In 1707, after the revival of the Port Act, the new county surveyor,
Thomas Gregg, made another survey of the town. This was done apparently
without regard to Buckner's original survey. Since Gregg adopted an
entirely new system of numbering, and since his survey was lost at an
early date, it is impossible to locate by their description the sites of
the lots granted in 1708 and after.
Forty years later John Mercer wrote:
It is certain that Thomas Gregg (being the Surveyor of Stafford
County) did Sep 2^d 1707 make a new Survey of the Town.... it is as
certain that Gregg had no regard either to the bounds or numbers of
the former Survey since he begins his Numbers the reverse way
making his number 1 in the corner at Buckner's 19 & as his Survey
is not to be found its impossible to tell how he continued his
Numbers. No scheme I have tried will answer, & the Records differ
as much, the streets according to Buckner's Survey running thro the
House I lived in built by Ballard tho his whole lot was ditched in
according to the Bounds made by Gregg.[47]
Whatever the intent may have been in laying out formal street and lot
plans, Marlborough was essentially a rustic village. If Gregg's plat ran
streets through the positions of houses on the Buckner survey, and vice
versa, it is clear that not much attention was paid to theoretical
property lines or streets. Ballard apparently dug a boundary ditch
around his lot, according to Virginia practice in the 17th century, but
the fact that this must have encroached on property assigned to somebody
else on the basis of the Buckner survey seems not to have been noted at
the time. Rude houses placed informally and connected by lanes and
footpaths, the courthouse attempting to dominate them like a village
schoolmaster in a class of country bumpkins, a few outbuildings, a boat
landing or two, some cultivated land, and a road leading away from the
courthouse to the north with another running in the opposite direction
to the creek--this is the way Marlborough must have looked even in its
best days in 1708.