Thomas Moverly

Moverly’s Bottom, with its gruesome dismal and depressing stories, thought to be a myth is really a legend founded on an actual event.

 

July 1, 1726.  Thomas Moverly, who for many years prior to this date, was a well known and highly esteemed citizen of the County of Westmoreland, being dead and his estate forfeit, being a “felo de se”, which in law is one who commits felony by suicide, or deliberately destroys his own life.  The old English custom or law that is so vividly illustrated in Charles Dickens’ “Old Curiosity Shop” where his character, a supposed suicide, was left to be buried with a stake through his heart in the center of four lonely roads, was transplanted here by Colonel John Washington and other early settlers, and so Thomas Moverly was buried in the fork of a lonely crossroads here in Westmoreland with a sign post – “Thou hath cast thyself away willingly – a warning to the traveler to take heed and listen to the voice from the past.  Many many years, the road orders read “Moverly’s grave” and today its known as Moverly’s Bottom, and is said to be haunted.  Tradition says he hung himself from a limb of a tree.  Today the crossroads is known as Oldhams.