George Carr

George Carr (1800-1886) was born in Albemarle County, Virginia, on November 16, 1800, three months before Thomas Jefferson was elected President of the United States. He was one of ten children of Micajah Carr (1752-1812) and Elizabeth Wood Carr. Micajah's father, Gideon Carr (1712-1794), a native of Virginia's New Kent County, was the first settler on the north side of the Southwest Mountains. It was here that he raised a family of nine children. Micajah, who once owned "Colle" and was thus Jefferson's neighbor, served in the American Revolution during Jefferson's County Lieutenancy, and by 1794, held the rank of Lieutenant in the Virginia Militia.

George Carr was educated in the local schools. At age eighteen, he was teaching a twelve-year-old grandson of Jefferson. At nineteen, when the Charlottesville Academy opened under Jefferson's patronage, Carr was both a student and an assistant instructor. When the Academy closed in 1820, Carr opened his own grammar school at 611 East Main Street. For a while during the 1820's, he was at Samuel O. Minor's boarding school for boys at "The Farm." Carr continued in educational work at least into the 1830's.

During this period Carr qualified himself for the bar, and on September 15, 1822, he was licensed to practice law in Virginia. He qualified himself as an attorney-at-law in the local bar on October 10 of the same year.

George Carr was well past middle age when he married Melinda Cahoon Carr (1827-1898) in February 1855. A few years later, during the early days of the Civil War, they bought a farm five miles northwest of Charlottesville. During the revolutionary war, Hessian prisoners had been encamped in the area. It was here that George and Melinda raised their eight children.

A few years before the Civil War, Carr had been named Commissioner for the Liquidation of the Monticello estate, a legal assignment that occupied him for two decades. In the early years of the war he was Mayor of Charlottesville.

George Carr died on October 1, 1886. The Reverend Edgar Woods wrote of him that at the time of his death he was the Nestor of the Albemarle County Bar.^[1]