USA > Virginia > City of Hampton > City of Hampton > Early history of Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1607-1783 > Part 2
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14. John Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, II, 186; Mrs. Virginia Armistead Garber, The Armistead Family, 137. 15. J. Heffelfinger, Kecoughtan, 12.
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Kecoughtan twelve head of cattle that he later shipped with their increase to his island. His servants there included William Jeanes of Kecoughtan, and several old time Kecoughtan residents were to testify in his behalf when he made his last 16
indomitable attempt to recover his lost domain in 1677.
With the year 1629 the formal history of the county may be said to begin, for it was then (March 20, 1628/9) that the Governor and Council appointed the first court commission- ers for the county, thus beginning the system that was to last until after the Civil War. 17 Of the eight commissioners thus appointed, it was required that either Captain Thomas Purify, or Captain Edward Waters be present at every quorum of three; and the former was also appointed "commander of and for the plantations within the precincts of Elizabeth City lying and being on Southampton River and extending towards Fox-Hill, and the places thereabouts." His special task was to see that all orders of governor and council were obeyed locally.
The governor who created the county commissioners was the same Dr. John Pott who later fell into such dis- repute that after Governor Harvey's arrival he was jailed for cattle thieving until pardoned by the king. It is an irresistible temptation to record that one of the unfortunate governor's pecadillos had been stealing away to Kecoughtan 18 now and then with a Captain Whiteacres. The point is
16. Maryland Archives, V, 236.
17. Hening, Statutes at Large, I, 132.
18. John Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors. I, 252.
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not in Governor Pott's taste for low company and hard liquor, but that in 1630 Kecoughtan already offered sufficient enter- tainment to attract an easy going governor from the path of executive duty.
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III
THE COUNTY, 1630-1680
It is a curious fact that it is possible to form a clearer picture of the prehistoric residents of Elizabeth City County than of their white successors in the half century following 1630. This is partly because the Kecoughtans, being a strange people, were observed more acutely and re- ported with more illuminating detail than the new settlers, who were so much like other people in the British empire that their visitors took their manners and customs for granted. It is also because the destruction during the Civil War of all the local records and of the Virginia archives for this period has extinguished all but a meagre handful of dry bones of fact into which it would take a poet rather than a historian to breathe the breath of life.
That the community's development was continuous during this period there is no doubt whatsoever. £ In 1634 Elizabeth City became one of the eight original shires or counties into which the Colony was then divided, its ad- ministration being put into the hands of the court created in 1629, and of the sheriff. Their duties will be discussed
presently.
The court commissioners ordinarily met six times
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a year on the 18th of the month. In 1661/2 they incurred an implied rebuke from the House of Burgesses in "James City", who ordered them to rehear the case of Anne Price, accused of an undesignated offense. It was stipulated
1. Hening, Statutes at Large, I, 462; II, 70.
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that two of the commissioners, Major Hone and Lieutenant Colonel Worlich (the bonded servant who had risen to county notable) were to have no part in this new trial, their places 2 being taken by two justices from the adjacent counties. This cryptic notation, dimly suggestive of neighborhood feuds, is the one piece of concrete human detail that the court can furnish during what was probably the most interesting half century of its development.
The most striking event of the seventeenth century from the local standpoint, and the source of the county's chief pride, was the fact that here in 1635 was established America's first free school. Or at least if it was not established at that exact date, it was then made possible by 3 the will of Benjamin Symmes or Syms, February 12, 1634/5. All too little is known of this pioneer philanthropist.
About all that can be said is that he was born in 1590, was living in the Isle of Wight district across the James from Hampton 4 in 1623, and made his celebrated bequest twelve years later. This consisted of the income from 200 acres on the Poquoson River "with the milk and increase of eight milch cows for the maintenance of a learned honest man" who was to keep a free school for the children of Elizabeth City and Kecoughtan 5 from Mary's Mont to the Poquoson River. The bequest was confirmed and commended by an act of the General Assembly in
2. Hening, Statutes at Large, II, 157.
3. Armstrong, The Syms-Eaton School, 2.
4. Ibid.
5. P. I. Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia, I, 352.
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1643, and in 1647, according to Bruce, the schoolhouse had been built, the herd increased to forty, and the project was 6
flourishing.
