Of the members of the Lee family participating in the early affairs of the town and county or owning land in Loudoun, it is generally held that the new town was named in honour of Francis Lightfoot Lee, the first county lieutenant. Thus the Lees are appropriately and locally commemorated, though their river still remains Goose Creek and the county of their large holdings goes by another and less congruous name.
Now it must be remembered that in this year of 1758 which marked the formal recognition and naming of Leesburg, the French and Indian menace was a very real and terrible anxiety in the minds of the Loudoun settlers and had been responsible for the erection of the small frontier fort at this point which has been mentioned. The local tradition that the little town, when first built, was surrounded by a timber stockade seems not only plausible but highly probable.[86] It was a well established custom of the English Colonists on the Indian frontier, north and south, to protect their outlying villages in that manner. Leesburg people always insist that the noticeable crowding together of houses in the older part of the town and the pronounced local custom of building immediately on the street line is a survival of this very early need of concentration for protection.
Where the two main roads, to which the town owes its existence, passed through its future site, they followed the old Virginia custom in being decidedly indefinite in their bounds; and their condition was further complicated by the ground at this point being marshy and fed by numerous springs. Therefore even before Leesburg was laid out or Loudoun organized, the people living in the neighborhood had petitioned the Fairfax Court for the construction of a highway at that point in such manner as would be most convenient for the travel from Noland's Ferry to the Carolinas. When Loudoun was organized the petition was certified to the court of the new county which, in its November term of 1757, ordered that the roads leading from Alexandria to Winchester and from Noland's Ferry to the Carolinas be opened to go through that neighbourhood "in the most convenient manner;" and James Hamilton, John Moss and Thomas Sorrell were ordered "to view the most convenient way for the same and make report to the Court." These viewers proceeded to so efficiently fulfill their duties that when they eventually reported to the court, on the 12th April, 1758, that they had "viewed the most convenient way for the Roads to pass through the Town and find them convenient and good with proper clearing,"[87] a corduroy road had been constructed through the marshy ground and Hough was thus able to have his King Street in definite bounds when he mapped his survey for Minor.