their brother Dr. Lawrence Brooke enslaved 6 adults and 8 children in Spotsylvania. Their grandfather's still-unresolved estate enslaved 20 adults and 19 children in nearby King William county. His brother Francis T. Brooke owned property in Fauquier County, but Humphrey Brooke paid the tax because Francis was underage. In 1791, Spotsylvania County voters elected Robert Brooke as one of their representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates, alongside Francis Thornton (who had enslaved 18 adults and 3 children in Spotsylvania County, 10 adults and 8 children in King George County and 11 adults and 18 children in Gloucester county, all in the tax census four years earlier). Both men won re-election the following year, but in 1793 his brother John T. Brooke succeeded Thornton. In 1794 John W. Willis (whom Robert Brooke had succeeded three years earlier) replaced John T. Brooke. In that 1794 session, Governor Light Horse Harry Lee resigned and left the Commonwealth in command of federal forces to quell the Whiskey Rebellion, so fellow legislators elected Brooke governor in his stead. Brooke took the gubernatorial oath of office on December 1, 1794, and served two years. In 1795 Robert Brooke built a home in Fredericksburg upon Federal Hill, which looked over Sandy Bottom to Marye's Heights, a thousand yards away. When Brooke left office in 1796, legislators elected him, a Democratic-Republican, as the state's attorney-general to replace James Innes, who had resigned to accept a federal position as commissioner under Jay's treaty. Fellow Fredericksburg attorney Bushrod Washington, President Washington's nephew, had also sought the position as state attorney general. Brooke was a prominent Freemason in Virginia. In November 1795, he succeeded James Mercer as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Virginia and would, in turn, be succeeded by Major Benjamin Day of Fredericksburg in 1797. Death and legacy Brooke died in Fredericksburg while still attorney general on February 27, 1800. The Library of Virginia holds his executive papers as governor. His former Fredericksburg home, which he named "Federal Hill", was occupied by Union forces during the American Civil War (as was his plantation in Spotsylvania County). The Fredericksburg house survives today as a private residence (with door and door canopy replaced from the adjacent photograph) although listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1796, the Virginia General Assembly split what had been vast trans-Appalachian Ohio County and created Brooke County), which they named to