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Finding the Founding

Newport’s Cross

It was one of the first big lies the English settlers told the native Powhatan people. The cross planted on a small island on the afternoon of May 24, 1607, near the falls of the James by Captain Christopher Newport entered legend almost as soon as the one-armed commodore shoved it into the ground.

Newport told the wary Powhatan that it symbolized the forging of a bond between his people and theirs. Never mind that the wood planks bore the crude legend Jacobus Rex, 1607 for King James. Newport represented the leading edge of British expansion. The English on that afternoon were, as they perceived the situation, one step ahead of the cruel and hated papist Spanish.*

The night before, the adventurers were accorded hospitality through rituals of tobacco smoking, feasting and dance. The English expeditionary force, just a week after beginning construction of James Fort (Jamestown), met with the original residents in a hilltop village called Powhatan, perhaps on the site of today’s Tree Hill Farm, just across the Richmond limits in eastern Henrico. The site may have also been the birthplace of the region’s paramount chieftain, Powhatan. The place was administrated by Parahunt, one of Powhatan’s many sons.

During evening entertainment illuminated by flickering fires, the English prodded their hosts about what was upriver and the distance to the mountains. Parahunt wasn’t keen to answer and he avoided the subject. The river coursed through the territory of the often-hostile Monacan tribe, into a mountainous country called Quirank. Beyond it was what the English sought to interpret as a large body of water—the Indian Ocean. On May 24, 1607, after lunch provided by their hosts, Parahunt and a guide, Nauiraus, led Newport and company to the falls.

Christopher Newport Cross at Gamble’s Hill Park. The site, for decades a favorite place for downtown strolls, would be swapped out and the cross moved twice during the twentieth century. Courtesy of the Cook Collection, Valentine Richmond History Center.

The group’s historian, Gabriel Archer, recalled the river as full of huge rocks. He saw a large island about a mile away and alongside the river high hills which increase in height one above another as far as we saw. The dramatic site overlooking rocks and rapids was near the north end of the present Mayo’s or Fourteenth Street Bridge and occupied by the Southern Railway freight building. This is where First Market Bank headquarters and Morton’s Steakhouse are situated, near the Canal Walk’s turning basin.

The Powhatan tried dissuading the English from further travel. In A Relation of Discovery, attributed to Archer, the writer describes sitting upon the bank by the overfall, beholding the same while their native guide, Nauiraus, with Parahunt at his side, began describing the tedious travel to be faced if the explorers continued. The village of the Monacan, enemies of Parahunt, was a day and a half away. It seemed best not to rile the Monacan with strange white faces whom the Powhatan’s enemies would assume were sent by Parahunt. Besides, journeying to Quirank would exhaust them and they’d have trouble securing food for such a long journey.

The English were eager to push on. Newport, acting diplomat, heeded Parahunt’s advice. But he wanted to indicate the company’s westernmost advance. Newport placed the simple wood cross with the king’s name above and his below. Parahunt well enough understood the symbolism, and angered, he left. Newport explained to those who remained, through Nauiraus, that the cross meant union, not domination.

The Powhatan Rock is at the abandoned eighteenth-century seat of the Mayo family located on bluffs just outside Richmond, in Henrico County’s Varina District. Five generations of Mayos lived there from 1726 to 1865. Mayo tradition became Richmond folklore that credited the stone as marking Chief Powhatan’s burial site. It rests now upon the brow of Chimborazo Hill. This image was made in 1906, the year before the stone’s guest appearance at the Jamestown Exposition that commemorated the three hundredth anniversary of Virginia’s settlement. Courtesy of the Cook Collection, Valentine Richmond History Center.

The party then gave a shout of celebration while the Powhatan looked on. After this ceremony, the English found Parahunt, calmed him and the duped native prince gave them a kind farewell. As the explorers pulled away in their boat, both native and newcomer gave parting cries of friendship.

On June 10, 1907, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities dedicated a copper cross upon a pyramid of James River granite on Gamble’s Hill at the base of Fourth Street. At that time, it seemed to overlook the general place where Newport had placed his cross.

Judge David C. Richardson, a future Richmond mayor, on the warm, drizzly afternoon said, From the time when Jacob erected a pillar at Bethel down to the present day, it has been the custom of nations and peoples to mark the spots at which important events have occurred by some enduring memorial.

