Peter Jefferson

The "Fry-Jefferson Map", created by Peter in collaboration with Joshua Fry in 1757, accurately charted the Allegheny Mountains for the first time and showed the route of "The Great Road from the Yadkin River through Virginia to Philadelphia distant 455 Miles"—what would later come to be known as the Great Wagon Road.

Jefferson was born at a settlement called Osbornes[a] along the James River[3] in what is now Chesterfield County, Virginia and was the son of Captain Thomas Jefferson (1679–1731),[4] a large property owner, and Mary Field (1680–1715), who was the daughter of Major Peter Field of New Kent County and granddaughter of Henry Soane (1622–1661) of the Virginia House of Burgesses.

His friend William Randolph, a widower and his wife's cousin, died in 1745, having appointed Jefferson as guardian to manage the Tuckahoe Plantation until his son came of age.

[3][6] Jane and Peter offered a privileged life for their family whether in established areas of eastern Virginia or, later, as they settled in the Shadwell plantation of the Piedmont.

They ate on fine dishware, frequently entertained, enjoyed classic books and music, and attended dances.

A member of the gentry, he was a host to his peers and to Native Americans who travelled on official business to Colonial Williamsburg.

[11] As described by Andrew Burstein in The Washington Post, Jefferson was "an accomplished, strong-minded, self-reliant frontiersman"[12] of the eighteenth century who migrated within Virginia to the western uplands called the Piedmont.

Planters large and small transported their tobacco or wheat on tied-together canoes along the Rivanna River (three feet deep in most places during the navigable months of November to June) and eastward along the James.

In the same year, with Joshua Fry, Jefferson extended the survey of the Virginia-North Carolina border, begun by William Byrd II some time earlier.

The detailed Fry-Jefferson Map, cited by his son Thomas in his 1781 book Notes on the State of Virginia, was produced by him and Fry.