Colonel Joshua Fry (1699–1754) was an English-born American adventurer who became a professor, then real estate investor and local official in the colony of Virginia. Although he served several terms in the House of Burgesses, he may be best known as a surveyor and cartographer who collaborated with Peter Jefferson, the father of future U.S. president Thomas Jefferson. After Fry’s death on a military expedition, George Washington became commanding officer of the Virginia Regiment, a key unit in what became the French and Indian War.
Early and family life
Born in Crewkerne, Somerset, England, Fry was educated at Oxford University, but sought his fortune in the colonies.
In 1736 or 1737, he married the wealthy young widow Mary Micou Hill (1716-1772), who would survive him by nearly two decades. They had five children who grew to adulthood: John, Henry, Martha, William, and Margaret. John and Henry would briefly succeed their father representing Albemarle County in the House of Burgesses (1761-1765) and Henry may have also represented Culpeper County in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1785-1786 and introduced an unsuccessful Emancipation resolution before the creation of Madison County.
From emigrant to planter
Fry emigrated from England to the Virginia Colony about 1726. By 1739, he established a grammar school for sons of the local gentry, affiliated with the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, which had received a royal charter in 1722. By 1732, Fry became the college's professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, and soon began a public career as justice of the peace of James City County.
When he married the widow of a local planter in Essex County, Fry resigned his teaching position and began operating what had been her plantation and its slaves. Fry also became a justice of the peace, as well as sheriff and coroner in that county. Although some Virginia planters supported their families by selling products from their plantations, Fry mostly surveyed, bought and sold real estate.
Albemarle county planter and official
Sometime before 1743 Fry and his growing family moved westward from Virginia's tidewater area to the piedmont, where he bought land along the Hardware River in what was then called Goochland County and began establishing an plantation and building a house he called "Viewmont." As European settlement was moving westward, the colony's legislature was in the process of establishing Albemarle County from Goochland County, and commissioned Fry to establish the boundary. Fry's plantation was in the new county. He became its judge (supervising the justices of the peace as well as in effect the chief executive officer), 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.
Albemarle County voters elected Fry to represent Albemarle County in the House of Burgesses several times between 1745 and his death in 1754. Fry also became the county's first lieutenant (colonel of the local militia). In addition, Fry continued to involve himself with affairs of the colony, with his surveys described below possibly securing his appointment a member of the governor's council in 1750.
Meanwhile, various Virginia real estate speculators wanted the western lands surveyed, and in 1738 Fry and fellow surveyor Robert Brooke began petitioning the Virginia General Assembly to pay for surveys. The proposals went to committees, and were only formally rejected in 1744, when the legislators created Albemarle County, although they also agreed to pay Fry for a survey of the dividing line with the now-smaller Goochland County. In 1746, lieutenant governor William Gooch commissioned Fry and Peter Jefferson to survey the lands of Lord Fairfax in the Piedmont region. In 1749, the pair received another commission, to establish the boundary between North Carolina and Virginia. Beginning in 1749, Fry also became involved with the Loyal Company of Virginia, which received grants across the Appalachian Mountains conditioned upon surveys being made (on less strict terms than imposed on the rival Ohio Company, possibly because of investments of multiple burgesses in the venture).