[51] C. O. Vandevantner in _Northern Virginian_, winter issue, 1932.
A few years after the death, in 1741, of Francis Aubrey, much of his great estate lying between the old Ridge Road (where it now passes through Leesburg under the name of Loudoun Street) north to the Limestone Branch and from the Potomac westerly to the Catoctin Hills, came into the possession of Mrs. Ann Thomson Mason, widow of the third George of that ilk; thus introducing to our frontier of that day another of the most prominent of the Tidewater families and one which also was to play a very notable rôle in Loudoun for at least a century. This George Mason, at the age of forty-five, had been drowned while attempting to cross the Potomac in a sailboat in the year 1735. In 1721 he had married, as his second wife, Ann Thomson, daughter of Stevens Thomson of Hollins Hall, Staffordshire, England, who had served as Attorney-General of Virginia for some years during Queen Anne's reign. He, in turn, was the son of Sir William Thomson of the Middle Temple, a Sergeant at Law who, to his credit, in 1680 had had the courage to act as counsel for the defendants Tasborough and Price in the malodorous Popish Plot trials of disgraceful memory. By this second wife, Mason had six or seven children, of whom only three were to survive him: George his eldest son (for his first wife had been childless) who later was to build Gunston Hall and become the author of the famous Bill of Rights; Thomson, later to become at least a part-time resident of Loudoun and a famous lawyer in his day; and Mary, who, on the 11th April, 1751, was to marry Samuel Selden of Salvington in Stafford County, near Fredericksburg. She died at her mother's plantation Chipawamsic, on the 5th day of January, 1758, leaving two children, Samuel and Mary Mason Selden, the latter inheriting her Loudoun lands.
When George Mason met his accidental death he left no will. Under the Colonial law of primogeniture, his extensive holdings of land therefore went to his eldest son. According to the family historian, his younger children were left penniless. His widow thereupon bent all her energies to create an estate for each of them. Saving what she could, through every available economy and acting under the advice of her late husband's friends, she acquired "ten thousand acres of what was then called 'wild lands' in Loudoun County, for which she paid only a few shillings per acre." She, during her lifetime, divided these lands between her two younger children "for the reason assigned by her that she did not wish her children to grow up with any sense of inequality among them in regard to fortune. The investment turned out a most fortunate one, and she thereby unwittingly made her younger children wealthier than their elder brother."[52]