Flowerdew Hundred Plantation, established on the James River in 1618 or 1619 under Sir George Yeardley, became one of early Virginia’s most productive private plantations. By 1621 it had the first windmill erected in English North America and sustained itself with tobacco, corn, fish, and livestock. It survived the 1622 Indian massacre with limited losses, later passed to Abraham Piersey, and remained active through the seventeenth century. The property was involved in Benedict Arnold’s 1781 campaign and in June 1864 served as the landing for a record-setting pontoon bridge used by the Army of the Potomac. It is also a major archaeological landscape with more than sixty sites and hundreds of thousands of recovered artifacts.

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Charles City, Virginia · USA