The Vaughans of Virginia: How the First House Gave Away a Fortune
A century after Benedict Vaughan sailed for Norfolk, his descendants in Roanoke spent everything on the mountains and the sick.
Few Elpsonians know that a branch of the First House has lived for more than 170 years in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
It began in 1853, when Benedict Vaughan, a younger son barred from the Council of Houses by the Statute of Precedence, landed at Norfolk with letters of credit and a signet ring. By the 1880s his son had moved west to the railway boomtown of Roanoke, where the family founded the Vaughan & Lyle Bank on Jefferson Street.
The fortune lasted until 1949. That year Colonel Thomas Aldric Vaughan, home from the Italian campaign, began spending it: first on the Blue Ridge Trust, which bought and protected mountain land around the city, then on the Vaughan Wards, which cared for children during the polio epidemics of the early 1950s without charge.
By his death in 1958 nothing remained. Archivists at Vaughan Palace say his letters home show no regret. “The money was never the inheritance,” he wrote in 1952. “The name is.”
The question of the American line's standing has returned ahead of the Winter Assembly, where its members are entitled, under the reforms of 1971, to a seat.