Jonathan Brewster

Spouse of Deborah Proctor Bowen, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Jonathan Brewster was born in 1790 in Staunton, Virginia, at the head of the Valley of Virginia, and he worked for thirty-five years as a riverboat pilot on the Shenandoah and the Potomac. He married the boarding-house keeper Deborah Proctor Bowen in 1814, fathered two children, Samuel and Deborah, and died in 1849, aged fifty-nine, in an accident on the high ground above the Potomac. He was not a hunter, and he was not born to the White Ledger, but he married into it and gave it a son, and the family's river cousins always said that the best thing a Proctor ever did on the water was to marry a pilot. The Brewsters of Staunton were a modest, sober family of the valley's Scots-Irish population, and the family papers name neither Jonathan's parents nor his brothers, only an uncle, a bargeman on the Shenandoah, who took him out on the water as a boy. Staunton in the 1790s was the seat of Augusta County, a stone and brick town on a hill, with a courthouse, a number of churches and taverns, a thriving market and, nearby, the springs and farms of the upper valley. It was a long way from the sea, and the rivers that rose in its hills ran north, against the grain of the Virginia rivers, to the Potomac. A boy who grew up there learned that the water moved goods, and that a man who could read it had a trade. His uncle's boat was a gundalow, the long, flat-bottomed, shallow-draft craft that was used on the upper Potomac and its tributaries to carry flour, iron and whiskey to the tidewater. It was steered by a long sweep at the stern, poled in the shallows, and, in the flood, simply allowed to ride the current, and its pilot needed judgement, nerve and memory. He had to know where the rocks lay at low water and what the channel did at high, where a bar had shifted since the last freshet, and which bend would throw the boat onto a bank. Jonathan was put to it at twelve, and by sixteen he was handling the sweep. He was a long-limbed, steady, economical young man who said little and saw everything, and within a few years the mill owners of the Shenandoah were asking for him by name. The river he learned was a river in motion. Between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies, the Shenandoah runs for some two hundred miles in two branches, north and south, to its junction at Harpers Ferry with the Potomac, and its course is marked by shoals, ripples, ledges and falls. Jonathan memorised it all: every rapid, every eddy, every rock with a name. He kept a notebook of soundings, in his own system of marks, that eventually amounted to a detailed chart, and he gave copies to other pilots who asked. A boat with Jonathan Brewster at the sweep, it was said, never touched bottom. He was living in a boarding house at Harpers Ferry in the spring of 1812 when he met Deborah Proctor Bowen, who ran the kitchen. She was twenty-three, broad-shouldered, red-handed and formidable, and she served him a bowl of soup of such excellence that he asked to meet the cook. She came out of the kitchen and told him he was in her chair. He moved. The second war with Britain broke out that summer, and in the spring of 1814, after a courtship of two years that consisted mostly of his sitting in her kitchen while she worked, they were married at Charles Town. Their son Samuel Proctor Brewster was born in 1815 and lived until 1866. He became a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, and it was Jonathan who taught him to handle a boat and to keep his head in an emergency, skills that served him well on the river hunts. Their daughter Deborah Proctor Brewster was born in 1819 and lived until 1862, and did not take up the work. The family lived in the boarding house at Harpers Ferry, where Jonathan, between trips, worked as a pilot for the armoury's suppliers and tried to keep out of his wife's way. He was not a hunter, but he learned enough about the White Ledger to be useful. The river is a hunter's highway, and a vampire who needs to move from one district to another without being seen might well choose a boat. Jonathan, who knew every craft on the river and every man who worked one, was in a position to notice when something was amiss: a barge that never tied up in daylight, a pilot who was new to the river and had no references, a cargo that nobody claimed. Over twenty years he passed some thirty such notes to his wife's cousins, and the Ledger records that eleven of them led to a tally. He piloted through the boom years of the canal, when the Chesapeake and Ohio was cut along the Potomac and the river trade began to give way to the towpath, and he lived to see the first railroad reach Harpers Ferry. In the late 1840s, as the gundalows dwindled, he took a job piloting a ferry and ran a small boat service for the armoury's workers. He was fifty-nine when he died, in the autumn of 1849. He had gone up the hillside behind the town, at dusk, to look for a boat that had broken loose in a rising river, and slipped on the wet rocks. He lay there all night, and was found in the morning by a boy. Deborah outlived him by eighteen years. He was buried in the churchyard at Harpers Ferry, under a stone that Samuel had cut with a single line: He knew the channel. He was a great one for small courtesies on the water, and the river remembered them. He never passed a boat in trouble without throwing a line, and he made it a rule that any craft that struck a rock in his company should be helped off before the cargo was counted. He taught his son the same rule, and it was from Jonathan that the White Ledger's river branch took its custom, observed for decades afterwards, of leaving a lantern lit on the landing at Harpers Ferry on the nights when a hunter was out, so that anyone coming down the river in the dark should know there was a friendly house ashore. The lantern was kept by Deborah, and after her death by her granddaughter, who lit it until the railroad bridge was built. Jonathan Brewster is remembered as the pilot of the Shenandoah, the husband of the landlady and the father of a hunter. In the Slayerverse he stands for the river men who carried the White Ledger's business between the valley towns and never asked what was in the box.