Dame Margaret Brent

Margaret Brent was born about 1601 in Gloucestershire, England, the daughter of Richard Brent of Admington and Lark Stoke and his wife Elizabeth Reed. She and her sister Mary emigrated to the new Maryland colony in 1638 with their brothers Giles and Fulke, and in 1639 received their own land patents — among the earliest land grants issued to women in any English colony in America ^[1] Source 1 Wikipedia, Margaret Brent Website .

In Maryland she became a frequent litigant and attorney in court on her own behalf and for others, and in 1647 was named executor of the estate of the colony’s proprietary governor Leonard Calvert. On 21 January 1648 she appeared before the Maryland Assembly and demanded two votes — one as a freeholder in her own right and one as Lord Baltimore’s attorney — a request the Assembly refused. The episode is the earliest documented demand by a woman for the franchise in the English colonial record.

Brent fell out with the Maryland leadership over her handling of Calvert’s estate and in 1654 relocated to the Northern Neck of Virginia, where she patented roughly 700 acres named “Peace” on the west bank of the Potomac in what was then Westmoreland County. The “Peace” patent overlapped the southern portion of the tract that fifteen years later — on 21 October 1669 — 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 as the 6,000-acre headright grant that 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 … bought within the month, and on which the city of Alexandria was platted in 1749. She died in Virginia about 1671.