Newport News was a small community in Warwick County until the late nineteenth century, becoming a town in 1880 and a city in 1896, while Warwick County, one of Virginia’s eight original shires formed in 1634, became the city of Warwick in 1952 and merged with Newport News in 1954. On this tract on Mulberry Island, early settler Matthew Jones held the land by the mid-seventeenth century, and his grandson Matthew Jones II of Isle of Wight County inherited it and built the house about 1725. After a cousin lived there, Scervant Jones inherited the estate, including livestock and slaves; he served as a county magistrate and tobacco inspector and died in 1773. His son Allen Jones, a Yorktown merchant, lived there during the American Revolution until his death in 1787. The property, known as Bourbon, later passed through several owners before Colonel Thomas Tabb acquired it in 1887 and sold it in 1893 to William R. Webb, who remodeled the house. In 1917, after Camp Eustis was established, the U.S. Army used Bourbon as a weather station and officers’ housing. Bourbon is the only known surviving earthfast structure in Virginia, and its design shows the transition from an early colonial manor house to a Georgian plantation mansion. The original house had exposed decorative framing, clustered chimneys at each end, and supporting timbers set in the ground, while bricks fired on Mulberry Island were used for Flemish bond brickwork above the water table and English bond below. Its hall-parlor plan placed a bedchamber in one room and a kitchen in the other. By 1730 it had been transformed into a T-shaped dwelling with a one-story gable roof, a central two-story enclosed porch, a rear lean-to, a new arched front door, and a projecting tower entrance, while interior changes turned the hall into a parlor and moved the service work of enslaved people to outbuildings including a separate kitchen. The house remained unchanged until Webb’s 1893 remodeling raised the main section to two stories, and a 1994 restoration repaired decades of neglect.
