Virginia had to initiate legal proceedings in a court in order to invoke the doctrine of escheat.
[17] On December 10, 1796 the Virginia House of Delegates, with John Marshall as a member and Robert Andrews of Williamsburg advocating on behalf of those who held Fairfax land under conveyances from the state, passed compromise legislation.
John Marshall seems to have believed in those years (the late 1790s) that the family was on legally solid ground based on the Treaty of Paris issue argued in the federal case.
Justice Johnson dissented, arguing that the Virginia legislature acted within its rightful authority, when the Fairfax lands were sequestered without certain established procedures being followed.