The Alexander family

The Alexandria Alexanders descend from John Alexander of Stafford County, Virginia (d. 1677), who acquired the 6,000-acre Howsing patent on the Virginia side of the Potomac in 1669 — the land that would, eighty years later, be platted as the town of Alexandria. The family farmed and rented out the tract through three generations before the 1749 Virginia Assembly act for “the erecting a town at Hunting Creek Warehouse” directed eleven trustees, including John Carlyle Person John Carlyle b. 1720 · d. 1780 Scottish-descent merchant born in Carlisle, England, in 1720; one of the eleven founding trustees of Alexandria in 1749, and builder of the stone Carlyle House at the head of what … and William Ramsay Person William Ramsay b. 1716 · d. 1785 Scottish-born merchant, one of the original trustees of Alexandria in 1749, and by local tradition the town's first postmaster and first lord mayor. His frame house on King Street … , to lay out a sixty-acre town on land then held by the family of John Alexander Person John Alexander b. 1711 · d. 1764 Great-grandson of , the immigrant patriarch who in 1669 bought the 6,000-acre Howson tract on which the city of Alexandria was later platted. The John Alexander who held the … (1711–1764) and Hugh West ^[1] Source 1 Powell, History of Old Alexandria, 1928 Book .

John Alexander’s son Philip Alexander conveyed the town site to the trustees; later generations of the family retained substantial surrounding holdings — including the Alexandria-area tracts later known as “Boyd’s” and “Belle Air” — through the early nineteenth century. The city’s name is the family’s legacy; their individual branches diffused into the regional planter and merchant gentry and do not anchor a distinct Alexandria neighbourhood the way the Carlyle and Lee branches do.