William Wirt and William Pinkney Classed Among the Americans of Wide Fame --
Early Life of Wirt, Who Became an Eminent Lawyer - School Days in Georgetown and Port Tobacco --
A Simple Autobiography - At Locust Grove and Culpeper. The Monument in Congressional Cemetery

Bladensburg is associated with several men who may be classed as Americans of wide fame. Two of these were William Wirt and William Pinkney. Wirt was eminent as a lawyer. President Jefferson appointed him one of he counsel in the prosecution of Aaron Burr, and his brilliant participation in that case gave him national fame as a lawyer. President Monroe appointed him Attorney General of the United States and he also held that office under the administration of President John Quincy Adams. Pinkney was eminent in divinity, and was long a minister and bishop of the Episcopal Church. He was known to a large number of Washington people and was rector of Ascension Church from 1857, until 1870, in which year he was elected assistant bishop of Maryland.

Among the records of the legislature of Maryland the Rambler came upon an act of the assembly in 1791 entitled “An Act for the Benefit of William Wirt.” It recites that “Whereas it is represented to this general assembly by the petition of William Wirt, a minor, that he is the youngest son of Jacob Wirt, deceased, and entitled by the last will and testament of his father to one moiety of a house and lot in Bladensburg known by the name of the Brick Store; that he has received a classical education and is now engaged in the study of law, but that his personal estate and the annual value of his real estate are insufficient to enable him to prosecute his studies with any advantage; he prays for the appointment of trustees to sell said property and to pay him the proceeds.”

The assembly granted the petition and appointed Joseph Hall and William Pitt Huntt as trustees for the purpose indicated under bond in the orphans’ court of Prince Georges county,

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It would require an examination of the land records at Marlboro to determine the site of the brick store and the Wirt lot in Bladensburg. So far as the Rambler has been able to learn, nobody in Bladensburg has this information, and the statements in this story that William Wirt had anything o do with Bladensburg and that William Wirt was a great lawyer or any other kind of a lawyer may be news to a good many people and perhaps even to a few persons living in or near Bladensburg.

William Wirt was born in Bladensburg in 1772, and it has been recorded in various biographical accounts of him that his father kept a tavern in the old town, though the inference from the act of 1791 might be that Jacob Wirt, the father, kept a store. He may have kept a tavern at one time and a store at another, or he may have kept a combination store and tavern, and this would have been not an unusual thing.

As the narratives went when William Wirt filled a part of the public eye, his father was a Swiss and his mother a German, and the family name at an earlier time may have been Worth and by phonetics was reduced to Wirt. William was the youngest of six children. His father died when William was two years old and his mother died before he reached the age of eight. Jacob Wirt had a brother, Jasper Wirt, who also lived in Bladensburg, and this uncle of William was a benefactor to whom he acknowledged his gratitude.

Long after William Wirt had achieve distinction throughout the nation he wrote a simple autobiography which he intended to be read only by his close friends. In that sketch he tells of his boyhood what follows:

”In 1779 I was sent to Georgetown, eight miles from Bladensburg, to school. I was placed at boarding with the family of Mr. Schoolfield, a Quaker. They occupied a small house of hewn logs at the eastern end of Bridge street. (Now M street.) Friend Schoolfield was a well set, square-built, honest-faced and honest-hearted Quaker; his wife was the best of creation.

”A deep sadness fell upon me when I was left by the person who accompanied me to Georgetown. When I could no longer see a face that I knew nor an object that was not strange I remember the sense of total desertion and forlornness that seized upon my heart. Unlike anything that I have felt in after years. I sobbed as if my heart would break. For hours together I was utterly inconsolable, notwithstanding the maternal tenderness with which good Mrs. Schoolfield tried to comfort me.

”Almost half a century has rolled over the incident, yet full well do I recall with what gentle affection and touching sympathy she urged every topic that was calculated to console a child of my years. After quieting me in some measure by her caresses she took down her Bible and read to me the story of Joseph and his brethren. * * * I went to see Mrs. Schoolfield after I became a man, and a warmer meeting has seldom taken place between mother and son.

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After some time at the Georgetown school of Mr. Schoolfield, William was sent to a school or academy near Port Tobacco, in Charles county, kept by a Mr. Dent. In his autobiography he ells that while attending that school he boarded with a widow named Love, and says: “My residence in her family forms one of the few sunny spots in the retrospect of my childhood.” In connection with the Dent school and the Love place he mentions a boy whose name was Johnson Carnes, and a little girl, Peggy Reeder. This little girl was no doubt a member of that Reeder family of St. Marys and Charles county from which Judge John Stephen, the Maryland jurist, also long a resident of Bladensburg, was descended. His mother was Miss Lizzie Attaway Reeder, daughter of Thomas and Susannah Reeder of St. Marys county. Wirt says of Peggy’s father that his name was Thomas and that “he lived in a big brick house situated on a high and airy bank giving a beautiful view of the Potomac river, which is there about four miles wide.”

After leaving Dent’s Academy, William Wirt was sent to the school of the Rev. James Hunt, a Presbyterian minister, in Montgomery county, whose church was popularly called Cabin John Church, and the site of that school and church was near the present village of Potomac, about three miles, as the Rambler remembers, west of Cabin John Creek. A Methodist church stands there today, and in the churchyard is a tall and broad slab of stone inscribed, “Presbyterian Church, 1716; grammar school, 1760. Placed by Janet Montgomery Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, 1916.” Among the tombstones is one inscribed, “In memory of the Rev. James Hunt, who departed this life the 2d of June, 1793, aged sixty-one years. He was set apart to the work of the ministry early in life, and in which he continued till death, laboring for the good of souls and for the glory of his Heavenly Master.”

