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Carter's Grove

Carter's Grove
  • Site of Wolstenholme Towne, a settlement founded ca.1620 by London Company of Virginia investors
  • Property purchased by Robert "King" Carter in 1709 to produce income for his daughter
  • House built by Carter Burwell, grandson to Robert Carter
  • Burwell family owned property until 1838
  • McCrea bought property in 1928
  • Rockefeller trust obtained property in 1964
  • Carter's Grove given to Colonial Williamsburg in 1969

Network of plantations located on banks of Tidewater rivers

18th-century Williamsburg was the hub in a network of plantations that ranged the banks of Tidewater's rivers – great farms like Carter's Grove eight miles southeast of the capital on the James River.

House built by Carter Burwell

Carter's Grove

Carter Burwell, whose first and last names combined the inheritance of two first families of Virginia, built the main house on 1,400 acres inherited from his grandfather, Robert "King" Carter of Corotoman in Lancaster County. Called "King" by his enemies for his haughtiness and by his friends for his wealth, at his death Robert Carter held 1,000 slaves, 300,000 acres, and £10,000. The will disposing of his possessions covered 53 sheets of paper.

When Robert Carter's eldest daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1688, married Nathaniel Burwell of Fairfield in Gloucester County in 1709, Carter bought the James River acreage and designated the income it produced for Elizabeth, but he retained ownership of the property.

By that time it seems that all traces of Wolstenholme Towne, a settlement founded on the tract by 1620 by London Company of Virginia investors, had vanished. Archaeologists began to unearth the town site in 1976, and part of it has been schematically reconstructed. Once the administrative center of Martin's Hundred plantation, Wolstenholme Towne was the Jamestown outpost hardest hit in the Uprising of 1622 – a Virginia-wide Indian uprising against the English settlers. The property was still known as Martin's Hundred – the name sometimes corrupted to "Merchant's Hundred" – when Robert Carter bought it.

Carter supervised the farm's operations; Elizabeth lived with her husband at her father-in-law's home north of the York River. Colonel William Byrd saw her there and wrote, "Mrs. Burwell is a very pretty, good humored woman." Widowed in 1721 with four minor children, she married Dr. George Nicholas of Williamsburg in April 1724 and died in 1734. By Robert Carter's will, the plantation passed to Elizabeth's son Carter Burwell, born October 8, 1716, when he turned 21. Carter's will also provided that "This estate in all times to come to be called and to go by the name of Carter's Grove."

Carter Burwell's farm grew foodstuffs instead of tobacco

Carter Burwell moved to the property about 1737, the year before he married Lucy Grymes of Brandon in Middlesex County. She bore nine children, the first, Nathaniel, arriving April 15, 1750. Her husband served in the House of Burgesses and ran a farm that produced foodstuffs instead of tobacco. He counted among its customers royal governors and Williamsburg innkeepers.

Soon after he moved there in 1737, Burwell began to build a two-and-one-half story, five-bay Georgian brick mansion between an earlier brick kitchen and brick office. Williamsburg bricklayer David Minitree was among the workmen and may be responsible for the rubbed brick around the doorways.

English artisan came from London to finish home's interior

Burwell brought artisan Richard Baylis, family and all, from London to do the interior woodwork. Baylis paneled the home in walnut and pine, providing its most distinctive features, particularly in the 28-foot-wide hall. A 20th-century admirer noted the grand stairway "in three runs with carved balusters and parquetry of light and dark wood on the half landings, the nail heads on the nosings covered by plugs of holly or box in three designs, the elliptical arch, the carved brackets, the Sienna marble mantled, fluted Ionic pilasters, and dentilled cornices."

Part of the residence appears to have been modeled after illustrations in William Salmon's "Palladio Londinensis," an architecture book Burwell bought at the Virginia Gazette in December 1751.

Carter Burwell only lived in house six months

The house was completed around November of 1755, but Burwell lived to enjoy it for just six months. He died in May 1756 at age 41. Burwell's son Nathaniel inherited the property when he came of age on April 15, 1771. He graduated the next year from the College of William and Mary, where he won a prize for his scholarship, and married Susannah Grymes.

By then the house was well known. Helen-Louise de Chastenay Maussion, a French traveler, visited in 1787, and wrote: "While on our journey, we stopped at a famous place called Carter Grove, near James River, one of the most elegant habitations in Virginia. It is really a beautiful house."

Susannah Burwell bore seven children, five of whom survived infancy, before she died in 1788. Her husband married widow Lucy Page Taylor in 1789 and fathered eight more offspring. They moved to Carter Hall in Clarke County, where he died in 1814.

Remained in Burwell family until 1838

Carter's Grove remained in the Burwell family until 1838, when it was sold to Thomas Wynne. For several years, Wynne operated a dock on the property at which riverboat passengers disembarked and rode to Williamsburg in Wynne's "hack."

Archibald and Mollie McCrea bought home that had fallen on disrepair

Carter's Grove

There were eight more owners before Archibald and Mollie McCrea of Lawrenceville, Virginia, bought the property from A. G. and Lucy M. Harwood on January 21, 1928. The home was in poor repair. One patriotic occupant had painted Baylis's paneling red, white, and blue. There were chickens in the basement and a hole in the hall ceiling.

McCrea, the son of the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was the chairman of the board of the Union Spring and Manufacturing Company of Pittsburgh. Mollie McCrea, a Petersburg, Virginia, belle, was a collateral descendant of the Burwells. The McCreas had the means and the motivation to set things aright.

Richmond architect and Williamsburg landscaper modernized the home and grounds

The McCreas employed Richmond architect W. Duncan Lee to raise the ridge of the main roof to create room for a full third floor with dormers, rebuild the chimney stacks above the level of the second floor, connect the brick office and brick kitchen to the main house with hyphens, and make modernizations. Much of the work was inspired by William Byrd's Westover. Garden architect Arthur Shurcliff of the Williamsburg restoration did the landscaping.

When they were done, Carter's Grove, standing more than 200 feet long in five sections beneath the shade of its enormous tulip poplars, was an example of architecture's Colonial Revival movement. It is in that form that the house is presented today. Many of the furnishings belonged to the McCreas, and, down to the telephones, the decor is appropriate to the 1930s.

Rockefeller family trust obtained property following death of Mollie McCrea

Obtained by the Rockefeller family's Sealantic Charitable Trust in 1964 after Mollie McCrea's death, Carter's Grove and 790 of its original acres became part of Colonial Williamsburg in 1969.

Reconstructed on the site is the slave quarter, an exhibition of mud-chinked log buildings much like those that most ordinary colonial Virginians, black and white, called home. The complex interprets the culture developed by African Americans on the site, which dates to the 18th century.

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Wolstenholme Towne

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