page_title: Peter Jefferson
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Peter Jefferson / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: A map of the most inhabited part of Virginia containing the whole province of Maryland with part of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and North Carolina. Drawn by Joshua Fry &amp; Peter Jefferson in 1751, published by Thos. Jefferys, London, 1755. This landmark map, unusual in that it relied on firsthand surveys, is the first correct depiction of the Allegheny Mountains, complete with 'The Great Road from the Yadkin River through Virginia to Philadelphia distant 455 Miles' - an accurate survey of what would come to be styled the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road.
context_page_description: Peter Jefferson was the father of US President Thomas Jefferson. A surveyor and cartographer, his "Fry-Jefferson Map" of 1751—created in collaboration with Joshua Fry—accurately depicted the Allegheny Mountains for the first time and showed the route of "The Great Road from the Yadkin River through Virginia to Philadelphia distant 455 Miles"—what would later come to be known as the Great Wagon Road.
context_section_description: As described by Andrew Burstein in The Washington Post, Jefferson was "an accomplished, strong-minded, self-reliant frontiersman" of the eighteenth century who migrated within Virginia to the western uplands called the Piedmont. He was among the initial settlers of Albemarle County, Virginia in 1737 and acquired property over the years to farm tobacco. By the time of his death, he held 7,200 acres. 
  Albemarle's founders lived their lives as tobacco planters, militiamen, road builders; they were ambitious, practical, businesslike individuals. Planters large and small transported their tobacco or wheat on tied-together canoes along the Rivanna River (three feet deep in most places during the navigable months of November to June) and eastward along the James. Most roads were forest paths, such as the Richmond-Albemarle passage skirting Shadwell...
  — Andrew Burstein in The Washington Post
  He was also a cartographer and surveyor. In 1746, he and Thomas Lewis ran the famous "Fairfax Line"—a surveyor's line between the headwaters of the Rappahannock and North Branch Potomac Rivers—which established the limits of the "Northern Neck land grant" (also known as the "Fairfax Grant").
  In 1749, Peter Jefferson, along with Joshua Fry, Thomas Walker, Edmund Pendleton and others, established the Loyal Company of Virginia, and were granted 800,000 acres (3,200 km²) in present-day Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky. In the same year, with Joshua Fry, Jefferson extended the survey of the Virginia-North Carolina border, begun by William Byrd II some time earlier.  The detailed Fry-Jefferson Map, cited by his son Thomas in his 1781 book Notes on the State of Virginia, was produced by him and Fry.
  In 1754 and 1755, he served in the Virginia House of Burgesses.
caption: 1751 Fry-Jefferson map depicting 'The Great Wagon Road to Philadelphia'
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