[75] Known as Chapter XXII. See 7 Hening, 148.
The boundaries of the new county thus fixed have since that time been changed but once, when in 1798, a part of the originally constituted Loudoun was, by act of the Legislature, returned to Fairfax as later will be noted.[76]
Thus, from the formation of Northumberland County in 1647, it had taken 110 years for a sufficient population to penetrate, settle and develop in the backwoods to justify the organization of Loudoun. At first the creation of new counties out of the early Northumberland had been rapid. Lancaster along the Rappahannock was formed in 1651 and Westmoreland along the Potomac in 1653. Out of Westmoreland came Stafford in 1664. Then, so far as the line of descent of Loudoun is concerned, there is a long wait. Indian warfare and Indian domination of the upper country effectually held back settlement until Spotswood's epochal treaty of 1722. With the withdrawal of the Indians the pressure from Tidewater rapidly had its effect. Out of the Stafford "backwoods" and those of King George to the south was organized in 1731 Prince William with a disputed western boundary, the Proprietor claiming much of the Shenandoah Valley and the Virginia government holding to the Blue Ridge but the act discretely leaving that question untouched. In 1742 the territory above "Occoquan and Bull Run and from the head of the main branch of Bull Run by a straight course" to Ashley's Gap became the County of Fairfax of which, as shown, Loudoun in 1757 was born. Her contiguous county Fauquier was, by contrast, taken directly from Prince William in 1759.
It would have been wholly appropriate to have named the new county Lee or Carter, honoring families and individuals which had been so active in its development but the Lees then loved the Carters not at all nor the Carters the Lees and doubtlessly each would, and perhaps did, prevent the honor going to the other. So it came about that the lusty infant became the namesake of a man whose fame, so far as Virginia and the other American Colonies were concerned, was highly ephemeral. On the 17th February, 1756, in the winter following Braddock's defeat, John Campbell, fourth Earl of Loudoun, had been appointed Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of Virginia and, on the 20th of the month following, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in America. He seems to have owed his selection to his own and his family's influence with Court and ministry; certainly nothing in his earlier career had logically earned the bestowal of a paramount command in such a critical period for Britain. Loudoun, the only son of the third Earl of that ilk and his wife the Lady Margaret Dalrymple (only daughter of John 1st Earl of Stair) had been born in 1705 and succeeded his father in the title and estates in 1731. From 1734, until his death in 1782, he was one of the representative peers of Scotland. At the age of twenty-two he entered the army and had been appointed Governor of Sterling Castle in 1741, becoming aide-de-camp to the king in 1743. When the Jacobite rebellion broke out in 1745 he had been a staunch supporter of the House of Hanover, raising a regiment of Highlanders of which he became colonel and which later was cut to pieces at the Battle of Preston. Loudoun was one of the few who came out of the fight unscathed and, shewing that upon occasion he was capable of energy as well as loyalty, promptly he raised a force of more than two thousand new soldiers.