Colonel Joshua Fry was an English-born American adventurer who became a professor, then real estate investor and local official in the colony of Virginia.
12 Facts About Joshua Fry
1.
2.
Joshua Fry emigrated from England to the Virginia Colony about 1726.
3.
When he married the widow of a local planter in Essex County, Joshua Fry resigned his teaching position and began operating what had been her plantation and its slaves.
4.
Joshua Fry became a justice of the peace, as well as sheriff and coroner in that county.
5.
Joshua Fry became its judge, as well as its official surveyor, and so often visited the new county seat at the horseshoe bend of the James River, later called Scottsville.
6.
Albemarle County voters elected Joshua Fry to represent Albemarle County in the House of Burgesses several times between 1745 and his death in 1754.
7.
Joshua Fry prepared "An Account of the Bounds of the Colony of Virginia of its back Settlements of the lands toward the Mountains and Lakes" and included a handwritten copy of "A Brief Account of the Travels of John Peter Salley," which documented a 1742 expedition led by John Howard along the Ohio River to the Mississippi River.
8.
In 1752 Joshua Fry accepted an appointment from Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie as one of the commissioners, and Christopher Gist of the Ohio Company to negotiate with the Native Americans to secure land west of the Appalachian mountains and south of the Ohio River.
9.
Joshua Fry is buried in an unmarked grave within the Rose Hill Cemetery in Cumberland, Maryland.
10.
Peter Jefferson, to whom Joshua Fry bequeathed his surveying instruments, became the executor of his will and guardian of his youngest children.
11.
Philip Slaughter wrote a biography of Joshua Fry, which is available online.
12.
Viewmont, which Joshua Fry sold to his fellow burgess and Loyal Company surveyor, Dr Thomas Walker and which Gov.