Capt. Robert Howson

Robert Howson’s biographical record is thin even by mid-seventeenth- century standards. He appears in the Virginia land records as the English shipmaster awarded a 6,000-acre headright grant on 21 October 1669 for bringing 120 settlers across the Atlantic — the maximum grant typically issued under the headright system. The patent ran from the mouth of Hunting Creek north along the Potomac to the foot of the Little Falls, taking in the future sites of Alexandria, Old Town and most of present-day Arlington County ^[1] Source 1 Powell, History of Old Alexandria, 1928 Book .

Howson sold the entire tract within the month of the grant 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 … for six thousand pounds of tobacco. The land thereafter passed through three generations of Alexanders to the founding of Alexandria in 1749. Howson himself disappears from the Virginia record after the sale; no marriage, death, or onward voyage is documented.