USA > Virginia > City of Hampton > City of Hampton > Early history of Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1607-1783 > Part 1
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Starkey, Mari
Alcove 23 AM 1935 st C.I
Boston University College of Liberal Arts Library
THE GIFT OF
the Author
Alcore 23 378.744 30 AM 1935 St
53152
ACCOPRESS BINDER
No. BF 250-27
BOSTON UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL Thesis EARLY HISTORY OF ELIZABETH CITY COUNTY, VIRGINIA, 1607-1783 by Marion Starkey (B.S. Boston University, 1922) submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 1935
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I The Kecoughtans
The Indian village of Kecoughtan is discovered. 2 John Smith contemptuously received at Kecough- tan. 3
John Smith and the Kecoughtans become frends. 4
Christmas at Kecoughtan. 5
The Kecoughtans are dispossessed. 6
II "The First Plantation"
The name "Elizabeth City" explained. 7
Forts at Kecoughtan. 8
Growth of the settlement. 9
The Gookin familj comes and goes. 10
The Laydons and Colonel Claiborne. 11
The first county court appointed, 1629. 12
III The County, 1630-1680
Elizabeth City County one of the eight origin- al shires of Virginia. 14
The first free school in America, 1635. 15
A second free school, 1659. 16
Continuity of the Syms and Eaton schools. 17
The fort at Old Point Comfort. 18
The county's quota in Indian wars. 19
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IV The Curtain Rises
Hampton created a town and port. 20
Condition of the county in 1690. 21
Rakish character of the town. 22
Seafaring atmosphere of Hampton. 23
Shipwrecks of local inters. 24
The naval collector, a jury, and some pirates. 25
Growth of the county in the 1690's. 26
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County Government
County government not democratic.
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Duties of the justices. 29
Duties of the sheriff. 30
The county clerk. 31
Quarrels among the county officials. 32
The grand jury and the parish vestry. 33
The church wardens. 34
VI Presented at Court
A deserted wife of 1692. 35
Four wild children of 1694. 36
Puritan influence in the early eighteenth century. 37
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Bastardy and miscegenation. 38
A scandal of the 1720's. 39
Horse racing at Isaac Prilly's field. 41
Crime and the General Court. 42
Trials of Negro slaves. 43
The death penalty removed from theft. 44
Negro physicians accused of poisoning. 45
Prisons in Hampton. 46
VII Making a Living
Importance of tobacco. 48
The tobacco warehouse. 49
Mills of the county. 51
"Infant industries! 52
Trades and fishing. 53
VIII The Bondsmen
The Indentured Servants
Henry Irwin and his servants. 55
The supplanting of servant by slave. 56
Similarity between the status of servant and slave. 57
Penalties for "eloping". 58
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Rights of the servants.
Payment of servants. 2.
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The Slaves
Indians slaves and servants. 63
Rise of the value of the Negro in the eighteenth century. 64
Care of slaves. 65
Free Negroes. 66
IX Education
The meagre information about the Syms and Eaton schools.
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Administration of the free schools. 68
The education of orphans and apprentices. 59
Compulsory education. 71
Education of the gentry. 71
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Colonial Interiors
Henry Richass rides to town. 73
Piety of one John Smith 74
The household of the Perrins. 75
Joan Smythe's bedroom and kitchen. 76
John Smith's store. 77
Anthony Tucker's possessions. 78
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Samuel Parson's library. 79
Charles Jennings' far flung acres. 80
XI
Getting Around
The contours of the county. 81
Waterways and roadways. 82
Place names, road laws. 83
How the roads were kept up. 84
Construction of the Sawyer's Swamp Road. 85
County ferries. 86
The free ferry to Brook's Point. 87
Bridges. 88
XII Towards the Revolution
Growth in population, 1721-1768. 89
Empty houses in Hampton. 90
Improvements in the courthouse. 91
Hampton hogs restrained. 92
The pirate Blackbeard and a hurricane. 93
George Wythe's career 94
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XIII
The Revolution
The county's lively part in the Revolution. 96
The county court during the war. 97
Sentiment for the Revolution. 98
Hampton's aggression against Captain Squiers. 99
Squiers' bombardment of Hampton. 100
The town saved from destruction. 101
Skirmish at Big Bethel. 102
Hampton at headquarters of the Virginia Navy .. 103
Negro heroes of the war. 104
Land grants for veterans. 105
Hampton's decline as a port. 106
XIV
Conclusion 107
Bibliography 110ff
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FOREWORD ABOUT THE RECORDS
The records of Elizabeth City County, Virginia, on which this survey is primarily based, are a story in them- selves. How far back they originally went no one can ever say, since all of them prior to 1689 were lost in the Civil War. But Bishop William Meade, who wrote his Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia in 1859, quotes from records made in 1635, and there is no reason for supposing that they did not then go back all the way to the founding of the county court in 1629.
