Reverend James Keith and the Elk Run Church

When the young James Keith arrived on the Virginia shore, he could not have known that he would marry a daughter of the Randolphs, one of the most extended and influential families of the Old Dominion, nor that several among his descendents would be distinguished in county, colonial, and, most famously, federal courts of law.

It is believed that Keith came from Scotland but there are scant records of his life before his arrival in Virginia.  Family legend claims he was born in direct descent of the noble Earls Marischal of Scotland, but examination of genealogical records of Scots peerage shows that this is not possible.  James Keith was ordained a priest in the Church of England in January 1729 and in March 1729 obtained the King’s Bounty that secured his passage to Virginia.  His first ministry was at Curle’s (later St. John’s) Church, located on Richard Randolph’s plantation in Henrico Parish, where he served from 1729 until resigning in October 1733.  At the time of his resignation, Rev. Keith was romancing Mary Isham Randolph, daughter of Thomas Randolph of Tuckahoe.  Two other Randolphs were active in the administration of Henrico Parish:  Richard Randolph, Mary Isham’s uncle, was a vestryman and William Randolph, her brother, was Church Warden.  In his later report to the Bishop of London, Commissary Blair wrote of Keith and Mary Isham that family and “friends did so dislike his character that they would not let her marry him,” so it may well be that Keith’s resignation was forced by the Randolphs.  Whatever the case, Keith left the county and Mary Isham apparently went with him.

In the meantime, Virginia’s parishes continued their re-organization to accommodate the population’s westward migration.  In 1730, Hamilton Parish was formed from the northern portion of Overwharton Parish and an old chapel ‘above the Occoquan Ferry’ was taken as Hamilton’s parish church.  In 1732, when the new Truro Parish was taken from Hamilton’s eastern flank along the Potomac, that church at Occoquan went with Truro.  Hamilton then took a church on the Quantico near the future town of Dumfries as its parish church and started building a chapel closer to the hub of parish activity in the Elk Run area near the Shenandoah Hunting Path.  In 1744, Hamilton Parish was divided yet again, with the parish church in Quantico assigned to the new (Dettingen) parish and the wooden chapel in Elk Run was designated Hamilton’s main parish church.

By 1755, the parish had grown sufficiently to require a second church, St. Mary’s (“the Turkey Run Church”), near the intersection of the Marsh and Rappahannock roads just south of what would become the Fauquier Court House (Warrenton), established when Fauquier County was carved out of Prince William in 1759.  Sometime in the 1750's the wooden church at Elk Run was replaced by a cruciform structure made brick with a stone foundation.

Itinerant preachers may have served Hamilton Parish at these early sites, but Rev. James Keith was Hamilton’s first permanent minister.  Although ministering to the Elk Run congregation was chief among Keith’s responsibilities, he also performed services at other parish sites – preaching at the church in Quantico as well as officiating and baptizing at Truro Parish when that parish had no minister.

By the time he arrived in late 1733 or early 1734, he and Mary Isham had married, and the first of their eight children was born in 1734.  It seems safe to assume that during his Hamilton ministry in the 1730s and 1740s, Rev. Keith and his growing family lived at the parsonage on the original glebe near Elk Run church.

In 1744, defining the formation of Dettingen Parish, the Virginia General Assembly required that after September 1746 the original Hamilton glebe be put up for sale . . . and that “the money arising by such sale be equally paid and divided between the said two parishes of Dettingen and Hamilton, to be applied towards the purchase of glebes, more convenient to each.”  The General Assembly further stipulated that until it was sold, the original glebe was to be used by “the present minister” of Hamilton Parish – and in 1744, that would have been Rev. James Keith.  In 1746, Hamilton Parish Church Wardens John Wright and Joseph Blackwell purchased two parcels of land on Licking Run in Germantown for the parish’s new glebe.  The old glebe did not sell until 1748, but Keith had purchased adjoining parcels of land south of Pignut Ridge in the summer of 1747, and he could well have moved his family there in anticipation of the old glebe’s sale before a new parsonage could be constructed.  The new parsonage, “about eight and a half miles” north of Elk Run Church, was not finished until the 1750s, and it is unlikely that the Keith family ever took residence there.

James Keith died sometime in the winter of 1752 – his will was proved in June 1753 at Prince William County Court – leaving Mary Isham with eight children between the ages of 18 and 4 years. 

Of their five sons, one was to spend his life as a lawyer and the other four were to fight in the Revolutionary War. James Keith Jr. (1734), was admitted to the law in Frederick County in 1757, where he served as County Clerk for over 60 years.  John Keith (1735) served as a Lieutenant in the Revolutionary War.  Thomas Randolph Keith (1736) married Judith Blackwell in a wedding officiated by soon-to-be Justice John Marshall.  Thomas served as Captain in the Revolutionary War, living first in Leeds Parish then moving to Georgia in 1800.  Thomas' grandson James Keith (1839-1918) studied at the University of Virginia and began to practice law in Warrenton, interrupted during the Civil War by several years in the Black Horse Troop.  On returning after the war, he began rehabilitation of “Woodbourne,” his birthplace home, resumed his law practice, was elected to the House of Delegates and was appointed a Judge in the 11^th Circuit Court, and later served many years as President of the Virginia Appellate Court (today the Supreme Court of Virginia) where he is reputed to have “shed luster on the bench and bar.”

The first of three daughters, Mary Randolph Keith, was born in 1737.  She married Thomas Marshall of Westmoreland County and bore him fifteen children.  Their firstborn son, John Marshall (1755-1835), was schooled at home, studied law at the College of William and Mary, and became a member of the Virginia Assembly, working on ratification of the United States Constitution.  He served as Secretary of State in President John Adams’ cabinet and, most famously, as fourth Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, shaping constitutional law for over thirty years.  A second daughter, Judith Keith, was born in 1738, and a third, Elizabeth Keith, in 1745.

Isham Keith, born in 1739, served as a Lieutenant, 3^rd Virginia State Regiment, in the Revolutionary War.  Rev. James Keith’s and Mary Isham’s eighth child, Alexander, born in 1748, served in several Virginia regiments in the Revolutionary War, moving later to Tennessee and finally to Mississippi.

Mary Isham lived into old age, residing in Leeds Parish under the guardianship of her son Thomas who, with his wife Judith, was then residing on a portion of the Pignut Ridge land inherited from his father.

This information is based on work by Gail Raney Fleischaker, a 7^th-generation Keith, down the Ford-Swetnam-Raney line from Elizabeth Keith] See Gail Raney Fleischaker, “Correcting and Expanding the Record of the Rev. James Keith of Hamilton Parish,” Magazine of Virginia Genealogy, Volume 55, November 2017, Number 4, pp. 257-276.