Born at Rye Field in King & Queen Co, VA. and raised by his sister and brother-in-law in Williamsburg.

After practicing medicine in Williamsburg and Fredericksburg, moved to what is now Albemarle County, married and built on his land there the oldest part of Castle Hill, today a mecca for Garden Week visitors. When he began to acquire land he became a surveyor, and added the roles of planter, explorer and diplomat. A friend of his neighbors, the famous map makers Peter Jefferson and Joshua Fry, he was made executor of Peter Jefferson’s will, and as guardian of his son, Thomas advanced money for him to enter and study at the College of William and Mary. These loans were repaid. Dr. Thomas Walker worked with John Lewis in finishing the survey of the Alleghanies and was an enthusiastic promoter and agent of the Loyal Land Company. he was the first white man to travel and record access across the mountains through the Cumberland Gap to the territory that would become Kentucky. He left his name in Southwest Virginia as Walker’s Creek and Walker’s Mountain in Giles and Pulaski Counties.
He was one of the five explorers who built a small cabin in eastern Kentucky, the first house in Kentucky built by Englishmen and located on Mitchell’s map as “Walker’s--the extent of the English settlements 1750.” Dr. Walker explored in southwestern VA and KY rivers and mountains, some of which still bear his name. He surveyed the boundry line between Kentucky and Tennessee.

He was commissary general of the Virginia troops in the French and Indian War, one of Virginia’s representatives in negotiations with the Indians at Fort Stanwix in 1768, member of the Virginia Revolutionary Committee of Safety, member of the Executive Council of Virginia in 1776, and headed the commission which extended the Virginia-Carolina boundary line from the point where Jefferson and Fry had left off. 8

The early governors of Virginia had promoted westward expansion. In 1749 Dr. Thomas Walker, John Lewis and others, otherwise the Loyal Company, were given permission to survey 800,000 acres beyond the Alleghanies in Southwest Virfgina. 9

In 1768 Dr. Thomas Walker, appointed by Lord Botetourt, was present as the representative of Virginia at Fort Stanwix, when the Iroquois Indians were induced to surrender to the crown of England all the lands west of the Alleghanies as far sourth as the mouth of the Tennessee River. 10

An act concerning the southern boundary of Virginia passed December 7, 1790. By this act the line commonly called Walker’s Line was declared the southern boundary of the Commonwealth. In 1728 Col. William Byrd of Westover, in Charles City County, acting for Virginia, had runt he boundary line from the Atlantic Ocean, through the Dismal Swamp to Peter’s creek. In 1749 Col Peter Jefferson, father of Thomas Jefferson, and Joshua Fry, professor of mathematics in William and Mary College, continued the line ninety miles further to Steep Rock Creek, supposed to be on the parallel of 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude. In 1778 another survey was attempted, but the commisioners from the two states differed so widely on principles, that two lines were run instead of one, known as Walker’s and Henderson’s lines, after the two leading commissioners from each State, Dr. Thomas Walker and Richard Henderson. AFter thirteen years North Carolina accepted Walker’s line and this act confirmed and established it. 11

In 1741 he married Mildred Thornton Merriweather, a widow and relative of George Washington. Mildred and Thomas had 11 children, 3 sons and 8 daughters. He built Castle Hill in Albemarle County on the 15,000 acres of Mildred’s estate and gave land to help establish the town of Charlottesville. After his wife died in 1778, he married her sister Elizabeth Thornton. At Castle Hill mint juleps helped prevent the capture of Thomas Jefferson, then governor of Virginia, and the Virginia Legislature by British troops during the Revolutionary War. In 1781, a unit of British troops on their way to Charlottesville to capture the Virginia revolutionary governing body, stopped ten miles east of there at Castle Hill. While Thomas Walker hosted the troops with southern hospitality, breakfast and mint juleps, Jefferson and the legislature were warned and escaped.

In 1777 Thomas Anbury, author of Travel Through the Interior Parts of America, commented on Walker’s character when he wrote: “One day, in a chat, while each was delivering his sentiments of what would be the state of America a century hence, the old man (Walker), with great fire and spirit, declared his opinion that, the Americans would then revere the resolution of their forefathers, and would eagerly impress an adequate idea of the sacred value of freedom in the minds of their children, that if, in any future ages they should be again called forth to revenge public injuries, to secure that freedom, they should adopt the same measures that secured it to their brave ancestors”.

In an article on Dr. Thomas Walker, Freeman Hart wrote: “His contemporaries describe Dr. Walker as being ‘rather undersized,’ weighing 140 pounds, round-shouldered, and packing a lot of dynamite in a small frame.” Dr. Walker died in 1794 at the age of 74 and was buried at Castle Hill.


Judge R. Thomas Walker Duke remembered: When he was a small boy his father owned an old Negro, who was born at Locust Grove and who, when in his early teens, was carried with his mother, by Dr. Thomas Walker, to Albemarle. The tales this Negro told about hunting and fishing and life in general along the Mattaponi River were more thrilling than any books he had ever read. The old Negro said, among other things, that there was one slave who spent most of his time fishing and hunting, to supply the family with food and fur for clothes, a custom that kept up on many river farms until the Civil War.12


For more reference Thomas Nelson Page’s book, The Page, Nelson, Mann, and Walker Families.