Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 09.pdf/410

 The Green Ba VOL. IX.

No. 9.

BOSTON.

SEPTEMBER, 1897.

JOHN TAYLOE LOMAX.

By ELIZABETH W. P. IXMAX. BEFORE touching upon the subject of this sketch it may be as well to state that a handsome notice of this eminent Vir ginia jurist was prepared by his grandson, the Hon. Lunsford Lomax Lewis, cx-judgc of the court of appeals, Richmond, Va., at the request of the editor of the Virginia "Law Register" in May, 1896. This brief biographical sketch was no doubt widely read, yet leaves something to be said by the present chronicler. John Tayloe Lomax came of a line of ancestry notable if not illustrious. He was the second son of Thomas Lomax and Anne Corbin Tayloe, his wife, and was born at the family seat, Port Tobago, in the county of Caroline, State of Virginia, the nineteenth of January, 1781. John Lomax, the progenitor of the family in this country, emigrated to the colony of Virginia, from the county of Northumber land, England, about 1700. He was the son of John Lomax, a clergyman of con siderable distinction in the Established Church and a Master of Arts of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His living was that of Wooler, in the county above mentioned, from which he was ejected after the restora tion of Charles II, for declining to conform to the Act of Uniformity, passed in 1662. In Calamy's " History of the Ejected and Silenced Ministers," a high tribute is paid to his piety and learning and to his patience under persecution. In 1703, shortly after his arrival in this country, John Lomax sought the star of his fate in one of the daughters of the colony.

He married Elizabeth Wormley, a daughter of the Hon. Ralph Wormley and Catherine his wife, who was the only daughter of Sir Thomas Lunsford. Sir Thomas had been a zealous partisan of King Charles I in the Civil War, which made him so obnoxious to Parliament that he was forced to leave England. He came to Virginia. Here, on the twenty-fourth of October, 1650, he obtained a grant for land extending for five or six miles, encircling Port Tobago Bay on the Rappahannock River. Through this marriage of John Lomax with the grand daughter of Sir Thomas Lunsford a valuable domain was acquired, which descended for generations to the Lomax family. John Tayloe Lomax, the subject of this sketch, on his mother's side of the house, was connected with most of- the prominent families of the State. His mother as Anne Corbin Tayloe had married Thomas Lomax of Port Tobago, while her seven sisters stepped each across the threshold of Mount Airy (Richmond County, Virginia), as a Lloyd of Maryland, as the wife of Francis Lightfoot Lee, or as the bride of her cousin, the Hon. Ralph Wormley, as the case might be, while another sister became the wife of Mann Page of Roscwcll, who erected the magnificent mansion, Rosewell, early in the eighteenth century. Another married Landon Carter of Sabine Hall. Another, William Augustine Washington, nephew of George Washington, and the youngest sister became the wife of Robert Beverly of Blandfield. The estate of Port Tobago then, as well as Mount Airy and the old Octagon House, 373