Markers of History

Municipal Historic Marker
Four Farthing or Town Point

Location: Wall of S side of build­ing, W Main St & Granby St, Norfolk, VA 23510

Visited: June 23, 2009, 3:55pm

Transcription of marker: Here at a cedar tree was the west­ern limit of the fifty acres con­sti­tut­ing the orig­i­nal town of Norfolk. The land was bought in 1682 as a port for Lower Norfolk County from Nicholas Wise, Jr. for “tenn thou­sand pounds of tobacco and caske.” It was deeded to Capt. Wm. Robinson and Lt. Col. Anthony Lawson as feof­fees in trust for the county.

Owen Foundry Mfg Co Inc     Norfolk VA

My impres­sions: Well, this marker is unusual com­pared to those I’ve seen around here for sev­eral rea­sons. For one, it doesn’t have a post: it is built into the wall of the build­ing. For another, I’m not exactly sure how to clas­sify it. Markeroni has included it as a state marker. My copy of Virginia’s Historical Markers does not include it, it doesn’t have a num­ber, and it has a seal of the city of Norfolk instead of the seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia. However, in search­ing I found (thanks to Google Books) a pre­vi­ous edi­tion of the book which did include it and oth­ers (pre­dom­i­nantly in Norfolk, I think) in a sec­tion of unnum­bered state mark­ers (although it erro­neously titled it “Fort Farthing or Town Point”). I’m not sure what the ratio­nale is behind drop­ping them from the cur­rent edi­tion. Did they fall through the cracks because they didn’t have num­bers? Was it deter­mined that these were actu­ally mark­ers from cities or coun­ties instead of the state? I don’t know the answers to these ques­tions, but they’re ques­tions that are get­ting into my brain.

As for the marker itself, it seems strange to me today to use a tree (which could be cut down or destroyed by fire, etc.) as a bound­ary marker for a town. But when I read this marker, along with one I found about 10 days later, this cedar tree was it.

And then there’s the vocab­u­lary ques­tion. Is feof­fees a word or did the foundry start a word too close to cof­fee break and then get dis­tracted part­way through the word? It actu­ally is a word. According to Wikipedia:

Feoffee, or more cor­rectly within this con­text feof­fee to uses, is a his­tor­i­cal term relat­ing to the law of trusts and equity, refer­ring to the owner of a legal title of a prop­erty when he is not the equi­table owner.…

The mod­ern equiv­a­lent of a feof­fee to uses is the trustee, one who holds a legal and man­age­r­ial own­er­ship in trust for the enjoy­ment of the beneficiary.

I guess trustees were more impor­tant for pub­lic access to things before gov­ern­ments were as strong as they are today.

Markeroni sta­tus: I logged my visit yesterday.

Update (7/16): After some dis­cus­sion, I’ve decided to con­sider these mark­ers as city mark­ers, so have changed the head­ing and cat­e­gory tag to match that. As there are not enough of these City of Norfolk mark­ers out­side the Cannonball Trail series to form a list, I have included them in the par­ent cat­e­gory “Municipal Historical Markers.”