About

Brown Town is the center of a large land area (more than 14,000 acres) that is officially and traditionally known as Gooney Manor. Gooney Manor takes its name from a creek that forms in the mountains and flows northward to the Shenandoah River.   The manor, part of Lord Fairfax’s holdings west of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, runs from the mountain tops on the east and south to Flint Run on the west, and what is now the Poor House Road on the north.  The first settlers to Gooney Manor arrived before 1750. How many of them and who they were is not recorded. The few records that are available identify the Land family, who gave their name to another creek that flows out of the mountain and joins Gooney north of Brown Town, and several others who were probably squatters in the Round and Buck Mountain areas. An Augusta County court record (Gooney was in Augusta when the lands west of the Blue Ridge were divided between Augusta and Frederick) identified James and Thomas Land as two of the residents who were to work a road leading from the low water bridge at Bentonville to the mountain top. A survey made by William Green for Lord Fairfax in 1747 reported that there were only six “improvements” in Gooney Manor. William Owins had bought his improvement from Samuel Wilson, a hunter who had moved on; Darby McCarty, lately of Bucks County, Pa, claimed two of the improvements; and George Neal, lately of Shenandoah, claimed the fourth. The other two, described as “little more than small cabins built by hunters,” were already abandoned.  Heavy settlement of the manor began about 1770, and continued through the end of the 18th century and into the 19th. Fairfax would not sell his land, so the settler leased 200 and 300 acre lots of “ungranted waste land,” built a cabin with a stone or brick chimney, as the leases specified, and planted 100 fruit trees.  The first post office was named Hambaugh, after postmaster John Hambaugh whose name appears in court records as postmaster in 1812. The Hambaugh post office was north of Brown Town. It was in 1812 also that the name Abraham Brown first appeared in the land records for Gooney Manor. He established the mills that were eventually to give the village of Brown Town its name.  It was in 1812 also that Lord Fairfax’s heirs sold Gooney Manor to James and John (the chief justice) Marshall. For the first time, Gooney Land was available for sale, and the Marshall’s conveyed deeds to some of the people already on the land by virtue of a Fairfax lease. One of those purchasers was the widow, Rachel Woodward. Others were descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers Robert Russell, Jeffrey Collins, and Jonas Morgan.  In 1837, when the new county of Warren was a year old, the Marshall family sold the remainder of their land, about 8,000 acres, to Rachel Woodward’s son, William. He built Liberty Hall, on Route 622 north of Brown Town, and continued the practice of selling land to leaseholders who wanted to buy it. He also obtained land from owners who wanted to sell it. The Woodward’s owned a large hunk of Gooney Land until the late 19th Century. By 1898, when William S. Woodward (the second William) died, the holding was down to the 800 acre “Home tract.” By then, the village of Brown Town had been born.  The name Hambaugh disappeared from the record shortly after the Civil War. The Hambaugh’s had disappeared from the county long before then, and the name Brown’s Mill was frequently used as an identification point for the community.