Virginia's Northern Neck

The land in Virginia between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers is known as the Northern Neck. 

In 1649, King Charles II of England, while still in exile during Cromwell’s Revolution, granted 5.2 million acres of land in the Northern Neck to seven proprietors. This land eventually came to be known as the Fairfax Proprietary.

Beginning in 1690, agents of the proprietors began to issue land grants. A person would buy a “warrant” from the proprietary land office, present it to a surveyor and then take the completed plat map back to the land office to get a formal “grant” document.

The land office opened by the proprietors continued to operate through the Revolutionary War until 1782 when Lord Fairfax died. The Commonwealth of Virginia continued to operate their land office after the final Fairfax interests were closed when the last surviving Fairfax family heir sold his title in 1808. 

The Virginia grants were recorded separately from the rest of the lands in the state, and held with the Fairfax land records until 1862. At that time, West Virginia broke away to join the Union as a new state. All of the remaining “open land” in the Northern Neck service area at the time was in West Virginia.

The Library of Virginia has three collections of records for these land transactions in the Northern Neck. The Northern Neck Surveys, 1697, 1722-81 and the Northern Neck Plats and Certificates, 1786-1874 are unrecorded documents arranged in folders with an index available online. 

The Northern Neck Survey 1786-1874 consists of recorded documents, all of which are both indexed and available as images online. If you have an internet browser you can find these images and indexes at http://eagle.vsla.edu/lonn/ and can easily do your land research from home.

Jeremiah Murdock was granted 374 acres in King George County on 22 July 1732. The details are found in Northern Neck Grants D, 1731-32, page 99. The image of that page can be read over the internet. The survey of this parcel was also a recorded document and can be downloaded and printed from your computer. 

The indexes online also give the details of which roll of microfilm these documents are on if you wish to get film from the Library of Virginia or from other sources.

George Morgan received a grant from the Commonwealth of Virginia, for 35 acres on Indian Creek of the big fork of the Guyandot River in Logan County, on 30 June 1847. 

This grant is found in Land Office Grants 98, 1846-1847 and is indexed with the Northern Neck Grants and Surveys. Logan County was part of the area that became West Virginia in 1862.

Gary A. Zimmerman

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