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    Hanover County
    Hanover County
    Hanover County
    Ebook212 pages59 minutes

    Hanover County

    By Dale Paige Talley

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    About this ebook

    Colonization, political and religious reform, revolution and Civil War have left footprints on the varied landscape of Hanover County. Centrally located within the state, Hanovertown on the Pamunkey River missed being the capital of Virginia by a slim margin. It was at the Hanover Courthouse that Statesman Patrick Henry gave a voice to the spirit of the Revolutionary War. During the Civil War, Grant and Lee would journey through the county struggling for control of Richmond in some of the state's fiercest fighting. This volume celebrates these emblematic images of history, and also delves into the daily lives of those who have shaped Hanover County for three centuries.Through vintage photographs, diaries, and articles from the pages of the Herald Progress, the voice of Hanover since 1913, Images of America: Hanover County captures the days gone by.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateDec 8, 2004
    ISBN9781439612804
    Hanover County

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      Book preview

      Hanover County - Dale Paige Talley

      promise.

      INTRODUCTION

      When a friend of mine suggested I put together this visual history of Hanover County, I quickly asserted that I am no historian. As we pored over the images, we found ourselves so charmed by remembrance of things past that we realized others might be equally attracted to this incomplete excursion into history. I hope these images will inspire those who see them to look deeper into the history of this corner of the world.

      When the first English adventurers, led by Capt. John Smith, sailed up the York River to the Pamunkey around 1612, they encountered prosperous, if not entirely harmonious, Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan–speaking natives who had been here for more than 11,000 years. Culture shock and a relentless wave of white settlers soon overwhelmed the natives. We have only the melodious names like Totopotomoi and Mechumps, for whom branches of the Chickahominy and Pamunkey are named, to remember. Both men had been loyal to the English and died fighting in wars against Chief Powhatan.

      After the excruciating first settlements at Jamestown, the English came in waves. In the 1640s, when Civil War in England stripped those loyal to King Charles—the Cavaliers—of their land and prestige, they came to Virginia to replicate a life and government imperiled in their own country. They came to reassert the Church of England and its laws and to rebuild lost fortunes. Liberal land grants and headright laws allowed the earliest settlers to acquire vast tracts of land. Venture capital to build plantations came from English stockholders in the Virginia Company of London. Expatriate landowners oversaw huge plantations; indentured servants and blacks from Africa provided the muscle. A thriving tobacco economy was born. However, reliance on slave labor and English markets would bring issues no one could have foreseen in 1640. It is ironic that a society originally bent on the preservation of English law, custom, and trade would evolve to overthrow it

      Around 1654, between the Pamunkey and Chickahominy Rivers, New Kent County was established. The northern border was the North Anna River. To the south, the county ended at the Chickahominy. The western border was not established, as no one truly knew what lay beyond the unexplored Blue Ridge Mountains. Early government was run by the Church of England through the establishment of ecclesiastical units of government, or parishes. St. Peter’s Parish had encompassed all of what is today New Kent County. By 1704, the Church split the territory into two parishes, the easternmost called St. Peter’s and the rest St. Paul’s. It was along those lines that Hanover County was established in 1720. The northern and southern borders remained the same with the western border still undefined

      Travel within Virginia in those days was on rivers. Roads were practically non-existent. Large warehouses sprang up along the Pamunkey with access to plantations and ships bound for England. Newcastle and Hanovertown were established along what is today River Road close to Old Church. Hanovertown was the largest tobacco port in the New World in the mid-1600s. It missed becoming the state capital twice by a slim margin, but revolution and the river’s own ecology brought about the demise of the nascent towns.

      In pre-Revolutionary America, church and state were not separate entities. Religious reform enlivened by evangelical Methodists like George Whitfield incited reading houses to organize to consider a new church order. In 1747, Samuel Davies, a Presbyterian, was licensed to preach in Virginia. He came to Hanover County as the first non-Anglican preacher in Virginia, and he argued for the education of slaves. It is said that the classic spiritual Lord, I Want to Be a Christian in My Heart was written by Davies and sung at Polegreen Church, the home of his ministry until 1752. Patrick Henry is said to have credited Davies with teaching me what an orator should be. It is through the effort of Davies and others, and the forward thinking citizens of Hanover, that the struggle for religious freedom in America was begun. According to Dr. Robert Bluford, The first legislative body in the world to adopt a statute of religious liberty was Virginia in 1786.

      After the Revolution, Hanover experienced a time of prosperity. Many of the elegant mansions that dot the countryside were established during the period from 1790 to 1860. Hanover remained largely rural and struggled to develop an economy based not on tobacco but on the cultivation and milling of grains and the development of a timber industry. By the 1840s, the railroad was growing all over the world. In Central Virginia, the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad envisioned laying track and carrying passengers from Richmond to Aquia Harbor, where they could board company-owned steamships to travel to Washington. In 1845, Slash Cottage was built to provide a stopover point for travelers. Complete with mineral spring, ballroom, bowling alley, racetrack, billiard room, and other outstanding amenities, Slash Cottage was, by the 1860s, a thriving resort renamed Ashland after native son Henry Clay’s home in Kentucky. Ashland was here to stay. After the Civil War, Randolph-Macon College relocated from Mecklenburg County when inducements from the railroad made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

      The Civil War was devastating to Hanover County. Just 12 miles north of the capital of the Confederacy and on a straight line from Washington, it lay between the Federal armies and the prize of prizes—Richmond. It can be fairly said that Hanover County suffered some of the worst fighting, occupation, and privations of the subsequent depression than any area in the country during that conflict. Many families not only lost their fathers, sons, and brothers, but their land and their ability to make a living—some forever.

      By the turn of the century, however, the development of Ashland and Randolph-Macon College encouraged growth in the central region of the county. The eastern portion, or Lower Hanover, with its amazingly fertile soil, produced high quality produce for markets from Washington to

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