Pine Slash

Upon Patrick Henry’s marriage to Sarah Shelton in 1754, he received as her dowry a 300-acre tract of land and six slaves at Pine Slash. Like many Virginians with small farms, Henry worked the fields with his slaves, but years of cultivation had exhausted much of the soil, and drought brought poor crops. In 1757 he marketed one hogshead of tobacco worth little more than £10. After the house at Pine Slash burned and destroyed most of the family’s possessions, Patrick and Sarah Henry and their two young children moved into a small cabin on the property, now known as the Honeymoon Cottage, and according to Shelton family tradition lived there about six months before moving to Hanover Tavern, owned by Sarah’s father. Henry opened a mercantile store in 1758, but it failed, and he closed it in 1760 soon after obtaining his license as an attorney. While practicing law, he continued to farm Pine Slash until selling the property in 1764. The Honeymoon Cottage is a rectangular 20-by-60-foot one-story building with three rooms, an attic, and a half cellar under the north end; its older two northernmost rooms date to the mid 18th century, and the third room was added about 1800. Pine Slash is the earliest and best vertical plank-walled construction building in the region, built as a permanent and relatively high-quality structure whose planks were weather boarded outside and finished inside with moldings to resemble more costly paneling, and it survives as a unique and valuable historic building. Patrick Henry later became a leading Virginia statesman in defense of Colonial America’s rights, the first elected governor of Virginia, a lawyer known for the Parsons’ Cause in 1763, an opponent of the Stamp Act in 1765, a central revolutionary orator remembered for “Give me liberty or give me death” in 1775, a drafter of Virginia’s 1776 Constitution and Declaration of Rights, a critic of the U.S. Constitution who influenced the Bill of Rights, and a public servant who spent 26 years in the Virginia legislature, served five terms as governor, fathered 17 children, and was buried at Red Hill Plantation after his death in 1799.

Virginia · United States