Charles Clay (1745–1820), TJ’s longtime friend, was a Virginia native ordained as an Anglican clergyman in London in 1769. He served as rector of Saint Anne’s Parish in Albemarle County from that year until 1782. Clay then withdrew from active ministry (with a brief exception in the mid-1780s in Chesterfield County). He moved to Bedford County, where he built a house at Ivy Hill near TJ’s own Poplar Forest estate, farmed, voted against the new United States Constitution at the state ratification convention of 1788, unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 1790 and 1792, and occasionally officiated at weddings and funerals (DVB description begins John T. Kneebone and others, eds., Dictionary of Virginia Biography, 1998– , 3 vols. description ends ; William Meade, Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia [1857], 2:48–50; Clay Family Papers, ViHi; PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 31 vols. description ends , 3:67, 16:129–30, 24:283–4; MB description begins James A. Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, 1997, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series description ends , 1:370–1, 2:1178).