"Except my education I never got a shilling of my fathers or any other relations estate, every penny I ever got has been by my own industry & with as much fatigue as most people have undergone."[51]
From his second ledger (the first, covering the years 1720-1724, having been lost) we learn that he was engaged in miscellaneous trading, sailing up and down the rivers in his sloop and exchanging goods along the way. Where his home was in these early years we do not know, but it would appear that he had been active in the Stafford County region for some time, judging from the fact that by 1725 he had accumulated £322 4s. 5-1/2d. worth of tobacco in a warehouse at the falls of the Rappahannock.[52] He certainly had encountered George Mason before then, and probably Mason's uncles, John, David, and James Waugh, the sons of Parson John Waugh, all of whom owned idle Marlborough properties.
Mercer's friendship with the Masons was sufficiently well established by 1725 that on June 10 of that year he married George's sister Catherine. This marriage, most advantageous to an aspiring young man, was celebrated at Mrs. Ann Fitzhugh's in King George County with the Reverend Alexander Scott of Overwharton Parish in Stafford County officiating.[53] Thus, allied to an established family that was "old" by standards of the time and sponsored socially by a representative of the Fitzhughs, Mercer was admitted at the age of 21 to Virginia's growing aristocracy.
In this animated and energetic youth, the Masons and Waughs probably saw the means of bringing Marlborough back to life. Mercer, for his part, no doubt recognized the advantages that Marlborough offered, with its sheltered harbor and landing, its fertile, flat fields, and airy situation. That it could be acquired piecemeal at a minimum of investment through the provisions of the Act for Ports was an added inducement.
[49] _JHB, 1712-1726_ (Richmond, 1912), pp. 336, 373.
[50] "Journals of the Council of Virginia in Executive Session 1737-1763," _VHM_ (Richmond, 1907), vol. 14, pp. 232-235.
[51] _George Mercer Papers Relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia_, comp. and edit. by Lois Mulkearn (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1954), p. 204.