For Lord Baltimore and his allies 1657 was a good year. He made peace with Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans, so he could regain control of his Maryland colony. Return to normalcy also brought Richard Collett back to his position as High Sheriff of Patuxent after being banished by the Puritans 15 months earlier. The return of political stability also opened Maryland’s borders to settlers from other colonies. So, Thomas Manning and family were preparing to leave the Virginia colony where they had settled five years earlier and move to Patuxent. Most relevant to our story it was the year Sarah Dorrington was born in Patuxent (Calvert County) to William and Anne Dorrington.
All went well for the next 11 years. William Dorrington acquired many properties and much influence in both Calvert and Dorchester Counties. Richard Collett was reappointed as High Sheriff and as a customs commissioner. Thomas Manning was enjoying even more success in Lord Baltimore’s colony. During this period Manning had various important positions including sheriff, customs commissioner, Maryland Attorney General, Maryland Delegate and eventually Speaker of the Maryland lower house. He also owned a 3000-acre plantation on the cliffs overlooking Chesapeake Bay. As far as we know all 3 of these prominent men were colleagues and acquaintances who did not show any enmity towards each other.
However, one day in early 1668 for some unknown reason Thomas Manning entered Richard Collett’s office and proceeded to severely beat the 66-year-old sheriff. The wounds sustained in this attack apparently were severe enough to contribute to Collett’s death four months later. Though Manning was arrested, he was never convicted of the assault. Then, about a year later in August of 1669 William Dorrington, a Quaker, was forced to go to the Maryland Chancery Court to request protection for his daughter from Thomas Manning. He informed the court that Manning had beaten and molested his twelve-year-old daughter, Sarah. There are no records of prosecution of Manning, but instead he was allowed to return to his plantation where he died a year later. It is unknown why Manning was spared prosecutions. Was it because of his prominence in the Colony or the state of his health? One history suggests that Sarah later succumbed to her wounds and died, but fortunately Sarah did survive.
In 1670, shortly after his daughter’s attack, Dorrington moved with his family to his large plantation west of the future town of Cambridge. This plantation at a minimum included the lands stretching from Jenkins Creek to what would later become the Hambrooks and Glasgow plantations. After William’s wife, Anne, died in the 1670’s, he married Elizabeth Winsloe in 1680. He had a son (William) and daughter (Ann) with Elizabeth, but Elizabeth died soon after in 1687. In the meantime, daughter Sarah married local farmer Thomas Fisher sometime during the 1670’s, but he died by 1677.
In 1679 she married again. This time to a doctor named Thomas Foulkes who was originally from Accomack on the Virginia Eastern Shore. He owned a number of properties in Dorchester, but the important one was the one he patented in 1683, Foulkes Content. Foulkes Content was a 100-acre farm that would be renamed a number of times, but it eventually became Oakley Farm after being purchased by Samuel Byrn 170 years later. It is not clear if Foulkes Content was ever originally part of William Dorrington’s holdings, but the property sat between the plantations of William Dorrington and Daniel Jones.
A year later, in 1684, Foulkes sold Foulkes Content to local planter William Watson for 4000 pounds of tobacco. This was also the year that John Kirk was given authority to purchase 100 acres of land from the Daniel Jones plantation and build the new town of Cambridge. Thomas and Sarah eventually moved south from Dorchester and settled in Somerset County where they both died in the 1720’s.