In 1619, Captain William Powell obtained 550 acres of what would become Chippokes Plantation, and that same year the first Africans to inhabit Virginia were taken by ship to Point Comfort, the site of modern-day Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. Historians believe African people in Virginia were initially treated as indentured servants, working for a certain number of years before being freed, but over time the General Assembly reduced their freedoms law by law. By the late 1600s, slavery had become a legally regulated practice in Virginia and continued until the end of the Civil War. The little that is known about the enslaved people who worked, lived, and died at Chippokes comes from tax and census records; nothing is known of their lives, thoughts, or feelings beyond their names and generations of silence. Quarter Lane, the road connecting the River House and the Jones-Stewart Mansion, takes its name from the row of houses, or quarters, where enslaved African Americans lived during the 1800s. The surviving slave quarters at Chippokes were built by Albert Jones in the mid-1800s. After the Civil War, these buildings were used to house sharecropper families and later tenant farmers. An inventory of Lucy Ludwell Paradise's property at Chippokes taken in 1812 included the names of 8 men, 13 women, and 10 children.