Freedom Park preserves six hundred one acres of historic land that includes a seventeenth-century James City County homesite, an eighteenth-century graveyard, and America’s earliest known free black settlement, dating to 1803. Continental, French, and British troops camped and fought here and nearby during the Revolutionary War Battle of Spencer’s Ordinary in 1781. The land was once part of the Hot Water tract, owned in the nineteenth century by William Ludwell Lee, a descendant of the second wife of seventeenth-century Virginia Governor William Berkeley of nearby Green Spring. When Lee died in 1803, he bequeathed freedom to his slaves, gave them a tract of his land, and provided for them in his will, and the park’s name honors those who lived in this free black community. James City County purchased the original four hundred seventy-eight acres in 1995 after citizens approved a 1994 bond referendum, added the adjacent Hot Water/Cole tract in 1996, prepared a master plan in 1997, and opened the park in September 2002. Its planning and design drew on a community effort, including guidance from a volunteer Historical Advisory Team and descendants of the Hot Water/Cole community, while the park today also includes the Williamsburg Botanical Garden and many miles of mountain bike and multiuse trails.
