William Lucas

William Lucas (November 30, 1800 – August 29, 1877) was a nineteenth-century planter, politician and lawyer from Virginia. Early life Born at Cold Spring near Shepherdstown, Virginia (now West Virginia) in 1800 to the former Sarah Rion and her husband, Robert Lucas. His family included an elder brother Edward Lucas, who served as an officer in the War of 1812 when William was a boy. Their Quaker grandfather, Edward Lucas II, moved his family to Virginia from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and patented 400 acres near the Potomac River that much later would be part of Elmwood Farm (established by his son Edward Lucas III in 1797). Edward Lucas II had built Cold Spring for his son Robert in 1793, and his brother (another William Lucas, this man's uncle) built another house called Linden Spring nearby, where his son Robert would be raised before continuing westward and eventually becoming Governor of Ohio. By this time, the Lucas family no longer adhered to the Quaker faith, which renounced military involvement and slavery. Both Edward Lucas II and his brother William owned teenaged slaves in the 1787 Virginia tax census decades before this man's birth. Like his brother, William received a private education appropriate to his class in Shepherdstown, then at Jefferson College at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (now Dickinson College), but he never graduated. Instead, Lucas returned to Virginia and taught school briefly at Harpers' Ferry, then in 1825 traveled to Winchester, Virginia and attended a private law school run by Judge Henry St. George Tucker. In 1830, this William Lucas married Virginia Ann Bedinger, and they had several children who survived them. The most famous was Daniel Bedinger Lucas, who became a lawyer, Confederate officer, and ultimately a member of the West Virginia Supreme Court. Career Admitted to the Virginia bar, Lucas established a private legal practice in Shepherdstown but soon moved to the county seat, Charles Town (now West Virginia) in 1830 and continued to practice there as well as farmed. This William Lucas greatly expanded the acreage he had inherited near the banks of the Shenandoah River with a view to its confluence with the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry, to nearly 2000 acres, and built a house which he called "Rion Hall" near Halltown. By 1850, William Lucas owned seven enslaved adults, ranging from two 45 year old Black man and a 45 year old Black woman, to 17 and 20 year old Black youths and 25 and 17 year old Black women.