If the original extent of the records is a mystery, the question of how some of them survived the burning of Hampton by its own citizens August 7, 1861, is an even greater one. There are several romantic traditions to explain the miracle, one of them being to the effect that they were placed in a boat in the river during the fire, a legend also attached to the records of Yorktown. But I believe that the matter can be partly explained more prosaically.
First of all the post war records themselves indi- cate that the courthouse had not been completely burned in the destruction of the town. There was a courthouse in ex- istence when the county was reorganized in 1865, though it was in such a decrepit state that after an attempt to patch it up, the court moved into Grebel Hall until a new courthouse could be built.
That the records left in the courthouse had either
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been seized by the Federal authorities or turned over to them for safekeeping is proved by the court order of July 27, 1865, directing that General Miles be asked for "the records of the courthouse now in possession of the military authorities at Fortress Monroe. "
But either the records had been very casually transferred to the fort, or indifferently cared for after they got there, for it is known that at least one volume that survived all the other hazards was carried home as a souvenir by a Massachusetts soldier. This volume reappeared in Hampton quite recently, being shipped thither express collect by the veteran's family. A statement of how and where he came into possession of it might clear up much of the general mystery about the records, but unfortunately his name has been lost. What is important is that this volume, one of the most valuable of all, covering the years 1689 to 1700, is back in the vaults, stoutly rebound, its crumbling yellow pages protected with silk gauze, thanks to the local chapter of the D.A.R.
This odyssey explains the occasional gaps in the documents that are available today. There is one such gap in the court records between the years 1700 and 1715, and another most depressing hiatus between 1769 and 1784, just when the conflict between the Revolutionists and Loyalists must have made life in Hampton most worth watching.
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The surviving records are of two general types, the court order books, and the books of deeds and indentures. Sometimes the two are found in separate halves of one volume, but usually they are in separate volumes. The order book contains notes of court proceedings, civil and criminal, grand jury presentments, the laying of the county levy, pro- vision for the processioning of lands, and the commissioning of court officials. The deed books include wills, inven- tories, deeds, election polls, and various miscellany such as the recording of letters bearing on court cases, special reports and resolutions.
In referring to my sources in the documents, I have adopted the general practice of all writers of early not Virginia history of referring to page numbers, but to the date under which the record may be found. I have also fol- lowed the general practice in making a double notation of Old Style dates, writing what would be January 1, 1723, Old Style, as January 1, 1723/4.
I wish to record my heartfelt thanks to those people of Hampton whose courtesy and friendly interest made my preliminary research so delightful an exercise. I must specially mention the indefatigable help given me by Major E. Sclater Montague in gaining me access to every source that might be of use, that of county Clerk H. H. Holt and his subordinates; John Weymouth; Mr. W. T. Stauffer; and Miss Fanny Worsham.
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I THE KECOUGHTANS
There is a legend, an American version of the slaughter of the innocents, to account for the fact that the Indian village of Kecoughtan was so very small when it gave the white man his first cordial welcome to Virginia. A Pow- hatan, so runs the tale, had been warned by a medicine man that one day men would come from beyond the sea to dispossess him of his kingdom. To forestall this calamity, the chief fell upon the tribe of Kecoughtans, who, living on the seagirt tip of the Peninsula between the mouths of the James and the York, were the only men beyond the sea he could visualize, and all but exterminated them.
The facts of the case were probably much less pic- turesque, but as they aren't known, the legend will have to do. Certainly it is surprising that the most delightful spot in Tidewater Virginia, the bit of land where grass grows green in the winter when inland a score of miles all is deso- late, should in 1607 contain a village of only eighteen"houses" 1 of twigs and bark, and twenty fighting men. It should be added that these people lived then substantially as their populous successors in Kecoughtan are likely to live to the end of time, by growing corn in their pleasant fields, and by taking fish from the salt rivers.
