Page:Southern Antiques - Burroughs - 1931.djvu/25



HE settlement of Virginia is a tale too often told to repeat. Whoever may have been the first to reach the shores, it is with the coming of Admiral Newport that history chiefly concerns itself, heading as he did, a company from London, aboard the Sarah Constant, Goodspeed, and Discovery. They set their stakes about fifty miles above the mouth of the river which they called the James, and set about speedily at Jamestown to meet the requirements of living, as best they might, and here achieved the first successful settlement of the white man on the North American continent, making of the spot one to which all Americans turn with instinctive reverence and faith—the spirit of the undertaking there embyronicembryonic [sic] of what the spirit of the nation was to be.

As the colony grew, the pioneers setting up homes pushed inland along the Virginia rivers through Tidewater, the York, the James, and the Rappahannock, later into Piedmont. On they moved into the mountains of the Blue Ridge and the far country beyond, with Williamsburg, Norfolk, and Alexandria the leading ports of the colony, and Richmond, Charlottesville, Staunton, and Winchester making a later appearance.

Settlement was first accomplished in Maryland with the arrival of Leonard Calvert in the Ark and the Dove, in which he came westward, as sent by his brother Cecilius Calvert (Lord Baltimore), with perhaps twenty gentlemen and two hundred working men and servants, largely English, to take possession of lands for which he held royal grant. In 1634 he sailed into the smooth waters of the Potomac, and pushed his way up the river to what is now Blackiston's Island, where he set up a cross at Saint Clements, later to fall back, however, seventeen miles down the Potomac near its mouth, to the site he chose for his capital; he called it Saint Mary's.

Much of the life of the colonist centered about the rivers. Along the James in Virginia, were scattered the homes of the planters, recalling the names of the Randolphs, the Byrds, the Carys, the Pages, too many to tell. William Randolph settled at Turkey Island, his descendants to scatter throughout the State along the river to Varina, to Tuckahoe, to Dungeness, and later, one of them along with Peter Jefferson to go to the mountain fastness of Albemarle, and open up the country where the Coles, the Rives, and others are found to this day. Williamsburg, settled in 1632, built itself rapidly and took a leading place in the life of the colony. It became the seat of the royal government, where William and Mary College was established, and where around its Palace Green and along Duke of Gloucester Street and elsewhere, homes of much excellence and finish were to arise, with furniture in keeping, to furnish fine background for the hospitalities they were to extend.

On the York, and on the Rappahannock at Corotoman, where lived King Carter, king of many lands; at Fredericksburg Rh