In the 1730s, John Carlyle trained as an apprentice to English merchant William Hicks in the port town of Whitehaven.

Carlyle established himself as a merchant at Belhaven (original name of Alexandria), a settlement that had grown up around a tobacco warehouse on the bluff overlooking the Potomac River.

Carlyle was owner of 4 ships, 3 of them capable of crossing the Atlantic to sell his products to France and Great Britain.

When the French and native forces were stronger, Great Britain sent General Edward Braddock to fight their enemies.

In 1755, Carlyle's house was the initial headquarters for Major-General Edward Braddock in Virginia during the French and Indian War.

The Congress of Alexandria convened at the house, most likely in the dining room, and here Braddock decided to make an expedition to the French Fort Duquesne.

Around 1770, Caryle constructed a plantation house and summer residence in what is now Fairlington, Arlington, Virginia first called Torthorwald (after his family's ancestral home in Scotland) and later changed to Morven (a mythical land of the Gaels in an Ossian poem) which stood until 1942.

In 1779, while George William Carlyle was at school was informed of the illness of his father and returned to the house, after his father death he volunteered for Virginian regiment led by William Washington and decided to join the revolution and died in 1781 at the Battle of Eutaw Springs.

He served in the cavalry (3rd Continental Light Dragoons under Lt. Col. William Washington, a cousin of George Washington) and was killed in South Carolina in the American Revolutionary War Battle of Eutaw Springs on 8 September 1781[2] at age 15, less than one year after the death of his father.