Capt. John Alexander Sr.

Captain John Alexander Sr. was born about 1625, descended from a Scottish family that had emigrated to Northern Ireland and from there to the Virginia colony around the mid-seventeenth century. By the 1660s he was an established planter of Stafford County, holding several thousand acres on tributaries of the Potomac ^[1] Source 1 Powell, History of Old Alexandria, 1928 Book .

On 21 October 1669 the English ship captain Capt. Robert Howson Person Capt. Robert Howson English ship captain who received the 6,000-acre royal headright patent of 21 October 1669 on the west bank of the Potomac as a reward for transporting 120 settlers to Virginia. … received a 6,000-acre royal headright grant on the west bank of the Potomac for transporting 120 settlers to Virginia. Within a month Howson sold the entire tract to Alexander for six thousand pounds of tobacco. The deed of November 1669 is the foundational transaction of Alexandria’s land title: the patent was held by the Alexander family — the city’s namesake — through three generations until the Virginia Assembly platted the town of Alexandria on a sixty-acre portion of it in 1749.

Alexander built and lived at “Caledon” plantation on the lower Potomac in what is now King George County, and at his death in 1677 left the Potomac-bluff lands to his sons. His grandson and great-grandson — Philip Alexander and 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) — were the Alexanders whose Hunting Creek parcel became Old Town Alexandria in 1749 ^[2] Source 2 Miller, Artisans and Merchants, 1991 Book .