John Alexander

The land on which Alexandria stands was first patented on 21 October 1669 by 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. … , an English ship captain who received a 6,000-acre headright grant for bringing 120 settlers to Virginia. Within a month Howson sold the entire tract to Capt. John Alexander Sr. Person Capt. John Alexander Sr. b. 1625 · d. 1677 Scottish-descended immigrant planter who in November 1669 bought the 6,000-acre Potomac-bluff tract from for "six thousand pounds of tobacco" — the land on which the city of … (c. 1625–1677), the Scottish-descended immigrant whose surname the city now carries ^[1] Source 1 Powell, History of Old Alexandria, 1928 Book .

Three generations of Alexander descendants held the tract through the colonial period. By the 1740s the sixty-acre parcel around the tobacco warehouse at the mouth of Great Hunting Creek had passed to John Alexander (1711–1764) — the patriarch’s great-grandson and the subject of this entry — and to his cousin Philip Alexander. When the Virginia General Assembly reorganised the settlement as a town in 1749, the Alexander cousins were compensated for the land in half-acre town lots ^[2] Source 2 Miller, Artisans and Merchants, 1991 Book .

Descendants of the Alexander family continued to hold property in and around the town for generations. The family name persists in the city itself, in Arlington County (once “Alexandria County”), and in scattered family burial grounds.