King George County: Northern Neck Tobacco Country
Near Colonial Beach, Virginia
King George County was carved from Richmond County in seventeen twenty because it had simply become impractical for residents of the upper Rappahannock to ride sixty miles to their county courthouse. Named for King George the First of Great Britain, the county sits on the Northern Neck, the long finger of land between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers that was one of the most valuable pieces of colonial Virginia. The Fairfax Proprietary, a royal land grant stretching between those two rivers, made this country the domain of a handful of powerful planter families in the seventeen hundreds. Along the Rappahannock, ports like Leedstown and Falmouth shipped tobacco to England, making the river a commercial artery as busy in its day as the roads crossing it are now.
