Joshua Fry

The name of Joshua Fry is linked with that of Peter Jefferson in the most important of the latter's activities as a surveyor. In effect if not in fact the two men constituted a partnership. Somewhat more than three years after they helped set up the Fairfax Stone, they surveyed the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina for ninety miles beyond the point where William Byrd and his fellow commissioners had left it a score of years before.

• Jefferson the Virginian
  • p. 24 (Easton Press, 1993)

Some months later the Acting Governor, following a directive from the Lords of Trade, selected [Peter Jefferson and Joshua Fry] as the best qualified persons to draw a map of the inhabited part of Virginia.

• Jefferson the Virginian
  • p. 25 (Easton Press, 1993)

[Peter Jefferson] drew no more major boundary lines, but he was county surveyor in Goochland that year; he was again a magistrate of Albemarle by the following spring, and a couple of years after that he became county surveyor there in succession to Joshua Fry, who had just died at Fort Cumberland while commanding the Virginia forces on the frontier. George Washington was his lieutenant. Fry has been credited with being the chief constructive influence in the life of Peter Jefferson, and not improperly. His good will continued to manifest itself after he was dead. He named his associate an executor of his will, left him the surveying instruments which they had used together, and in effect bequeathed him his major public offices.

• Jefferson the Virginian
  • p. 26 (Easton Press, 1993)

Residents of Albemarle remembered that Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson had penetrated uncharted territory, and men associated with the County followed their example. Thomas Walker of Castle Hill carried on the dividing line from the point where they had left it; and George Rogers Clark, who was born across the Southwest Mountains from Shadwell just about the time that Peter returned, conquered the Northwest during the Revolution. His younger and equally redheaded brother, William Clark, was born in another county after his family had left this one, but Meriwether Lewis, whose name is linked with his in the history of exploration, was a native. Under the direction of President Jefferson they crossed a continent. The tradition of the wilderness persisted in Ablemarle.

• Jefferson the Virginian
  • p. 30 (Easton Press, 1993)