Berkeley Plantation

Another Declaration of Independence Signer to see.  Since he's buried on his plantation, we had another historic site to visit.

Berkeley Plantation comprise about 1,000 acres on the banks of the James River.  It was originally called Berkeley Hundred, named after the Berkeley Company of England.  In 1726, it became the home of the Harrison family after Benjamin Harrison IV located there and built one of the first three-story brick mansions in Virginia.  It is the ancestral home of two presidents of the United States: William Henry Harrison, who was born there in 1773, and his grandson Benjamin Harrison.

I felt like we were stepping back in time as we drove onto the property.

I pictured myself in a carriage :-)

And then we arrived.

The Guest House in colonial times is now the Gift Shop and where tours start.

We met two nice women who were "on duty" that day.

Linda and Sudi

Also "on duty" was George.

We went outside to start the house tour with Sudi.  Unfortunately, we learned that photos of the inside of the house were prohibited.

The side of the house displays an interesting item - notice the round mark above the door.

The initials of Benjamin IV and Anne Harrison

On December 4, 1619, a group of 38 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Hundred on the north bank of the James River.  It was about 20 miles upstream from Jamestown, where the first permanent settlement of the Colony was established on May 14, 1607.

During the Indian Massacre of 1622, nine of the settlers at Berkeley Hundred were killed, as well as about a third of the entire population of the county.  The Berkeley Hundred site and other outlying locations were abandoned as the colonists withdrew to Jamestown and other more secure points.

In 1726, using bricks fired on the Berkeley plantation, Benjamin Harrison IV built a Georgian-style brick mansion on a hill overlooking the James River.  Harrison's son, Benjamin Harrison V, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a governor of Virginia, was born at Berkley Plantation, as was his son William Henry Harrison.  Berkeley would later earn a distinction shared only with Peachfield in Quincy, Massachusetts, as the ancestral home for two United States presidents, though this connection is negligible as William Henry Harrison's grandson, the 23rd president Benjamin Harrison, was born and reared in North Bend, Ohio.

By the time Benjamin Harrison VII inherited Berkeley in 1799, the land was worn out after more than two centuries of monoculture tobacco and cotton crops and the plantation was drifting toward financial ruin.  After 150 years of Harrison family ownership, a local bank foreclosed on the plantation and the family was evicted.  Benjamin Harrison VII was the last Harrison to own Berkeley.

During the Civil War, Union troops occupied the plantation and President Lincoln twice visited in the summer of 1862 to confer with General George McClellan.  During the Army of the Potomac's Peninsula Campaign in 1862, confederate General J.E.B. Stuart's army shot a cannonball into the side of the house from the nearby James River.  The cannonball was never removed and is still visible today.

The Harrisons were unable to regain possession of the plantation after the war and it was rented out by the bank from time to time to tenant farmers and the mansion was eventually used as a barn, falling into such disrepair that it was uninhabitable.

John Jamieson, who as a youth had been at Berkeley as a drummer boy in McClellan's army, purchased the property in 1907.  In 1925, his son Malcom inherited the property, spending large sums of money to turn the ruined main house into a livable and stately home for himself and his wife, Grace Eggleston.  The project took over a decade and the mansion was finally occupied by the Jamiesons in 1938.

Today the house is owned by the Malcom E. Jamieson family and one of the family lives on the second floor of the home today.

It was time to walk the grounds.  But first, I made a stop in the restroom outside near the Gift Shop.  Look who was guarding the door for me.

Tribute to a Drummer Boy who was the youngest recipient of the Medal of Honor.

This monument memorializes the origin of Taps.  During the Civil War in July, 1862, when the Army of the Potomac was in camp on this site, Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield summoned Private Oliver Willcox Norton, his brigade bugler, to his tent.  He whistled some new tune and asked the bugler to sound it for him.  After repeated trials and changing the time of some notes which were scribbled on the back of an envelope, the call was finally arranged to suit General Butterfield and used for the first time that night.  From that time, it became and remains to this day the official call for "Taps".

As explained in the book The Great Plantation, by Clifford Dowdy, when the ship from England arrived on December 4, 1619, the men rowed ashore, placed their personal luggage on the ground, gazed at the woods and listened to the silence.  Then at the command from their Captain, the homesick men knelt on the dried grass to pray.

The Berkeley Company had given a specific list of ten instructions to the settlers when they departed England.  The first instruction was upon landing that they give a prayer of Thanksgiving for their safe voyage and to do so annually and perpetually thereafter.  

On that day, America's first official English speaking Thanksgiving had just occurred, one year and 17 days before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts and almost 2 years before the pilgrims held a 3 day Harvest Feast with their Native American friends, which today is commonly thought to be the first Thanksgiving.

We finally made it to the burial ground overlooking the James River.

Harrison and Jamieson family members are interred here.  But we came specifically to see Benjamin Harrison V, signer of the Declaration of Independence.  Benjamin V was one of the nation's Founding Fathers and served as Virginia's governor from 1781 to 1784.

Benjamin Harrison V (1730-1791) and Elizabeth Bassett Harrison (1730-1792)

Once again, the actual gravesite is "somewhere in this graveyard".  We've seen this so many times.

We had one more quick stop we wanted to make before we made the drive back to the RV.

Grace Episcopal Church was first founded in 1634 on the site of the current U.S. Coast Guard Yorktown station, but has been nestled in the heart of the historic Village of Yorktown since 1697.  The church has survived fires and two wars over its history.  It is one of just 50 colonial Virginia churches to survive among the roughly 250 Anglican churches built in the Colonial period.

Here lies Thomas Nelson Jr. (1738-1789), a Founding Father of the United States, general in the Revolutionary War, and member of the Continental Congress.  In addition to serving many terms in the Virginia General Assembly, he twice represented Virginia in Congress, where he signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  Virginia legislators elected him to serve as the commonwealth's governor in 1781, the same year he fought as a brigadier general in the siege of Yorktown, the final battle of the war.

Inscription:

Gen. Thomas Nelson Jr.

Patriot Soldier Christian-Gentleman

Mover of the Resolution of May 15, 1776

In the Virginia Convention

Instructing her delegates in Congress

To move the body to declare the colonies

Free and independent states

Signer of the Declaration of Independence

War Governor of Virginia

Commander of Virginia's forces

He gave all for liberty

Interestingly, his wife, Lucy Grymes Nelson, lived 41 years following his death and is not buried here with him but in Fork Episcopal Church Cemetery in Doswell, Virginia.

We walked through the cemetery and I noticed an interesting group of headstones.

In the middle is Corbin Waller Mercer (1840-1910).  Maybe only interesting to me since the middle name is Waller and my Revolutionary patriot is Ashbel Waller.  So I looked him up to learn more about him and to see if, by chance, he was related to Ashbel.  

Corbin Mercer served in the Confederacy under the command of Colonel John S. Mosby, and was a member of the Robert E. Lee Camp of Confederate Veterans.  During the war he was captured and imprisoned at Fort Delaware.  I also learned that he was the great-grandson of General Hugh Mercer, who was killed at the battle of Princeton, New Jersey in the American Revolution.  Hmmmm, why did that name sound familiar?

Turns out when we were visiting Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia a few weeks past, we not only saw the gravesite of General Hugh Mercer but we took a picture of it. 

What a day.