William Preston (Virginia)

Col. William Preston (December 25, 1729 – June 28, 1783) played a crucial role in surveying and developing the colonies going westward, exerted great influence in the colonial affairs of his time, ran a large plantation, and founded a dynasty whose progeny would supply leaders for the South for nearly a century. He served in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and was a Colonel in the militia during the American Revolutionary War. He was one of the thirteen signers of the Fincastle Resolutions, a predecessor to the United States Declaration of Independence.

He was a founding trustee of Liberty Hall (later Washington and Lee University), when it was made into a college in 1776.

William Preston was born on Christmas Day, 1729, in Limavady, Ireland, to Col. John Preston and his wife Elizabeth. Elizabeth's father Henry Patton was a prominent shipwright and merchant, and her brother James Patton served with such distinction in the Royal Navy that the Crown granted him between 100,000 and 120,000 acres in America to permit British colonization beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. The family immigrated to Augusta Co., Virginia, in 1738 on James's ship. Subsequent French and Indian resistance and reversal of British policy limited the impact of the family's grants, but Prestonsburg, Kentucky, was named in John's honor by its later founders. In 1755, he survived the Draper's Meadow massacre, an Indian attack against a settlement that was part of a property (later known as Smithfield Plantation) that he inherited from his uncle, Colonel James Patton, who died in the incident.

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