Catalpa was an 18th-century

plantation Plantations are farms specializing in cash crops, usually mainly planting a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. Plantations, centered on a plantation house, grow crops including cotton, cannabis, tob ...

near Culpeper in

Culpeper County Culpeper County is a county located along the borderlands of the northern and central region of the Commonwealth of Virginia. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 52,552. Its county seat and only incorporated community is C ...

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...

. Catalpa is best known as the

birthplace The place of birth (POB) or birthplace is the place where a person was born. This place is often used in legal documents, together with name and date of birth, to uniquely identify a person. Practice regarding whether this place should be a cou ...

of John Strode Barbour, Jr. (29 December 1820 – 14 May 1892), a United States House Representative and

United States Senator The United States Senate consists of 100 members, two from each of the 50 U.S. state, states. This list includes all senators serving in the 119th United States Congress. Party affiliation Independent Senators Angus King of Maine and Berni ...

from Virginia. Catalpa is also known as the scene of the first encampment of the Culpeper Minutemen.

History

During Virginia's colonial period, the Catalpa estate was the seat of Major Philip Clayton. The

was named after a

catalpa ''Catalpa'' (, ), commonly also called catawba, is a genus of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to warm temperate and subtropical regions of North America, the Caribbean, and East Asia. Description Most ''Catalpa'' are decidu ...

tree that Clayton brought from

Essex Essex ( ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the East of England, and one of the home counties. It is bordered by Cambridgeshire and Suffolk to the north, the North Sea to the east, Kent across the Thames Estuary to the ...

and transplanted on the property. Clayton's tree was the first catalpa introduced to Culpeper County. Philip Clayton married Ann Coleman the sister of Robert Coleman, on whose land the town of Culpeper was established in 1759, originally named "Fairfax" until the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of A ...

. Philip Clayton was among the town's first

trustee Trustee (or the holding of a trusteeship) is a legal term which, in its broadest sense, refers to anyone in a position of trust and so can refer to any individual who holds property, authority, or a position of trust or responsibility for the ...

s, along with Nathaniel Pendleton, William Green, William Williams, and Thomas Slaughter. The Culpeper Minutemen organized on 17 July 1775 under a large oak tree at "Clayton's old field" on the Catalpa estate.

References

{{Coord, 38, 30, 38.4, N, 77, 59, 15.9, W, display=title Barbour family residences Houses in Culpeper County, Virginia Virginia in the American Revolution Plantations in Virginia