Colonel William Preston played a crucial role in surveying and developing the colonies going westward, exerted great influence in the colonial affairs of his time, ran a large plantation, and founded a dynasty whose progeny would supply leaders for the South for nearly a century. He served in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and was a Colonel in the militia during the American Revolutionary War. He was one of the thirteen signers of the Fincastle Resolutions, a predecessor to the United States Declaration of Independence. He was a founding trustee of Liberty Hall, when it was made into a college in 1776.
Colonel Preston was elected to the Virginia colony's House of Burgesses in 1765 to represent Augusta County and served until the county was divided around 1770. In 1775, Preston was one of the thirteen signers of the Fincastle Resolutions. Colonel Preston served in both the French and Indian War and American Revolutionary War. During the French and Indian War, William Preston saved George Washington's life from an impending Indian attack. During Lord Dunmore's War of 1773-1774 against the Shawnee Indians, he urged Virginians to join the militia to enact revenge on the Indians and plunder their stock of horses. As a Colonel in the militia, one of Colonel Preston's greatest contributions to the American Revolutionary War was his ability to suppress the Tories from uprising in Southwest Virginia, thus helping prevent a civil war during the Revolution. He also helped aid in the fight against Lord Cornwallis and the British in the Carolinas. He served as a founding trustee of Liberty Hall, formerly the Augusta Academy, when in 1776 it was renamed in a burst of revolutionary fervor and relocated to Lexington, Virginia. Other founding trustees along with Preston were prominent men including Andrew Lewis, Thomas Lewis, Samuel McDowell, Sampson Mathews, George Moffett, and James Waddel. Finally chartered in 1782, Liberty Hall was again renamed, to Washington College and finally Washington and Lee University. It is the ninth oldest institution of higher education in the country.
Legacy
Colonel Preston died during a military muster near Price's Fork, Va., in 1783. The cause of death is unknown but it is believed to be either a heat stroke or a heart attack. He is buried in the family cemetery located on Virginia Tech's campus in Blacksburg, Virginia near Smithfield Plantation. His final home, Smithfield Plantation, has been restored and is listed on the U.S. Historical Registry, and is open for tours April through the first week in December. Many other prominent Americans descended from Colonel William Preston and his wife Susanna, for whom the plantation is named. They were parents or grandparents to governors, senators, presidential cabinet members, university founders and presidents, and military leaders. Most notably among them are the Prestons' son James Patton Preston, who was governor of Virginia from 1816–1819 and helped charter the University of Virginia, and their grandson William Ballard Preston, who was a Congressman, Secretary of the Navy under Zachary Taylor, and later a Senator from the Confederate States of America. William Ballard Preston also offered the Ordinance of Secession to the Virginia Legislature that resulted in Virginia joining the Confederacy, and he co-founded a small Methodist college, the Olin and Preston Institute, which was in financial difficulty by 1872. The trustees relinquished its charter and donated its property to the state, which reorganized the campus as the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, the forerunner what is today Virginia Tech. Colonel Preston was memorialized on July 27, 2011 with the Colonel William Preston highway in Blacksburg, Virginia. The city of Prestonville, Kentucky, was erected on one of his land grants and named in his honor. It was the most important town in the county and larger than Port William. One of the first roads built in this section of the state was from the mouth of the Kentucky to New Castle in Henry County.