Eloquent testimony to the success of the Syms school in the next few decades is found in the fact that twenty-four years later a similar and larger bequest was made the county by Thomas Eaton, "curugeon", onetime of London. It is prob- ably significant that it was in 1634, one year before Syms made his will, that Dr. Eaton came to the county to take up a patent on Back River; in the years that followed he probably took an active interest in the work of the "learned and honest man" who was instructing such of the children of the county as could get to his rather out-of-the-way school on the Poquoson River. Anyway in 1659 Thomas Eaton made his will, providing for the upkeep of a school 500 acres of land near the head of Back River, two slaves, livestock to the extent of twelve cows, two bulls, twenty hogs, and sundry farming and household utensils ranging from cheese presses to milk pails. This estate was to be administered by the commissioners, min- isters and church wardens of the county. Unlike Syms he tied a string to his gift by stipulating that his school was ex- 7 clusively for the poor of the county. Thus the institution created out of this bequest was known henceforth as the "Eaton Charity School", whereas the other usually went by the more democratic name of "Syms Free School. "
6. P. I. Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia, I, 352.
7. Armstrong, The Syms Eaton School, 8, 9. The original of this will is in the Court House.
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What little is known of the operation of these schools from 1690 on will be discussed later. It is enough to say here that the schools had a continuous existence, were merged into the more centrally located Hampton Academy in the nineteenth century, and the subtle influence of their founders' example was certainly responsible for the fact that Elizabeth City was to be one of the first counties in Virginia to establish a free public school system in the progressive era just before the Civil War. And it was with the help of the funds of the Hampton Academy, happily pre- served through the war, that the county was able to resume 8
public instruction in 1872. No notables that have ever lived in the county, George Wythe to President John Tyler, are more eminently worthy of a monument than the shadowy figures of Benjamin Syms and Thomas Eaton.
Another fact about the county that stands out from the scattered allusions in Hening's Statutes is that it was Old Point Comfort rather than Hampton that was the official port of the county before 1691. There at the fort lived the commander, whose duty it was to board all incoming ships, take a passenger list, and extract an oath of allegiance from everyone aboard before permitting the captain to proceed to Jamestown. 9 The fort itself was maintained by a levy on these ships made in 1632/3: "one barrel of gunpowder contain- ing 100 lbs., and ten shot for ordinance for every tunn of
8. Court Records, April 26, 1872.
9. Hening, Statutes at Large, I, 166.
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10 burden. " These "castle duties" were revised in 1662 and 11 increased by a head tax of sixpence on each passenger. A year earlier arrangements had been made for placing beacon about the shoals at the entrance of the James, and providing pilots for incoming ships to be picked up at Point Comfort.
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The Point lost in prestige in 1667, however, when the burgesses in voting to build five forts on the great rivers of Virginia, from the James to the Rappahannock, re- jected Old Point Comfort as a site. "To build a ffort at
Point Comfort would produce little to the ends proposed be- cause seated in a place where is almost an equall difficulty of procuring materials to erect it and of men to guard and defend it when built; and besides a ship or ships coming in with a ffaire wind and tide, opportunity being seldome omitted by any that goe on such designs, with the hazard of one or two shott have as much liberty to prey upon the ships 13 or country as if there were noe fort there." The fort for the lower James was build at Nansemund (now Nansemond), Eli- zabeth City County being made partly responsible for its support.
In the expeditions against the Indians which the Colony sent out now and then throughout the century, Eliza- beth City was called upon to furnish her quota. She was ordered to raise eight of the company of sixty rounded up
10. Hening, Statutes at Large, I, 192. 11. Ibid, II, 134.
12. Ibid, II, 35. 13. Ibid, II, 356-8.
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in 1646 for an expedition up the Rappahannock, and to provide them with "fixed guns, shott bags and swords." "Kichotan" 14 was made the rendezvous for this expedition on April 20.