It was the last day of an April so forward that the strawberries were already turning ripe when the red folk
1. John Smith, "A True Relation" in Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, Arber and Bradley, I, 9.
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at Kecoughtan became aware with apprehension and high excite- ment of three ships with sails standing offshore at Old Point Comfort. To be sure only five of their braves were there at the Point when certain white men put ashore in a shallop and tried to establish communication; but the village was on hand full force to welcome these odd, overdressed strangers, when their braves, having satisfied themselves as to their peace- able intentions, guided them around the bend of the river to Kecoughtan. 2
There the first families of Virginia, properly garbed in red and black paint, with their black hair on the unshaven side of their heads knotted up and stuck with feathers, waited to give the strangers a royal welcome. It
was the first welcome of any kind that the latter had had, except for a rude volley of arrows from an ambush of live oaks over on the Cape Henry side of the great bay. Probably they didn't know what to make of this primitive Virginian hospitality. The cries of greeting from their hosts, who bowed to the ground before them as was only etiquette, they later described as a "doleful noise". And after they, sit- ting on mats, had eaten the bread of maize, and had taken turns at drawing on the tobacco in the huge earthen pipe, they were more mystified than edified by the dance where- with their hosts entertained them for the next half hour, a dance distinguished by a rhythmic stamping of bare feet,
2. George Percy, "Plantation of the Southern Colony" in Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, Arber and Bradley, I, lxiii.
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a fantastic brandishing of painted arms, and a wolvish but not unmelodious howling.
But the kindly intentions were clear. Presently the guests distributed beads by way of souvenirs among their hosts, and sailed away up the broad James, leaving the village of Kecoughtan subject for mirth and converse for months to come. It was fall before Kecoughtan saw any more of the strange white men, except as their ships passed down the James homeward bound for the unimagined country beyond the Virginia Capes, but in the meantime they had been hearing stories about their shiftless settlement upstream from friends roundabout, and knew them now for a beggarly lot. Instead of settling down like honest red folk to live by fishing and the planting of corn, they had been roving about making trouble with other tribes, or just sitting about their rotting tents, picking quarrels with each other and dying off. It was plain that they were neither to be feared nor res- pected. So when one Captain John Smith came down with a few fellow adventurers to bargain for provision, they con- temptuously offered him stale bread and handfuls of beans, 3 and turned to more important matters.
But the Kecoughtans were essentially a friendly people. Their children ran down to the shore to take shy, inquisitive looks at the bearded John Smith ( theirs was a beardless race), mothers took time off from the grinding of maize or the spinning of threads from the silk grass to
3. John Smith in "A True Relation", Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, Arber and Bradley, 1, 9.
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say a kind word to the strangers and learn with delight that he had already picked up several kind words to say in return. when these came back with free gifts of bright beads and bits of copper, such royal bounty made the village wonder if it hadn't made a mistake. So it happened next morning that when the good captain, who had found it "cold comfort" offshore in a rainy night, made another attempt to trade his copper and hatchets for corn, they made him come in to one of their smoky houses to dine on venison, oysters and maize. John Smith went back to the idle and hungry folk at Jamestown with all the corn he could carry, about sixteen bushels.
While the captain remained in Virginia there was friendship between the white people at Jamestown and the red men at Kecoughtan, and the respect of the latter for the indomitable Smith grew enormous. In July of the following year he was brought in from an expedition up the Chesapeake 4 with his arm swollen from a nearly fatal injury. Another of his party had a bloody shin; the boat bristled with bows, arrows, swords, and carried a rich store of furs. Thus the canny Kecoughtans knew without being told that Captain Smith had led his men in bloody combat against their old enemies, the Masawomeekes. The inglorious truth was that the captain had been poisoned by a stingaree and his companion had barked his shin; but it seemed hardly manners to undeceive his good friends, and he didn't. The delighted Kecoughtans told their friends about it, and they told theirs, so that when on July
4. W. Russell and A. Todkill, "The First Supply in Virginia", Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, I, 114.
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21 Smith's barge, brave with painted streamers, came into port, the dreary idlers at Jamestown had heard all about the heroic encounter with the Masawomeekes.
