4. A Shower of Rain in the Morning & the wind very high from No. Wt. afterwards—Mer. at 65. Mr. B. Bassett & Mrs. Dunbar & Mr. McCarty came to dinner. The latter returned afterwards.
Mrs. Dunbar may be Elizabeth Thornton Dunbar, wife of Robert Dunbar, a Scots merchant of Falmouth. She was a sister of Charles Washington’s wife, Mildred Thornton Washington. Mr. McCarty is Daniel McCarty, Jr. (1759–1801), son of GW’s former neighbor Daniel McCarty of Mount Air. The younger McCarty had served in the Revolution as a lieutenant in Grayson’s Additional Continental Regiment. He was now living at his grandfather Denis McCarty’s old home, Cedar Grove, and was married to Sarah Eilbeck Mason McCarty, daughter of Col. George Mason of Gunston Hall. McCarty was interested in moving west and tried to negotiate with GW for an exchange of his Loudoun County Sugar Lands for GW’s Kanawha lands, but he decided that he would prefer to have property in the Louisiana area. For the correspondence regarding the negotiations, see Daniel McCarty, Jr., to GW, 2 and 6 Nov. 1797 and 19 Sept. 1798, DLC:GW; GW to McCarty, 30 Oct. 1797, ViMtvL; GW to McCarty, 3 and 13 Nov. 1797, NN: Washington Papers.