The search is still on for historical document proof that William Clark’s ancestors are from Middlesex County and that Clark left on the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition from the Gressitt House in Urbanna.
The Middlesex County Museum and Historical Society is on the trail as local researchers recently went to the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) and traveled back in time by viewing the maps created by Garrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman for their book “A Place In Time — Middlesex County Virginia 1650-1750.”
King & Queen County is on the Lewis and Clark Historic Trail because the immigrant John Lewis lived and is buried on the banks of the Poropotank River where the gravesite can be found today.
John Lewis of Abergavenny, Wales, emigrated to the colonies in 1653 and established the Lewis’ family starting from King & Queen. The gravestone adjacent to John is that of his daughter-in-law Isabella (Miller) Lewis Yard. She is the mother of Colonel John Lewis, who with his wife, Elizabeth Warner of Warner Hall in Gloucester, are the great-grandparents of Meriwether Lewis.
Anecdotal history from generations past have William Clark leaving from the Gressitt house on Virginia Street in Urbanna where one of Clark’s relatives was living. At one time, a plaque hung near an outside door at the home speaking to that event.
National historians, however, consider it a fairy tale. However, if the local research team could connect the ancestral dots between William and two Clark landowners on the Rutmans’ map in the early 1700s, maybe there is a strong Middlesex connection…
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