William Claiborne

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William Claiborne (c.1600-1676) (also spelled William Clayborne) was an English pioneer and surveyor who was an early settler of Virginia and Maryland. He arrived at Jamestown in October of 1621, chosen to be the land surveyor of the colony. About 1627, six years after his arrival, he began to trade with Indians on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, the Potomac and Susquehanna rivers. With a royal license granted in 1631, he helped purchase Kent Island from the Indians. The trading post was converted into a regular plantation, with about 100 men. Meanwhile, the second Lord Baltimore thought that Kent Island was part of what Charles I had granted him.

Claiborne's plantations on Kent Island in the Chesapeake Bay became part of a border dispute between Maryland and Virginia. This came to open fighting in 1635 and Claiborne was defeated by a Maryland force led by Thomas Cornwallis in 1638. Maryland effectively won when Claiborne abandoned this estate in 1637, but the issue wasn't fully resolved until 1776 when Virginia renounced its claims. In 1635, ships of Claiborne's company fought and lost to some of Lord Baltimore's ships in Pocomoke Sound, Eastern Shore. This seems to have been the first naval fight in any waters of North America.

For four years after the fall of Kent Island, (1639-41?) Claiborne attempted to colonize another island, named Roatan, off the northern coast of Honduras. Eventually they were expelled by the Spanish.

Claiborne served as a Virginia councilor (1624-37, 1643-61), Secretary of State (1626-34) Treasurer (1642-60) parliamentary commissioner (1651-60) deputy governor (1652-60) and the first major general of militia (1644-46) His greatest significance was as a pioneering fur trader and the most prominent proponent of Virginia's commercial and territorial domination of the Chesapeake Bay.

Claiborne retired from political affairs after 1660 to manage his 5,000-acre estate, 'Romancoke', near West Point on the York River. His total land holdings were 45,000 acres.

According to historian Robert Brenner, "William Claiborne may have been the most consistently inflluential pollitician in Virginia throughout the whole of the pre-Restoration period". He was the first of the early merchant-planter oligarchs, and no Virginia colonist ever held a greater variety of important offices simultaniouslyl, or enjoyed such a lengthy political career. Above all, Claiborne was the prototypical acculturated frontiersman, who first recognized the significance of local Indians in determining the physical survival and financial success of the English.

William's estates and family prospered, with Claiborne descendants playing important roles in the American Revolution as well as the politics of Virginia, Tennessee, and William Charles Cole Claiborne in Louisiana.