Henry Field (d. by 15 October 1787), member of the Convention of 1776, was born probably early in the 1730s in the part of Orange County that became Culpeper County in 1749. His parents, Henry Field and Esther Field, deeded him five slaves and two large tracts of land in Saint Mark's Parish, Culpeper County, in June 1755, perhaps the time when he reached the age of twenty-one or first married. It is not known whether he married more than once, although that is possible. When Field wrote his will in November 1785 he mentioned his wife Mary Field and eight daughters and six sons, several of whom had not yet reached the age of twenty-one and who may have been the children of a second marriage.

Throughout his life Field signed his name as Henry Field Jr., initially to distinguish himself from his father and later possibly to distinguish himself from several others of that name in Virginia and Kentucky. Field became a Culpeper County justice of the peace in October 1762 and a vestryman for Saint Mark's Parish the following year. Later he may have served on the Bromfield Parish vestry in the same county. By the mid-1770s Field had also become a colonel in the militia. At an unknown date before the American Revolution he began working as an agent collecting taxes in the counties of Culpeper, Fauquier, and Prince William for the proprietor of the Northern Neck.

Field won election to the House of Burgesses in 1769, 1771, and 1774. He probably missed the sessions that convened in May and June 1770 and in July 1771, but when present he served on the Committees for Courts of Justice and of Public Claims. Field signed the Virginia associations of 1774 and represented Culpeper County in all five of the Revolutionary Conventions between August 1774 and June 1776. In the autumn of 1775 he became paymaster to the Culpeper Minutemen, and in February 1776 he contracted with the Virginia Committee of Safety to provision two of the Virginia regiments stationed between the York and Rappahannock Rivers.

At the fifth and final Revolutionary Convention in May 1776, Field was appointed to the Committees of Propositions and Grievances and on Claims. He was probably present for the unanimous vote on 15 May instructing the colony's delegates to the Continental Congress to introduce a resolution for independence, but on 4 June 1776 the convention ruled that because Field had accepted an appointment as aide-de-camp to Brigadier General Andrew Lewis he had become ineligible under the terms of the convention's ordnance of elections. The length of his service on Lewis's staff is not recorded.

Field won election to the House of Delegates in 1778 and served on the Committees of Courts of Justice and of Public Claims. Three years later he was elected again. During the tumultuous session of May 1781, when the assembly fled Richmond for Charlottesville and then fled Charlottesville for Staunton, Field served on the Committee on Privileges and Elections; at the autumn session that year he sat on the Committee of Courts of Justice. Field won reelection in the spring of 1782 and was appointed to the Committees on Propositions and Grievances and on Trade, but later that year he became Culpeper County sheriff and therefore ineligible to sit in the session of the House of Delegates that began in October.

In addition to the several hundred acres of land and the slaves that Field owned in Virginia, he patented and purchased several thousand acres in Kentucky after the Revolutionary War. Henry Field died on an unrecorded date probably not more than a few weeks before 15 October 1787, when the Culpeper County Court proved his will. The place of his burial is not recorded.

Sources Consulted:
Raleigh Travers Green, comp., Genealogical and Historical Notes on Culpeper County, Virginia, Embracing a Revised and Enlarged Edition of Dr. Philip Slaughter's History of St. Mark's Parish (1900), 15, 57–58; Frederick Clifton Pierce, Field Genealogy . . . (1901), 2:1102–1103; Culpeper Co. Deed Book, B:336–338; petition of Henry Field Jr., 18 Nov. 1776, Legislative Petitions, Prince William Co., Record Group 78, Library of Virginia; provisioning contract, 23 Nov. 1776 (copy), enclosed in William Aylett to Richard Henry Lee, 26 Nov. 1776, Papers of the Continental Congress, Record Group 360, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; numerous references in William J. Van Schreeven et al., eds., Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to Independence: A Documentary Record (1973–1983); Henry R. McIlwaine et al., eds., Journals of the Council of the State of Virginia, 1776–1791 (1931–1982), esp. 1:249, 341–342, 398, 399, 408; will and partial estate inventory in Culpeper Co. Will Book, C:270–271, 313–314.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Brent Tarter.

How to cite this page:
Brent Tarter,"Henry Field (d. 1787)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2015 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Field_Henry, accessed [today's date]).

Return to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography Search page.