Corotoman, on a point above Virginia’s Rappahannock River, was a major seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plantation and the principal seat of the Carter family, especially Robert Carter I. Inhabited earlier by the Cuttatwomen people, it was settled by John Carter I in the 1650s and grew into the center of Robert Carter’s far-reaching estate. Around 1720 he began an elaborate Georgian mansion completed in 1725, but fire destroyed it in 1729 and it was never rebuilt by him. The site also witnessed the 1814 escape of 69 enslaved people to British ships. Archaeology since 1978 has revealed its foundations, artifacts, and colonial grandeur.