Rebecca Washington collection

Rebecca Washington was the daughter of Sallie Wright Washington (b.1811) and George W. Washington (1809-1876), who was descended from a brother of President George Washington. Sallie Wright, along with her brother and sister, had co-inherited Ridgedale farm from her grandfather, Major Robert Lockhart. When Sallie married, the land passed to her and her husband, and they built a log cabin on it circa 1832. The large home they built in 1835, where Rebecca grew up, is now on the National Register of Historic Places. [More information about Ridgedale is available online at www.historichampshire.org.] The family owned 16 slaves in 1850, when Rebecca would have turned 11, but only one is listed on the 1860 census. Rebecca’s father was one of the trustees who purchased land in 1851 in the town of Springfield in order to construct a church building for the Methodist Episcopal Church South, after Methodists split into northern and southern factions in 1846. The Washingtons’ children were Edward, Rebecca, Esther [Ettie], John, Betty, George, Robert and Sallie. Edward and John both joined the Hampshire Guards before the Civil War began, and left for Harper’s Ferry in May 1861. John was killed in the battle of Cold Harbor the following year. (Maxwell & Swisher, History of Hampshire County, West Virginia, 1887.) Edward led a McNeil’s Rangers party that kidnapped Union Generals Crook and Kelley from a house in Romney towards the end of the war, and Rebecca is said to have ridden to Virginia with a sister to carry news of the Union forces in Romney to Confederate General Stonewall Jackson (Selden W. Brannon, Historic Hampshire, McClain: Parsons, WV, 323). When Confederate Capt. Richard Ashby and a scouting party were ambushed in 1861 in the New Creek area, he was brought to Ridgedale and died there. One of Rebecca’s future brothers-in-law, John J. Inskeep, spent part of the war in a Union prison camp. Just after the war ended Rebecca married James Benjamin Reese [also Rees] (1836-1904), and the couple settled in Mineral County, W. Virginia, created out of Hampshire County. Rees and his brother Samuel managed the Rees Tannery of New Creek (later Keyser), an extensive enterprise, including company housing. He and Rebecca raised five children: Lucy Maria, Sallie Washington, Ellen Josephine, George Silas, and Samuel Strader.