Three days later Smith was back in town again, and stopped off three days waiting for favorable winds to get him around the Point into the Chesapeake again. The Kecoughtans had no doubt that he was off to avenge himself on his enemies and theirs, and treated him as such a hero deserved. They feasted him and danced for him, and Smith returned the compli- ments by firing off some rockets. This terrifying piece of wizardry convinced Kecoughtan once and for all that nothing 5 was beyond the might of Captain John Smith. There is just one more happy episode to record. That winter John Smith spent Christmas week with his "Salvages". Headed for the great Powhatan on an embassy, wind, rain and frost held him seven days in the village "where wee were never more merrie nor fedde on more plentie of good oysters, fish, flesh, wild foule and good bread; nor never had any better fires in England than in the drie warme smoke houses of Kecoughtan. " 6
He saw the new year in with his good friends ( though by his reckoning 1609 did not begin in January) and that year was to be his last in Virginia. It was also the last that the Kecoughtans were to enjoy their cornfields and their fishing. On July 6, 1610, one of Sir Thomas Gates' men, Humphrey Blunt, was killed by Indians at Nansemund while he
5. Ibid, 116.
6. Ibid, 121.
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was trying to recover a long boat blown over from Fort Alger- nourne at Old Point Comfort. What follows is puzzling. John Smith's own maps demonstrate that then as now Nansemund was over on the south shore of the James, all of fifteen or twenty miles from Kecoughtan; nor is there any evidence that the Kecoughtans and Nansemunds had been allied. Nevertheless Governor Gates revenged himself upon the Nansemunds by marching upon the Kecoughtans on July 9, and driving them out forever.
His soldiers picked up a little meagre spoil, a few baskets of wheat, pease, beans, tobacco, and some women's girdles so artfully woven of silk grass that one of the party, W. Strachey, thought one of them worth presenting to a 7
ladyship in England.
Such was the end of old Kecoughtan and the birth of the town of Hampton. What happened to these "first families of Virginia", thus roughly put out of their homes where they had given the Englishman such kindly hospitality, who took them in, what other fields they planted with corn will never be known. But they were less than human if they didn't have part in the massacre with which the red man was to attempt to seize back his lands one dozen years later.
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7. W. Strachey, quoted in Kecoughtan, by Jacob Heffelfinger, Appendix A.
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II
"THE FIRST PLANTATION'
The settlement of Hampton and the county of Elizabeth City gradually evolved on the site of the old Indian village in the next few decades. The name of the county is odd in that it contains no such place as "Elizabeth City", and strictly speaking never has. The explanation of this anomaly lies in the vague nature of the Colony's organization until its division into shires or counties in 1634. The name "Elizabeth City" was accepted by the burgesses in 1620 in 1 place of the old pagan name of Kecoughtan. Like Kecoughtan, however, this name was applied not so much to the settlement growing up on the banks of the Hampton River, an inlet at the mouth of the James, as to the whole territory roundabout. Bruce says that this territory was to have had a capital called Elizabeth City. 2
In the meantime, however, the only real settlement was being variously known as Kecoughtan, Southampton, or Hampton; the latter names had been adopted in honor of the Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare had dedicated "Venus 3 and Adonis", and who was then active in the London Company. Thus when town and county began to achieve definite politi- cal form, it was the county that was "Elizabeth City", and the town that was Hampton. The citified name of the county is not wholly inappropriate in that the county was to Vir- ginia what the town was to New England; and especially was this true of Elizabeth City County which until well after
1. J. Heffelfinger, Kecoughtan, 9.
2. P. I. Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia, II, 292. 3. John Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, 1, 133.
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the Civil War was to have no town except Hampton. For the entire Colonial period Hampton and its county had no separate political identity; the town was merely the natural center of the county.
After the destruction of the Indian village in 1610, Hampton for two or three years seems to have been little more than a military outpost and a plantation where corn was grown 4 for the improvident people at Jamestown. Fourt Algernourne, mentioned in the preceding chapter, had been built at Point Comfort in 1609. After the ousting of the Indians, Lord DelaWare had two more barricades, Fort Henry and Fort Charles, built on the Hampton River, intending them not only for strong- holds against the Indians, but as a species of inn for new- comers from England, "that the weariness of the sea may be 5
refreshed in this pleasing part of the Countree."
Events of the next few years are vague but pictur- esque. And Englishman was kidnapped by Indians from Fort Henry in 1611. When three years later he found his way back to Jamestown and begged John Rolphe to secure his liberty from King Powhatan, he had "both in complexion and habit" be- come "so like to a Salvage" that Rolphe knew him for an 6 Englishman only by his speech.