In 1676 the county was required to furnish nineteen men for the Indian wars that resulted in Bacon's Rebellion$, 15
and in June, 1676 was ordered by Bacon's government to furnish twenty-six. The county's small proportion in an army of 1,000 indicates that it was still sparsely populated. All the neighboring counties had larger quotas; Warwick County thirty-four; York eighty; Lower Norfolk, fifty-four. 16
That Hampton played any part whatsoever in Bacon's Rebellion is improbable. Not one resident is mentioned in the accounting of hangings and pardonings made after the restoration of Governor Berkeley's government. Lyon G. Tyler, however, interprets a slander suit brought by Captain Henry Jenkins, Elizabeth City County justice in 1695 against Robert Taylor as indicating that Jenkins had been one of Bacon's fol- 17 lowers who had been included in the general pardon.
The widow of Nathaniel Bacon was also to live in Hampton for a time. She had become the wife of the sea cap- tain Thomas Jervise or Jarvis, who in 1680 purchased land on 18 the banks of the Hampton River from old William Claiborne. It was on some fifty acres of this land that the town of Hamp- ton was ordered built by act of Assembly in 1680.
14 Hening, Statutes at Large, I, 318, 319.
15. Ibid, II, 328.
16. Ibid, II, 344.
17. L. G. Tyler, "Old Kecoughtan" in William and Mary Quarter-
77 ly, IX, 2, 130. (October, 1900.)
18. Tyler, History of Hampton, 28.
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IV
THE CURTAIN RISES
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In 1689 the curtain rises. No longer dependent upon scraps of information in Hening's Statutesand references in contemporary narratives, we have the thing teself, some 370 pages of county court records roughly covering the years be- tween 1689 and 1700. This is the volume that was carried off by a damyankee in the War between the States, returned by his family and tenderly restored and preserved by the minis- trations of the D.A.R. It has suffered from mishandling; pages are missing and those that are preserved are not always in order or wholly legible. Nevertheless they are rich with the life of the old lost Hampton. By patient study and piecing together of fragments, we get a vivid glimpse of town and county at the close of the seventeenth century.
Hampton had already been recognized as a town by 1 act of Assembly in 1680, and was created a port in April, 2 1691. There were subsequent attempts on the part of the burgesses to call towns into being from the tobacco fields of 3 Virginia by legislative enactment. Some of these acts, with their talk of "benchers of the guild hall" irresistibly London connote an atmosphere of medieval Nurenburg with its cobbled streets and teeming craftsmen, but this effect ex- isted exclusively on paper. The burgesses assembled at Jamestown valiantly proclaimed at intervals, "Let there be towns", but no towns were. Virginia remained a land of
1. Hening, Statutes at Large, II, 472.
2. Ibid, III, 59.
3. Ibid, III, 405.
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broad scattered plantations except for an occasional promising village such as Jamestown itself, Norfolk and Hampton.
Hampton had had a tobacco warehouse for the inspect- 4 ing of the yearly produce of the county since 1633. It had at the time that the records open a curiously convivial sort
of courthouse; 5 there. It was a port where the governor had a collector of
Worlich Westwood was keeping an ordinary
customs on duty. 6 Yet even so, except when ships from England or the Barbados had just come to anchor in the river and let their sailors off for shore leave, or except for those occasions when the whole county came in on horseback to go to market and take in such entertainment as was offered by the con- current sessions of the court, it was a quiet town, still close to the backwoods. The fertile tobacco fields of the county were set about with wilderness; wolves' heads, some- times as many as eight at a time were being brought in for 7 bounty at the levies as late as 1699. Roads were few, and so nearly impassable that his excellency the governor was writing from Jamestown to lodge complaints against the con- 8 dition of the county highways. And the Indian past was still close. Not only was the name of the Kecoughtans who had once befriended John Smith still applied unofficial- ly to the county (spelled xiquotan just then) but indian servants and slaves were numbered among the enslaved Negroes
4. Hening, Statutes at Large, I, 211.
5. Court Records, 1694. (The month is indecipherable. )
6. Hening, Statutes at Large, III, 59.
7. Court Records, November 14, 1699.
8. Ibid, September 18, 1699.
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and bonded white servants.
Still a frontier town, it is not surprising that the records suggest that there was something a bit rakish about the Hampton of the day. It isn't merely that the justices had been enjoying the convenience of having an ordinary right there at the courthouse, but that there were for a time alto- gether too many ordinaries for a town so small. At least the governor was telling the justices so in 1699. In the same
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8 letter in which he had complained of the highways, he commanded the justices to enforce the law permitting only two ordinaries . to a town. So the justices revoked the licenses of everyone but William Hudson and William Smelt, and ordered several women to shut up their "tippling houses." How long this reform lasted it is impossible to say, but it is certain that this was the only period of record in pre-Revolutionary Hampton when the town didn't have at least a half a dozen ordinaries.
