The O'Neal Genealogy Association Newsletter

Jump to Page Number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Go Back to Web Site

TOGA NEWS Volume III, Issue 9, September, 2003

Page 21
After a time, however, continual dissipation was more than a match for domestic saving. My master fell into difficulty, and from difficulty into a lawsuit with a brother-in-law, who charged him with dishonest mismanagement of property confided to him in trust. The lawsuit was protracted enough to cause his ruin, of itself.
Isaac's brother-in-law would have been one of Matilda's brothers.

Now, from a development site in Montgomery County, Maryland located on property where Isaac Riley's plantation existed, we find the following.....
"Gradually, the early plantations gave way to small farms or parcels of land. Over time, the ground between today's Montrose Road and Tuckerman Lane was given such wonderful names as Wheel of Fortune, Allison's Discontent,  Scrugg's Hill, Resurvey of Millie's Discontent and I Will Not Yet I Will. "

The following text accompanied this photo:
Smokehouse keeps history alive in North Bethesda, by Myra Mensh Patner, Staff  Writer
Few homeowners get an authentic relic of American Colonial history when purchasing a house, but Tina and Matthew Clarkson did just that when they bought their red brick home in the 12000 block of Old Bridge Road last year.  At the back of the half-acre property sits an historic smokehouse from the 1700s. The chinked, log structure with its peaked roof was once part of a working farm that operated under a series of owners from pre-Revolutionary War days through the 1960s in what is now North Bethesda.
  Josiah Henson, the former slave who became the model for Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was owned by the family that also owned the smokehouse.  That's because the property was once part of  the Isaac Riley plantation, a farm of more than 500 acres that fronted Old Georgetown Road. The log cabin known as Uncle Tom's Cabin sits a little more than a mile away from the smokehouse on a part of the Riley land that was subdivided long ago. The smokehouse, and a covered well in front  of it, are the only remaining structures from part of the farm that was torn down in the mid-1960s to make the community of Old Farm, about 500 homes that  sit between Montrose and Old Georgetown roads. The smokehouse is listed on the Montgomery County Master Plan for Historic Preservation, which means that any changes must be approved by the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission.