William Cobbs^{[1, 2]}

1792 - 1852  (60 years)

• Name	William Cobbs
  Born	2 Mar 1792	Campbell County, Virginia
  Gender	Male
  Died	5 Sep 1852	"Popular Forest" Bedford County, Virginia
  Buried	Saint Stephens Episcopal Church Cemetery, Bedford County, Virginia
  Person ID	I20733	My Reynolds Line
  Last Modified	1 Oct 2018

  
  

  Family	Marian Stannard Scott,   b. 20 Jun 1803, Lynchburg, Virginia ,   d. 30 May 1877, Bedford Co., VA  (Age 73 years)
  Married	1 Nov 1821	Campbell County, Virginia
  Children	1. Emma William Cobbs,   b. 25 Oct 1822, Bedford County, Virginia ,   d. 9 Jul 1870, Bedford County, Virginia  (Age 47 years)
  Last Modified	1 Oct 2018
  Family ID	F7713	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

• Notes

  Near the end of his life, Jefferson sought to find permanent residents for the property, and his grandson Francis W. Eppes and wife Mary Elizabeth moved to Poplar Forest shortly after their 1823 marriage.[6] Jefferon died in 1826, and made his last visit to Poplar Forest in 1823.[8] The Eppses sold Poplar Forest in November 1828 to William Cobbs; Cobbs assigned the task of managing the property to his son in law Edward Hutter in 1840 following his marriage to Cobb?s daughter Emma.[6] This period from 1745-1840 in which Poplar Forest was sold many times in quick succession meant that many enslaved men, women, and children were separated from their families as the owners settled their predecessor's debts. The Cobbs and Hutter families maintained ownership of Poplar Forest into the twentieth century. The Hutter?s son Christian purchased the property in the late nineteenth century and used it as a summer home and working farm into the 1940s using labor from both black and white hired farmhands and tenant farmers.[6] Christian Hutter sold the property to James Watts? family in 1946; the Watts family operated Poplar Forest as a dairy farm and worked with Phelps Barnum and W. Stuart Thompson to restore the house to the way it appeared during Jefferson?s time.[6] They also did significant landscape development, and sold a majority of the remaining land to a developer who constructed a nine-hole golf course and a lake along the eastern and southern part of the property.[6] Dr. James Johnson purchased the house and 50 acres of land from the Watts family in 1980; the nonprofit Corporation for Jefferson?s Poplar Forest purchased the acreage and the remaining physical structures on the property in 1984.[9] The organization has worked in recent years to reacquire land within the original plantation boundaries, and as of 2008 owned 617 acres of the original property.[

  
  

• Sources

  [S32] Find-A-Grave.com, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/54632362. William Cobbs fell into bad health early in life and, hence, was very little known to the public. He purchased the home of Thomas Jefferson in Bedford County, "Poplar Forest", where he spent his entire life. Per Bedford Genealogical Society, Inc...Info from "Tombstone Inscriptions of Bedford, Virginia" Collected and compiled by The Peaks of Otter Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution 1940. and information [S130] Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplar_Forest.