There is some question as to whether this town of too many "tippling houses" had even one church after the late 90's. In 1698 Walter Bayley was paid 400 pounds of tobacco at the county levy for pulling down the "old church 9 and setting up benches in ye courthouse." The entry is ambiguous, suggesting as it does a probably misleading con- nection between the pulling down of the church and the setting up of the benches; but possibly, as was true in later days, church services were held temporarily in the
Court Records, November 10, 1698.
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later courthouse, which was as natural a community center as a New England town hall. Heffelfinger suggests the possibility, in which he does not believe, that the parish was without a 10
church for some years. But one thing is certain of this early period, that whether there was a church in Hampton or not, the spirit of Puritanism was not then so rampant that people were being haled into court for not attending it. The earliest local record of court action on that particular offense is August 17, 1715.
But the chief cause of the town's rakishness was not the fact that it may have been unchurched awhile, or that it had too many ordinaries, but the fact that intermittently it was thronged with seadogs. That, indeed, was the undoubted reasons for the excessive number of ordinaries. Sailors get thirsty. Ships came up the river and into port from the most diverse places, all parts of the West Indies, old England, New England, New York. Ships got wrecked on the shoals near Old Point Comfort; there were even pirates about. The jus- tices were constantly being called to arbitrate in nautical matters, supervise the salvaging of wrecks, hear cases in- volving anchors and skiffs stolen from ships lying offshore, bonded servants lured from Hampton masters by skippers out- bound for the Indies, testimony about high winds in Jam- aica and founderings off Ireland.
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One can imagine that the Irish incident furnished
Jacob Heffelfinger, Kecoughtan, 17.
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subject for much argument over tankards of all in the ordin- aries. It's a pity that there's no way of listening in on it to get the whole truth, or at least the complete legend of the extraordinary affair. The story that one S. Davis, 11 indignantly brought to the ears of the justices in 1691, ran thus. The ketch Experience, property of Captain Lowry Jenkins of the county, had in the course of a voyage from Virginia to England become separated from the fleet with which she had left the James, and had become caught in a gale off the Irish coast. Hard pressed by wind and weather there was nothing to do but make for a nearby port, but this the skip- per, one John Goddard, declined to do because said port was Irish. "I'd lose everything before I'd land in Ireland, " said Skipper Goddard, as reported by Deponent Davis. And lose everything he did; for even after the ship grounded in County Cork he declined to give a hand at salvaging the goods which but for him might have been largely saved.
The county was treated to a shipwreck of its own in December, 1696, 12 when the William and Maryof New York, John Corbett, commander, ran into middle ground on the Horse Shoe off Old Point Comfort. The shoal is still known by that name, and is still a spot where the night boats to Baltimore and Washington pick their way warily. No lives were lost on this occasion, and much of the cargo was salvaged; the
11. 12. Court Records, September 5, 1691.
Ibid, December 31, 1696.
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justices appointed a committee of four, Captain Willis Wilson, Mr. Thomas Melton, Charles Jennings, Henry Royal, to view all the goods brought ashore.
At the close of the century occurred a nautical inci- dent trifling in itself but interesting in that it suggests that spirit of independence which was at a very distant date to break out into a revolution. In 1698 Peter Heyman, his majesty's collector and naval officer in the Lower James brought James Berryman, master of the London frigate Seventh 13
Son into court on the charge of having forged papers. The jury disagreed with his majesty's collector and pronounced the defendant not guilty. There is nothing very revolution- ary about that, and the matter have no special significance, but it is interesting in view of the fact that local officials in other colonies at that time were making it a point to dis- agree with custom's collectors who were trying to enforce the Navigation Acts.
This collector was the Peter Heyman who was killed April 28, 1700 when Governor Nicholson led an attack Esom Hampton on the pirate Guiland in Lynnhaven Bay. Three of 14 the pirates, according to Heffelfinger were hanged in Hampton. The unfortunate Heyman was buried in the Pembroke Churchyard in Hampton, where his grave may be seen to this day.
