Rosewell Mansion featured matching east and west pavilions that housed interior stairways, and the east pavilion's window arrangement brought abundant light to the grand stairway, great hall, and southeast rooms on the first three floors. A door at the northeast corner opened into the great hall and was probably used by staff carrying meals from the kitchen on the east side, while a vaulted basement space there was likely a wine cellar. Because no plans survive and the design matches no popular 18th-century pattern book, Mann Page I may have based the house on mansions he saw in England while studying at Eton and Oxford in the early 1700s, with the building appearing closer to a late 17th-century London town mansion than to a contemporary country manor. Its imported marble, mahogany, and other materials were so expensive that large construction debts remained after Mann Page I died at age 39. The exterior was built so solidly that after a fire destroyed the interior in March 1916, the mansion stood for many years as a roofless shell. When Mann Page I died on January 16, 1730, before the house was ready for occupancy, his family was living in a nearby dwelling whose location is unknown. Although he died elsewhere, his body lay in state for several days in the unfinished great hall before burial in the family graveyard across the east lawn. After inheriting more than 7,000 acres in seven Virginia counties by age 21, he returned from England in 1711 and quickly rose in political and social prominence over the next two decades. Twice married to heiresses, he left seven children: a son and daughter by his first wife, Judith Wormeley, and five sons and a daughter by his second wife, Judith Carter, all under age 12; although all eight children were born on the Rosewell estate, none were born in the mansion. In his deathbed will, he gave his widow a lifetime interest in the estate, with the plantation to pass to his eldest son Ralph Wormeley Page, while about 70,000 acres elsewhere in Virginia were to be divided among his five other sons, with cash settlements to his daughters. Ralph, age 17, died only a few months later, and Rosewell then passed to 12-year-old Mann Page II. Mann Page II and his mother Judith Carter Page, aided financially by her father Robert "King" Carter and her three brothers, are credited with completing the mansion by the early 1740s, and Judith raised her children and stepdaughter as a single parent; her two youngest sons died in their teens, and her daughter died before age three, leaving three sons, Mann II, John, and Robert.

Photo: Brandon D Cross

Gloucester Courthouse, Virginia · USA