Francis Epps (bap. 14 May 1597–by 30 September 1674), member of the Council and founder of the Epps family in Virginia, was a younger son of John Epps and Thomasine Fisher Epps. He was baptized on 14 May 1597 in Ashford Parish, Kent, England, where most likely he had been born. The family's name appears in contemporary Virginia records as Eps, Epes, Epps, and Eppes, and his many Virginia descendants in later centuries employed all these spellings.

His elder brother William Epps arrived in Virginia in 1618 and spent several years there, and his younger brother Peter Epps lived in the colony for a shorter time beginning about 1622. Francis Epps had married probably before joining them in Virginia, but the date of his marriage, the maiden name of his wife, and the date of her death are not known. They had at least three sons, one of them born about 1628 and one baptized in September 1630 when the family was temporarily back in London. The record of that christening identified Epps's wife as Marie. Epps may have settled in Virginia about 1623 or 1624, but his name appears for the first time in an extant Virginia record when he represented Shirley Hundred in the General Assembly that met on 10 May 1625.

By 9 January 1626 Epps had attained the rank of ensign. On 8 August of that year the governor and Council appointed him to the monthly court, predecessor of the county courts, for the upper part of the colony. On 4 July 1627 the governor named Epps and Thomas Pawlett, to whom Epps was possibly related by blood or marriage, to command a force sent out on 1 August to attack the neighboring Appomattuck and Weyanoke Indians, one of the belated retaliations for the Powhatan attack of 1622. Promoted to captain, Epps served in the General Assembly in March 1628 and was reappointed to his office as magistrate that month. He returned to England probably later that year and remained until about 1631.

Epps represented Shirley Hundred and two other settlements in the General Assembly that met in February and March 1632, which reappointed him to the monthly court for Charles City and Henrico. By the mid-1630s, Epps was regarded as one of the principal planters in Virginia, and in 1637 his name appeared on a list of men qualified for appointment to the governor's Council.

Epps owned land on both sides of the James River in what became Charles City and Prince George Counties. On an unrecorded date he acquired the land sometimes called Shirley Hundred and sometimes Epps Island on the north bank of the James River opposite the later city of Hopewell, and on 26 August 1635 he patented 1,700 acres of land across the river at the mouth of the Appomattox River. He was entitled to the property for transporting his three sons as well as thirty servants to Virginia. Two decades later Epps patented an additional 280 acres of adjacent land. A portion of that 1,980 acres remained in the possession of his descendants until late in the twentieth century.

Epps represented Charles City County in the assemblies that met in January 1640 and in November 1645. A few months after the second Powhatan attack on the colony in 1644, the governor appointed Epps, still a captain in the militia, commander of Fort Charles on the James River for protecting the settlers and for launching the war "against theire Neighbour Indians."

On 30 April 1652, after the General Assembly had surrendered to Parliament at the close of English Civil Wars and had assumed the power to name the governor and members of the governor's Council, it elected Epps to the Council to serve for one year or until the conclusion of the next assembly session. With the rank of colonel, he was still sitting on the Council in January 1654, but he evidently was not reelected in November of that year because his name does not appear on the list of Council members present when the assembly convened in March 1655. The few surviving executive and legislative records of the time reveal nothing else about his service on the Council.

On 4 October 1668 Francis Epps obtained a new patent for his 1,980 acres of land as a single parcel. He died, probably in Virginia, on an unrecorded date between then and 30 September 1674, when his son John Epps took out a new patent on that land.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Eva Turner Clark, Francis Epes: His Ancestors and Descendants (1942), 36–37, 211–214 (with mother's maiden name Bankes), and John Frederick Dorman, ed., Ancestors and Descendants of Francis Epes I of Virginia (Epes-Eppes-Epps) (1992– ), 1:101–104; baptism date in Register of the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Ashford Parish, Kent, England; record of 1625 General Assembly (copy), Wyatt MSS, Add. 62135, British Library, printed in part in William and Mary Quarterly, 2d ser., 7 (1927): 130–131 (first reference in Virginia); Henry R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 2d ed. (1979), 88, 106, 151, 153, 193; William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619… (1809–1823), 1:168, 186, 371–372; Warren M. Billings, with Maria Kimberly, eds., The Papers of Sir William Berkeley, 1605–1677 (2007), 65 (quotation); Virginia Land Office Patent Book, 1:280–281, 537–538, 3:219, 5:349, 6:62–63, 203 (last dated reference, 4 Oct. 1668), Record Group 4, Library of Virginia.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Sam Walters.

How to cite this page:
Sam Walters, "Francis Epps (1597–1674)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Epps_Francis, accessed [today's date]).

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