Layton's Landing Wharf and Ferry

Two miles northeast on the Rappahannock River, at Coleman’s Town, George Southern was operating a ferry by 1679. In the early 1700s, the Ley and Layton families ran the ferry, an ordinary, and a wharf. By midcentury, the community had become a hub of commerce featuring a public tobacco warehouse, from which tobacco was inspected and shipped to Great Britain, and a Scottish merchant’s store. George Washington used the ferry several times in the 1750s and 60s. An effort to develop a town called Beaufort here ca. 1770 failed when the tobacco trade declined after the Revolutionary War. Layton’s Wharf was a stop on the Baltimore to Fredericksburg steamboat route from the 1830s until 1937.