13. Court Records, May 18, 1698.
14. Jacob Heffelfinger, Kecoughtan, 20.
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Hampton at the moment was uneasy about pirates and invaders from the sea. In 1701 two watchmen were appointed "to keep a constant looke out to seaward by night and by day, and if they or any of them shall happen to see any ship upon the sea they shall diligently observe the courses and motions of the said shipp or vessell, and if -- " they -- "have any suspicions of their being enemyes they shall immediately give notice thereof to the next command officer of the 15 militia. "
Meanwhile port and county had been growing slowly but steadily. In 1693 the tithables numbered 3 65; in 1696 they were 389; and in 1698, 410. Included among the tithables were all Negro men and women, and all white men between the ages of sixteen and sixty; 16 thus the statistics on tithables
do not constitute a complete census. But it is a fair guess that the 410 tithables of 1698 representated a total popu- lation of at least 800. In any case newcomers, the F.F.V. 's of the future, were entering the county every year, buying up the half acre lots that had been set aside in "Hampton Towne", and getting themselves awarded generous land grants elsewhere in the county for importing their kinsmen and bondsmen into the Colony. Henry Royall, for instance, was granted 650 acres in 1695 for bringing in thirteen persons, 17 no less than four of whom where named Henry Royall. Three years later Hampton acquired her very first naturalized
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15. Hening, Statutes at Large, III, 208.
16. Ibid, I, 291.
17. Court Records, March 18, 1694/5.
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citizen. He was Bertram Servant, born in the kingdom of France, but for thirty-eight years a resident of Elizabeth City County. The naturalization was done most impressively by a proclamation from Governor Edmund Andros awarding him the same rights as "any of his majesty's naturall born sub- 18 jects have and injoy. "
And these people, the newly naturalizaed old timer, the newly arrived "first families" from overseas, were laying the foundations of a thriving, tenacious community, whose dramatic story was to be that of Virginia in miniature.
Court Records, March 9, 1697/8.
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COUNTY GOVERNMENT 1
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The government of pre-Revolutionary Elizabeth City County was not democratic, but it was a neighborly affair. Offhand it might not seem even that, since it was the royal governor, direct representative of the king in Virginia, who appointed all the important county officials. In practice, however, the governor very seldom imposed an official on the county from outside in the period that the records cover. He merely confirmed the recommendations of the eight county jus- tices as to who should fill vacancies in their own number, and chose a sheriff from the three names the justices yearly submitted to him. He sent along the commissions in June, the justices swore each other into office, and went along with the administration of county affairs.
But since it was left to the justices to nominate their successors and name each other in rotation for sheriff, county government was in effect a closed corporation. Common folk had no voice in it. Influential newcomers became jus- tices from time to time, but in general the management of Elizabeth City County affairs remained in the same families for generation after generation, and these governing families were inevitably the well-to-do and well born. They were
be people like the Carys and Celeyes, said to the descended from noble lineage, the Wythes, the Armisteads Jennings, Lowrys, Mallorys, Curles, Tabbs, many of them names that
1. All of my interpretations of the duties of county officials in this chapter have been carefully checked with P. A. Bruce's Institutional History of Virginia,
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are prominent in Hampton to this day.
The manifold duties performed by the county court in Colonial times are now distributed among a dozen departments in Elizabeth City County and the City of Hampton. Literally all local government was in their hands. The first and most involved of their duties was the hearing of civil and crim- inal court cases. It is remarkable how well they managed in view of the fact that up until 1746, when a young attorney namee George Wythe became a justice, none of them had formal legal training. But they were all actively reading law. The Body of Virginia Law and Mercer's Abridged were passed from hand to hand; and what they lacked in knowledge of clas- sic precedent they made up for by the application of plain horse sense and their intimate neighborly knowledge of com- munity affairs. What sort of cases they heard and what they did about them will be discussed in a later chapter.
A responsibility of no less importance was that of appointing all subordinate officials, constables, town patrols, surveyors, inspectors, and in keeping a general eye on them to see that they did their work competently. Allied with this duty was that of laying the county levy. This they accomplished simply by adding all the claims against the county plus the sheriff's ten per cent for col- 2
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