[57] _Baptists in Virginia_, by R. B. Semple; also 3 Balch Library Clippings, 64.
It is believed that a congregation of the German Reformed Church at Lovettsville was organized before 1747 and possibly at once on the arrival of the first German settlers in the Lovettsville neighbourhood, about 1731. Again we are faced with the loss or destruction of early records; but the Rev. Michael Schlatter, one of the early founders of the Reformed Church in America, kept a journal from which it appears that he preached to a Reformed congregation in our German Settlement at the home of Elder William Wenner in the month of May, 1747. It is believed that there was, at a very early day, a building of logs used as a church and as a schoolhouse as well and that this continued to serve its congregation until 1810, when a larger brick building was erected which gave way in 1901 to another structure.[58]
By patent dated the 7th day of December, 1731, Rawleigh Chinn of Lancaster County acquired from Lord Fairfax 3,300 acres near Goose Creek and adjacent to a huge patent of 13,879 acres lying along the east side of Goose Creek which already had been granted to Colonel Charles Burgess, also of Lancaster. This grant to Chinn was on the Proprietor's usual terms, reserving to the latter "yearly and every year on the feast day of Saint Michael the Archangel the fee rent of one shilling sterling money for every fifty acres of Land hereby granted and so for a greater or lesser quantity"; and also meticulously reciting, "Royal mines excepted and a full third part of all lead, copper, tin, coals, iron mines and iron ore that shall be found thereon." Raleigh Chinn had married Esther, a daughter of Colonel Joseph Ball of Epping Forest, Lancaster County, an older sister of Mary Ball who was to marry Augustine Washington; and he, although never living on his purchase of forest lands in the "upper country," appears to have been so well pleased with his investment that he subsequently added heavily thereto; so that at the time of his death in August, 1741, he left to his children a large estate in what later became Loudoun and Fauquier Counties. One of Raleigh Chinn's sons, Joseph, in January, 1763, sold to Leven Powell 500 acres of his inheritance and on a part of this land Colonel Powell later (1782) laid out the town of Middleburg. Thomas Chinn, a brother of Joseph, lived on the land on Goose Creek he had inherited from his father and according to family tradition, employed his young cousin, George Washington, to survey it for him, Washington occupying "an office on a beautiful hill," built for him by Chinn. Another surveyor who had run out the Chinn lines was Colonel Thomas Marshall who was the first county surveyor of Fauquier, subsequently became its burgess and sheriff, played a most gallant part in the Revolution and became the father of the famous Chief Justice.[59]