Preview
Creation Date
11-8-1771
Description
Order, 8 November 1771, to the Sheriff of Charlotte Co., Va., to arrest Sarah Worsham for adultery. Signed by Thomas Reade.
In eighteenth-century Virginia, women were punished harshly for sexual crimes including adultery, for which Sarah Worsham was ordered to be arrested in this document. Thomas Read, the clerk who signed this order, served as County Lieutenant of Charlotte County during the Revolutionary War and as clerk of Charlotte County from about 1770 until his death in 1817. Today, a reproduction of Read’s clerk’s office houses the Charlotte County Association for the Preservation of Virginia Museum on the grounds of his former Ingleside estate in Charlotte County.