Select a deed on the map to view details.
This map is a work in progress. It owes a conspicuous debt to J.R. Hildebrand’s hand-drawn map of the Borden Grant from 1964, as well as the supplementary index added by Marty Hiatt and Les Querry in 2021. Beyond the deed books themselves — consulted digitally at familysearch.org and on film at the Library of Virginia over several years — I must also acknowledge Oren F. Morton for his list of “Conveyances in the Borden Tract, 1741–1780” in A History of Rockbridge County, Virginia.
The implicit promise of this map is to reduce the possibility of human error by delegating all calculations and drawings to computers. However, one quickly learns that error inheres in the historical record to such a degree that it matters little whether it was introduced by surveyor, clerk or researcher. One would expect a perfect closure of Borden’s patent around Midway Creek to the northeast, only to find that the final line misses the starting point by almost a mile. I have taken the liberty of shifting this opening to the opposite corner in the southwest, mainly because my personal focus is the triangle of Steele’s Tavern–Spottswood–Brownsburg, but also because it leaves a gap that can easily be closed by an interpolated line.
Similar errors of heading and distance abound throughout the map. I have made no effort to eliminate them or any overlaps of line or deed where they appear to exist. In some cases these, too, are part of the historical record. One informative case is that of John McCown’s tract near Kerr’s Creek. A subsequent owner argued that the original deed transposed “North” for “South”, so that it extended to the northeast instead of the southeast along Norwood and Wiley’s lines. Further, a survey of this neighborhood from the first decade of the 1800s shows that the imbrication of Greenlee and Wiley’s tracts — included here, but erased from Hildebrand’s map — was a known issue.
Nonetheless, there are certain correspondences of place that give the same joy as synchronicities in time. The map itself geo-anchors the northeast point of the Francis Beatty tract to Dutch Hollow Hanger Cemetery where, according to Hildebrand, a surveyor found a station marker on the long north–south line separating the Beverley and Borden patents. One then finds that the meeting point of the Sproul, Burriss and Wardlaw tracts is very close to the Big Gap of Pisgah as indicated in each of their deeds.
Tracts shaded in green are contextual tracts that share a boundary line with the Borden Grant but do not lie within it. Unshaded tracts outside the bounds of the patent belong within the bounds of the map, but their placements cannot presently be determined.
Another promise of the map is to make it easier to find not just the original grantees, but subsequent grantees in the chains of title as well. You can presently search for “Philip Cox” and see that he purchased the tract that had been sold to John Lusk; a search for “Christiana Cox” will show you that she eventually owned 65 acres of John Handley’s tract via a chain much longer than Philip’s. Adding more chains of title will require great effort still — if you are interested in collaborating, don’t hesitate to get in touch.