Col. Thomas Marshall at Buck Pond

Col. Thomas Marshall (1730–1802) came to Kentucky as a veteran of two wars and a surveyor by trade. Born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, he is best remembered as the father of Chief Justice John Marshall (opens in a new tab). In the Revolution he was colonel of the 3rd Virginia Regiment of the Continental Army.

His regiment fought at Brandywine (opens in a new tab), covered the Continental retreat at Germantown, and wintered with Washington at Valley Forge. Ordered south, Marshall was among the troops surrendered at Charleston in 1780. While on parole he rode over the mountains to Kentucky for the first time and located the land he would later settle.

In 1783 he was appointed surveyor general of the Kentucky lands due to the officers and soldiers of Virginia’s Continental Line, and he opened his office in Lexington. Virginia had promised its veterans land instead of cash, and his office was where those promises became surveyed tracts. That made him one of the men who decided how the Bluegrass would be divided among its new owners.

Buck Pond Farm’s own history (opens in a new tab) dates his farm near present Versailles to 1783 and the house to 1785. Wikipedia says he moved the rest of his family from Fauquier County, Virginia, to Kentucky in 1785. The farm’s account says George Washington appointed him surveyor general of the lands of Fayette County, but Washington was not yet president in 1783; Wikipedia credits Washington only with naming him Kentucky’s collector of revenue later.

Fayette County voters sent Marshall to the Virginia House of Delegates for the 1787–1788 session. In 1788 he was also a delegate to the convention at Danville that weighed Kentucky’s separation from Virginia, and his family were Federalists. Around 1800 he turned Buck Pond over to his youngest son, Dr. Louis Marshall, and he died in Mason County in 1802.

Wikipedia notes that Marshall opposed slavery in Ohio but practiced and proposed indentured servitude for formerly enslaved people. Neither source says who labored at Buck Pond in his lifetime, so that part of the farm’s story is still untold here.

Kentucky today

Buck Pond is still a Thoroughbred farm on Paynes Mill Road outside Versailles, and the farm says six generations of Marshalls lived there under the Revolutionary grant. Later owners bred the 1902 Kentucky Derby winner Alan-a-Dale and raised Spectacular Bid there. The farm is private and welcomes visitors by appointment only, so the map pin is for viewing from the road.