According to the Vienna, West Virginia website, Dr. Joseph Spencer was granted 5,000 acres in Virginia for his service during the Revolutionary War. This story is repeated in other places, but it didn’t seem right.
Joseph Spencer was born on 11 May 1750 in East Haddam, Middlesex, Connecticut. He was one of the original proprietors of Campton, Grafton, New Hampshire along with his father, brothers, and some cousins (a major project I’m currently working on). The land was lousy for farming, and Joseph moved to Hoosick, Rensselaer, New York where he practiced medicine before moving to Virginia and “founding the town of Vienna.”
Joseph had gone to Campton in 1766, but when the call to arms went out. According to the DAR website, he enlisted in Connecticut and served as a doctor under the command of his father, Col. Joseph Spencer. Joseph did not serve in a Virginia regiment so was not entitled to a Virginia bounty. Also, the Virginia bounty land was in Ohio and Kentucky, not in what is today Virginia and West Virginia. And finally, five thousand acres was more than would have been granted as bounty land. (See the Introduction to Revolutionary War Bounty Land Grants.)
Knowing this explained why I wasn’t finding a bounty land grant in Virginia for Dr. Joseph Spencer. But was Joseph the exception to the rule? No. Dr. Spencer was part of a group that bought 63,000 acres in the Vienna area from others who had purchased the land through the Virginia Treasury Warrants program (a program designed to sell unsettled land in the western part of the state), not Revolutionary War bounty land warrants.
Image from United States Military Bounty Land Warrents FamilySearch wiki.
A great example of using logic and reasoning to understand what happened, rather than take it all at face value. We do genealogy different these days.
Very cool, I didn't know about those resources!