Jonathan Cooke Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Jonathan Cooke Proctor was born in 1779 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, at the falls of the Rappahannock, and he spent his working life as a carpenter in the valley towns of the state. He never married and had no children. He was not a hunter, and the White Ledger carries no tally in his name, yet among the Proctors of the Shenandoah he had a reputation as the man who built what the hunters needed and never asked why they needed it. He died in 1832, aged fifty-three, of the fever the old people called the sweating sickness, in a house he had framed himself. His father, Thomas Cooke, was born in 1750 and lived until 1808. He was a wheelwright, a maker of wheels for the wagons and carriages of the Virginia roads, and Jonathan grew up in a shop that smelled of steamed oak and hot iron. His mother, Rachel Thorne Proctor, was born in 1755 and died in 1801, and she was a farmer's wife who had come into the marriage with two names and a family connection that her husband respected without altogether understanding. The Thorne in her name pointed to the border hunting house that had married into the Proctors a generation earlier, and the Proctor to the White Ledger line that ran through her veins, though neither she nor her husband was a hunter. Jonathan had a younger brother, John Cooke, born in 1781, who was called to the work and became a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The two boys grew up in the same small house, but only one of them kept the secret that the other did not share. Fredericksburg in the 1780s was a tobacco port and a market town, handsome and a little decayed, with brick warehouses along the river, a courthouse, a pair of churches and the house where Washington's mother lived. The Rappahannock carried the tobacco and wheat of the Piedmont down to the Chesapeake, and the wagon roads brought the crops in. Wheelwrights and carpenters were always in demand, for every hogshead needed a cart, every cart needed wheels and every warehouse needed a roof. Jonathan was put to his father's trade at twelve. He learned to cut spokes and dress felloes, but he found that his hands preferred long straight timber to curved, and at seventeen he asked to be apprenticed to a housewright. The housewright's craft was a demanding one. A house frame was cut from green oak and pine with a broadaxe, an adze, a pit saw and a set of chisels, each timber numbered with a scribe so that it could be raised in the proper order on the day of the raising. Jonathan learned to read a plan, to lay out a frame, to cut a mortise that held without a nail, and to hang a door so that it neither stuck nor rattled. He learned, too, the odd discipline of framing, in which the building had to be imagined whole before a single cut was made. He was a slow, deliberate worker, and he made a habit of measuring twice and sometimes three times, a habit that his employers found irritating until they saw the results. By the turn of the century he was working on his own in the valley, at Winchester, Staunton, Harrisonburg and the small towns between. The Great Wagon Road was bringing Pennsylvanians and Germans south, and the valley was filling with new farms, barns, mills and churches. Jonathan raised them. He built a stone-footed barn for a farmer near Woodstock that stood, unbent, for a hundred and fifty years, a meeting house in Strasburg with a gallery on three sides and a tall pulpit, and a great many plain farmhouses with a central chimney and a door on the gable end. His work was sober and sound, with no flourishes, and he kept a notebook of sections and joints that he drew with a steel pen in a fine, upright hand. What the White Ledger valued in him was a more particular skill. Hunters who came through the valley often needed things made quickly and quietly: a box with a false bottom for the carrying of silver shot, a chest with a concealed drawer for the Ledger, a stout shutter fitted to a window that a vampire might try, a sliding bar across a cellar door, a wagon bed with a hidden compartment. Jonathan made them all, in the evenings, in a shed behind his lodging. His brother John was the first to bring him such a job, in 1800, and word went round the Proctor cousins that the carpenter at Winchester would build anything and answer nothing. He charged them the price of the timber and a little more for his time. He served in the War of 1812, in the Virginia militia as a pioneer, one of the soldiers detailed to build bridges, barracks, ramps and gun platforms, and he spent a season on the Potomac frontier building a timber blockhouse that never saw an enemy. It was the only time he left the valley for long. His commanding officer said he was the only man in the company who ever finished a job ahead of the plan, and the regiment's muster roll, which survives in the state archive, lists him as a carpenter, aged thirty-three, five feet six inches tall, with grey eyes and a scar across the left thumb. His parents were dead by then. His mother had died in 1801, when he was twenty-two, and his father in 1808, and he had buried both in the old churchyard at Fredericksburg. He bought a small lot at Winchester, built a one-and-a-half-storey house with a workshop at the back, and lived there for the rest of his life. He took in his brother John when John came through, and the neighbours remembered the house as a place where a lamp was always lit late. He never married. A widow who kept a boarding house on Loudoun Street set her cap at him for a winter, and he built her a staircase, which she considered an inadequate answer. He was, in the words of one nephew, a bachelor by trade, a man wedded to a workbench and a level. In the 1820s he took on a pair of apprentices, both of whom became master builders, and one of them built the courthouse at Front Royal. The fever that killed him swept the valley in the autumn of 1832. Jonathan was fifty-three and in good health when it took him, and he died within a week in his own bed, with the stair he had built outside the door. His brother John, then in Harrisonburg, came for the funeral with a cart and took away a chest of his tools. The rest were sold to pay for a stone. Jonathan Cooke Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the carpenter of the valley, the builder of the hiding places and the quiet hand behind the hunters. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsman's discipline that was as necessary to the White Ledger as any rifle: to measure well, to build soundly and to keep the family's secrets in the joints of the walls.