Westover Plantation

Westover Plantation was established in 1619 as part of the rapid agricultural expansion that followed several years of mere subsistence for the English at Jamestown. The English often co-opted fields already cleared by Natives for farming or as fishing camps, and these strained relations came to a boil in 1622 when Powhatan’s successor Opechancanough orchestrated an attack on outlying English settlements, including Westover, where two settlers were killed. The farm persisted, however, and the plantation house was built by Richmond founder William Byrd II circa 1730. From the riverbank at Westover, one looks south to Maycocks Point in the James River National Wildlife Refuge, where archaeological excavations have revealed that Native Americans lived on the promontory more than 1,000 years before the English arrived. John Smith knew the James River by its Algonquian name, Powhatan, the same as the region’s paramount chief, and he traveled the river many times between 1607 and 1609, trading with Virginia Indians to ensure survival at Jamestown. What he saw of Virginia’s woodlands and waters inspired him to explore the greater Chesapeake Bay and chronicle its natural wonders. Rivers were the primary thoroughfares of Algonquian Virginia, where Indians made canoes of hard cypress wood by hollowing trunks with fire and shaping them with stone tools and oyster shells, and as many as forty men paddled a single canoe. The English arrived aboard the Godspeed, Susan Constant, and Discovery, but Smith’s trading missions along the James River and his two 1608 exploratory voyages of the Chesapeake Bay were conducted on a smaller vessel called a shallop, brought to Virginia in pieces and assembled at Jamestown. At least 30 feet long, the shallop accommodated a crew of 15 and could be rowed or sailed. During the past four centuries, boats of every sort have plied the James River, from early barges carrying tobacco to port for shipment to England, to Federal ironclad gunboats during the Civil War, to later steamships ferrying passengers, and today cargo ships, U.S. Navy vessels, and recreational boaters.

Virginia · United States