Joshua Fry

Colonel Joshua Fry (1699-1754) was a surveyor, adventurer, mapmaker, soldier, and member of the House of Burgesses, the legislature of the colony of Virginia. Born in Crewkerne, Somersetshire, England, he moved to Essex County, Virginia as a young man to marry the wealthy widow Mary Micou Hill, who bore him five children who grew to adulthood, viz., John, Henry, Martha, William, and Margaret. He was educated at Oxford, and after his arrival from England was made professor of mathematics at William and Mary College.

He was afterward a member of the House of Burgesses, and served on the commission appointed to determine the Virginia and North Carolina boundary-line.[1] In 1743-1744 Fry and his family moved to what is now Albemarle County, Virginia to claim unclaimed plots of land and take advantage of surveying opportunities. There he built a house called Viewmont that sat on a 800-acre (3.2 km2) plantation bordering the Hardware River.

He was a colonel of militia and a member of the governor's council in 1750, and in 1752 was a commissioner to treat with the Indians at Logtown.[1] Fry, along with fellow member of the Loyal Land Company, Peter Jefferson, created the famous Maryland-Virginia Fry-Jefferson Map in 1752. In the early days of the French and Indian War, Fry was given command of the Virginia Regiment and ordered to take Fort Duquesne then held by the French. During the advance into the Ohio Country, Fry suddenly fell off his horse and died from his injuries on May 31, 1754 at Fort Cumberland, Maryland. George Washington succeeded him in command of the regiment. Fry is buried somewhere in the Rose Hill Cemetery in Cumberland, Maryland.

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