A queerer and on the whole perhaps a more dis- turbing event, since the possibility of a Spanish invasion was the favorite nightmare of the early Virginians, happened
4. "History of Virginia", edited by John Smith, in Travels and Works of John Smith, Arber and Bradley, II, 506.
5. Ibid, 503.
6. Ibid, 519.
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the same year when a mysterious Spanish caravel appeared at Old Point Comfort, and having obtained an English pilot, sailed away leaving three of its crew stranded. One of the latter was the spy Diego de Molina, who later reported to the Spanish ambassador at London that Fort Algernourne maintained a garrison of twenty-five and had four iron pieces, that the 7 others were without artillery and had fifteen soldiers apiece.
Gradually in these days the county was being "planted". When John Rolphe sailed for England with his young wife Poca- hontas in 1616, he reported that Kecoughtan contained twenty men and boys, without counting the women; 8 in fact the settle- ment had attained to almost exactly the same size as that of the Indians that it had supplanted. It had a church, where Mr. William Mease officiated as minister, and to this church in 1619 were sent three pieces of silver communion plate, still the prized possessions of St. John's Church. In 1619 the community was important enough to send two burgesses, Captain William Tucker and William Capp to the legislative assembly at 9 Jamestown , and self conscious enough to instruct them to get rid of the name of the ousted Kecoughtans and substitute something more English and Christian.
It might have been poetic justice had the straggling settlement been visited by the frightful massacre of 1622 whereby the Indians took the heart out of the colonists by reducing their population by one quarter; but Hampton was
7. Robert Arthur, Fort Monroe, 21.
8. J. Heffelfinger, Kecoughtan, 9.
9. Ibid.
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not touched. On the contrary, thanks to the massacre, "the first plantation", as Nathaniel Butler called it in his defense 10 of Virginia in 1623, had a rapid jump in population, as settlers came in from isolated plantations to the protection of the villages. It had a population of 349 by 1624, and of 360 a year later, though both figures include not only Eliza- beth City County proper, but also a settlement across Hampton 11
Roads at Sewell's Point, close to what is now Norfolk.
It is of interest to note who was who in the em- bryonic county of that time. Its most substantial citizen in the early part of its second decade was Master Daniel Gookin, who arrived in 1621 with fifty men of his own and ample pro- 12 vision and cattle to start a plantation at Newport News. Here he was established so comfortably at the time of the massacre of 1622 that he declined to obey orders to come into one of the strongholds on the grounds "that he thought himself sufficient against what could happen", and held his own without mishap. 13 His son was to be later driven out of the Colony to Boston, not by the Indians, but by his fellow Virginians, who disliked him as a Puritan. Thus the name of Gookin was 14 early lost to Hampton.
Another type of newcomer in 1622 was the eighteen
year old William Worlidge or Worlich. The interesting thing
10. John Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, I, 209.
11. J. Heffelfinger, Kecoughtan, 12.
12 "History of Virginia", edited by John Smith, in Works and Travels of John Smith, Arber and Bradley, II, 565.
13. Ibid, 584.
14. J. Esten Cooke, Virginia, 172.
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about him is that although he came as an indentured servant, he was to render such a good account of himself that by 1648 he was chosen to represent the county in the House of Bur- gesses. He was likewise to become an honored ancestor of some of the most respected county families. 14
Of sentimental interest is the fact that the John Laydons and their three daughters were in Hampton 1624, 1625, probably driven in by the massacre. They were humble folk, the Laydons; John had been a laborer with the first supply
in 1607; his wife had been the fourteen year old servant girl Anne Buras, when she came over with Mrs. Thomas Forest on the second supply; but their marriage had been the first wedding of English people in Jamestown, or for that matter in the new world. And their fifteen year old daughter Virginiax was, aside from her hapless namesake of the Roanoke Colony, the first English child born in America. 15
By far the most famous resident of Kecoughtan in that decade was William Claiborne, later Surveyor General and Secre- tary of the Colony, who was to precipitate Virginia's cele- brated feud with the Calverts of Maryland over the possession of his settlement on Kent Island in the Chesapeake. Kecoughtan saw quite a bit of Claiborne in the intervals of his exploring and trading expeditions, especially as the village at the mouth of the James was his supply base for Kent Island. When he left for England in 1629, he left with Thomas Purify of
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