Levi Wilder

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

Levi Wilder was born in 1708 at a tobacco landing on the Potomac, at the place that would later be laid out as the town of Alexandria, Virginia. He became a wheelwright, married Rachel Proctor in 1734, and spent most of his life on the wagon roads of the Shenandoah Valley making and mending the wheels that carried the settlers' goods. He was not a slayer and was born outside the Proctor blood, but his three children carried the Proctor name, in keeping with the family custom by which a surname often passes through daughters, and two of them became vampire slayers of the White Ledger. The Potomac of his boyhood was a wide brown river bordered by tobacco fields, warehouses and small wharves. The town of Alexandria did not yet exist; there was a warehouse near Hunting Creek where planters brought their hogsheads to be inspected and shipped, and a scatter of houses, taverns and cooperages beside it. The land was owned by large planters whose wealth rested on enslaved labour, and the free craftsmen who served them, coopers, smiths, carpenters and wheelwrights, lived in an economy of tobacco notes and barter. Levi's father worked as a carter and his mother as a laundress, and the boy grew up among horses and wagon-wheels, with the sound of iron tyres on gravel the loudest thing in his early life. He was said to have an unusual feel for wood, and at twelve was placed with a wheelwright who made cart-wheels for the tobacco haulers. The craft he learned was a hard one. Every part of a wheel was a decision: elm for the hub because it would not split when the spokes were driven in, oak for the spokes, ash for the felloes. He learned to cut the mortises by eye, to steam and bend a rim, to fit an iron tyre by heating it in a ring of fire and dropping it over the wheel so that it shrank tight as the water hissed on it. His master was a stern Scot who taught him that the wagon was only as good as its poorest wheel, and that a poorly made wheel could kill a man on a downhill road. Levi took the lesson to heart. He earned his freedom in his early twenties, set up his own shop and gained a name for wheels that lasted. He met Rachel Proctor, born in 1712, at a church gathering on the upper river, and married her in 1734. She came from a farming family who traced their line from Yorkshire through Pennsylvania and Virginia, though she spoke of it lightly and Levi, at first, understood nothing of what the name meant. She was a farmer's wife in her own right, the kind who kept bees, salted pork, dyed wool and ran a household with brisk efficiency, and she was the one who decided that the family would go west. Land on the tidewater was going to the great planters and there was little left for a small man. The Great Wagon Road ran south from Pennsylvania down the valley of Virginia, and thousands of families were moving along it. Rachel moved her household down the valley road, with Levi and the tools of his trade in a cart, and they settled among the limestone farms of the Shenandoah, where the soil was good and the roads were bad and the demand for a wheelwright was constant. Their first child, Benjamin Proctor, was born in 1735, and their daughter Phebe Wilder Proctor in 1741. Jonas Proctor followed in 1743. All three carried the Proctor name, a choice that Levi is said to have accepted without complaint; it was Rachel's family's custom, and he was a practical man who saw no reason to quarrel over a word. Benjamin and Jonas would become slayers of the White Ledger, and Phebe, who was not called, lived a settled life until 1803. Levi came slowly to understand what this meant. He learned that his wife's people kept a tally, that it was older than the colony, that it went back to a quarrel in the reign of Henry the Sixth, and that his sons would be measured in it. He took the news with characteristic calm. What he could contribute was what he already had, wheels and wagons. The valley farms were separated by long stretches of empty road and river bottom, and the Proctors who hunted there needed vehicles that could run at speed on bad ground, carry a load of equipment and take a hard knock. Levi built them. He made a light, high-wheeled cart with wide tyres for river fords and a long farm wagon with a hidden locker beneath the bed. He fitted his sons with a saddle rig that carried a long rifle without printing under the coat. He was the kind of father who taught his boys to change a wheel in the dark and to know when a road was bad, and to treat these things as matters of survival rather than of skill. Living in the valley in his forties and fifties meant living through the wars with France on the frontier. The French and Indian War came to Virginia in the 1750s, and the valley lay on the edge of it. Settlers abandoned outlying farms, militia companies were raised, and the roads were full of wagons carrying supplies westward toward the fighting. Levi's shop was busy; the army needed wheels, and the small farmers needed them repaired. He worked long days and later remarked that he had never done so much business or slept so poorly. His sons were in the thick of another war, the one the ledgers recorded, and he had the particular anxiety of a father with two children in the field and no way to say so. Rachel outlived him by thirteen years, and lived until 1785. Levi Wilder died in 1772, aged sixty-four, of the plague, a sickness that went through the valley settlements that year and took a number of the older men. He was buried near the farm his wife had chosen, and his sons carried the coffin. Benjamin lived until 1804 and Jonas until 1799, and both left entries in the White Ledger. What Levi left was less easily counted: wheels that ran for decades on roads that had ruined others, and a family that could move at speed when it mattered. Within the Slayerverse he is the Proctor in-law who built the roads under the White Ledger's feet.