Beside this tomb is one inscribed, “In memory of Mrs. Ruth Hunt, wife of the Rev. James Hunt, deceased, who departed this life the 17th of May, 1795, in the sixty-seventh year of her age. She early in life devoted herself to the service of religion and continued through a long life a bright example of Christian piety. She was a woman of sorrows and acquainted with grief, being the greater part of her days the subject of affliction, which refined her as fire, for dwelling in the mansions of the holy and blessed.”

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While attending Dr. Hunt’s academy young Wirt boarded with the family of Samuel Wade Magruder, who lived in a brick house on a farm called Locust Grove. This house is still standing back from a road which leads west from the Georgetown-Rockville road to Bell’s mill, and, as the Rambler remembers, Locust Grove is about two miles west of Georgetown-Rockville road. Locust Grove and the Presbyterian Church and school near the hamlet of Potomac were subjects of “rambles” several years ago.

Young Wirt seems not to have led a happy life at Locust Grove. In his memoirs he wrote this:

Maj. Magruder was a magistrate and ex officio a conservator of the peace, which, however, he was as ready on provocation to break as to preserve. Mrs. Magruder’s contrast with her husband was striking. She was quiet and generally silent. I do not remember having heard her speak a dozen times in the two years that I lived with the family. But the major’s voice I remember as loud as the north wind that used to rock the house and sweep the snow-covered fields. They had a large family - seven sons and four daughters. The grown sons were numerous and loud enough to keep the house alive, being somewhat of the Osbaldian order, except that there was not a Rashleigh among them, nor was there a Di Vernon among them.

Maj. Magruder’s household embraced not less than twenty white persons. To these there was a constant addition by virtue of the young people of the family. It was, in fact, an active, bustling, noisy family, always in motion and in commotion. To me it was painfully contrasted with the small, quiet, affectionate establishment of Mrs. Love.”

There was one of Wirt’s associates or quasi companions at Maj. Magruder’s of whom Wirt wrote in unflattering terms. Whether this fellow was one of the Magruder family or a boarder Wirt does not say. What he does say is that the young man was “ill-tempered and I became the peculiar object of his tyranny.” Continuing he says: “There was that in my situation which would have disarmed a generous temper. I was a small, feebly grown, delicate boy, an orphan and a poor one, but these circumstances seemed rather to invite than to allay the hostility of this fierce young man. During the two years that it was my misfortune to be in the house with him and his school fellow I suffered wanton barbarity that so degraded and cowed my spirit that I wonder I ever recovered it.”

Wirt remained a student at the Hunt’s school until 1787, when the school was broken up. The Rambler’s understanding is that Dr. Hunt changed the location of his school to Rockville, and that it came to be called the Rockville Academy, a school which continued to take in and turn out boys until a few years ago. The Rambler is writing that from some memories which seem to lurk in the back of his head, and he has not the time now to look the matter up, but if he has gone wrong some of his old friends in Rockville - Lovie Morgan, Skillet Higgins, Tom Dawson, Ed. Peter, Will Burdette, Cliff Robertson, Wash Hicks, Doc Vinson, Doc Linthicum, Doc Pratt, Doc Lewis and all the others - will come to his rescue and set him right.

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One of Wirt’s schoolfellows at Hunt’s school was Ninian Edwards, who became United States senator from Illinois and governor of that state. Ninian Edwards’ father was Benjamin Edwards of Mongomery county, who after removing to Illinois sent back for young Wirt to come on and act as tutor in his family. Wirt served for some time in that capacity and then returned to Montgomery county and began reading law at Rockville in the office of William P. Hunt, who was a son of the Rev. James Hunt. Later Wirt read law in the office of Thomas Swann, a distinguished member of the Washington bar and at one time United States attorney for the District of Columbia. It was this Swann who built a flat-front, three-story, plain brick house on the north side of H street near the corner of Connecticut avenue, which was bought by or for Daniel Webster and stood in his name from June 1844, until June 1849 when the house and various lots adjoining were bought from Moses and Julia Grinnell of New York by W.W. Corcoran, who enlarged and remodeled the house. It came to be famous as “the Corcoran mansion.” In the winter of 1919-1920 the Rambler wrote a series of stories treating of that property and W.W. Corcoran.

When Wirt wasa twenty years old - that is, in 1792 - he removed from Washington to Culpeper and was admitted to the bar in that historic town. There, in 1795, he was married to Mildred Gilmer, a daughter of Dr. George Gilmer of Albemarle county. Wirt took up his residence in the Gilmer home, then name of which was Penn Park, and there he became acquainted with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and other prominent Virginians and many others, who, though not prominent, were good Virginians just the same. Mrs. Wirt died in 1799. In that year Wirt was elected to the house of burgesses and was soon after appointed to the office of chancellor of the eastern district of the commonwealth. During his service in that position he lived in Williamsburg. In 1802 he married a daughter of Dr. Gamble of Richmond removed to that city. Wirt died in Washington city February 18, 1834, and he is at rest under a fine monument in Congressional Cemetery.

When I began this “ramble” it was my purpose to dispose of Wirt and Bishop Pinkney in the same story. But things have come to me as I have proceeded, but we will give the good old Bishop Pinkney his day in court - I mean his day in the “rambles” next Sunday.