The youngest son born to the former Mary Watts (d. 1775; widow of Col. Henry Ashton of Westmoreland County) and her master builder husband Richard Blackburn (d. 1757) was born at Rippon Lodge, the plantation house which his English-born father had built around 1745,[2] and which he inherited because his elder brothers died before their father.
Richard Scott Blackburn would continue his father's political career by twice winning election to serve as one of Prince William County's representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates before accepting a commission as captain in the U.S. Army by 1800, and was promoted to major before dying while on duty in Georgia in late 1803.
In 1774, he was elected as one of the county's two representatives in the House of Burgesses, alongside fellow planter and veteran legislator Henry Lee.
The lead bullet made riding a horse painful and caused him to walk with a limp; it would not be removed from his body for many years, due to its placement and surgical limitations at the time.
He continued to support the war effort and one winter quartered a regiment of Continental troops on his property, feeding as well as clothing them before they resumed military operations in the spring.
He bequeathed Rippon Lodge to descendants of his eldest son, who died three years previously, subject to a debt he owed to his son-in-law Bushrod Washington.
Thus, in 1811, Bushrod Washington sold Rippon Lodge to George R. Atkinson, who had emigrated from England to Virginia, fighting to defend Richmond during the War of 1812, then moving to Fairfax County.
Thus, Bushrod Washington took Atkinson to court, and when he died in 1829, his executor continued the process, as well as tried to resell the property to Benjamin Dyer and Richard Stonnell.
On his death in 1855 his underage son George Atkinson inherited it, but when he came of age after the conflict, operated it on a much reduced level, and the buildings also deteriorated.
[13] About a decade after George Atkinson's death in 1901, Rippon Lodge was acquired by the retired Marron brothers, who in 1924 sold it to Wade H. Ellis, who could trace his descent to Richard Blackburn, and who between his work for the U.S. Department of Justice and private legal practice in Washington D.C. and Cincinnati, Ohio, during the 1930s restored and expanded the old house in the Colonial Revival style.
Ellis also restored the graveyard (which has at least 35 and possibly more than 60 gravesites) and relocated several gravestones from endangered places in Prince William County (including those of burgess Martin Scarlett and Rose Peters, who died in 1649 or 1670).