The Ramsay family

The Alexandria Ramsays descend from 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 … (1716–1785), born in Galloway, Scotland, who reached the Potomac in the early 1740s as a tobacco factor and was operating from the West family’s Hunting Creek warehouse landing well before the 1749 town act. Named to the eleven-trustee body that platted Alexandria, he served the town for its first three decades as merchant, port collector, postmaster, and member of the Common Council ^[1] Source 1 Powell, History of Old Alexandria, 1928 Book . He acquired Lot 47 at the corner of King and Fairfax Streets and built the gambrel-roofed frame house there about 1751; the 221 King Street Place 221 King Street Small frame house at the northeast corner of King and Fairfax Streets, traditionally held to be the oldest extant house in Alexandria — though the building you see today is largely … survives — much rebuilt — as Alexandria’s official visitor centre and the city’s symbol of its founding generation.

William Ramsay married Ann McCarty of Stafford County in 1749. Their children dispersed across the region: their son Dennis Ramsay served as mayor of Alexandria in 1789 and delivered the address that bid George Washington Person George Washington b. 1732 · d. 1799 Planter, military commander, and first President of the United States. Master of Mount Vernon from 1761 until his death in 1799, and a regular presence in Alexandria, which he … farewell on his departure for the presidential inauguration in New York. Other sons became merchants, militia officers, and Episcopalian vestry. The family’s Alexandria line did not produce a multi-generational dynasty on the Carlyle scale, but William Ramsay’s role in the town’s first constitution earned him a place on the corporation’s nineteenth- century roll of honour as the “Romulus of Alexandria” ^[2] Source 2 Miller, Artisans and Merchants, 1991 Book .