The Gamble’s Hill site became a tourist attraction and favorite promenading spot, for the view of the rapids, the industrial might of Tredegar Iron Works and the whimsical turreted and crenellated Pratt’s Castle, made of rolled sheet iron, scored and painted to resemble the stones upon which it sat.

In 1983, after a land swap with Ethyl Corporation, the memorial was removed to Shockoe behind the Martin Agency nearer the probable site. The peripatetic pile and cross were moved once again in 2003 to the bottom of Twelfth Street along the canal walk, even closer to the actual location.

Originally published 2003–07.

*And, in fact, all this happened somewhat later than is noted in most accounts because of the then-ten-day difference between the Old Style (Julian) calendar used in England until 1752, and the New Style (Gregorian) calendar used ever since. Not to make waves, this book uses the standard dates. Just thought you’d like to know.

You Say You Want a Revolution

British Come, Jefferson Flees

During the chilly late afternoon of January 5, 1781, Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson stood helpless at his vantage point in Manchester as he watched warehouses and workshops in Richmond burn. Traitorous General Benedict Arnold, who hadn’t received a satisfactory response to his demand for the surrender of the one-year-old capital of Virginia, was torching the town.

About a month before, on December 9, 1780, General George Washington himself had warned Jefferson that a fleet of British troopships had left New York City, bound southward. Jefferson first heard of twenty-seven vessels entering Chesapeake Bay on New Year’s Eve morning. He thought that the French might at last be coming to the bogged Revolution’s rescue. However, by dawn on Thursday, January 4, 1781, Jefferson understood that the British were coming to Richmond. He sent his wife and daughters away and oversaw the transportation of fifteen tons of gunpowder and military stores out of town.

Benedict Arnold had managed to land infantry, dragoons and light artillery at Westover Plantation, the ancestral estate of Richmond’s founding Byrd family, thirty miles from the capital, with nary a defensive shot fired. Arnold and his green-coated American Legion, made up of mercenaries and Continental army deserters, arrived in Richmond by 11:00 a.m. on January 5.

A mere two hundred hardscrabble Virginia militiamen assembled. Many of them weren’t armed. Colonel John Graves Simcoe of the Queen’s Rangers sent dismounted soldiers up Church Hill to disperse the militia. The Virginians managed to fire one ragged volley before scattering into the woods, pursued by the British.

The Governor’s House was a rented place near the southeast corner of today’s Capitol Square. When the British came to call they found Governor Jefferson not at home. Arnold’s men ransacked the house and cracked open his Madeira casks when the servants wouldn’t reveal where the governor had gone. Jefferson also would not respond to an ultimatum: Give me the tobacco stores, Arnold had declared in a letter, and I’ll not harm the town. The governor didn’t negotiate with turncoats.

Arnold then commenced to stealing the tobacco and ordered the selective burning of structures, though he passed by the Virginia General Assembly building, a makeshift commercial structure at Fourteenth and Cary Streets. Simcoe’s dragoons destroyed the Westham foundry. Many wartime Virginia documents were lost to fire, including Jefferson’s letters.

Arnold and Simcoe met that Friday evening at Gabriel Galt’s tavern on the northeast corner of Nineteenth and Main Streets (now an open-air performance space associated with a restaurant). Where Jefferson spent that terrible evening isn’t known; Manchester tradition maintains that he hid in a house owned by his relatives, possibly in the attic. Jefferson never said.

By noon that Saturday, Arnold had left the smoking city for Westover. Following him were numerous escaping slaves.

Through spring 1781, British Generals William Phillips and Lord Charles Cornwallis again attacked and burned buildings in Manchester and Richmond, causing Jefferson and the state legislature to refuge to Charlottesville in late May. Several days later, militiaman Captain Jack Jouett happened to be in a tavern outside Richmond when he glimpsed Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s raiders in pursuit of Jefferson. Jouett rode hell-for-leather to Charlottesville to alert the Virginia leadership. Jefferson was saved and Monticello somehow spared.

Jefferson stepped down as governor that summer. The French showed up and none too soon. The British surrendered at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. Quitting office so close to the end of the Revolution only heightened Jefferson’s humiliation over being forced to flee and having his courage impugned, writes biographer Willard Sterne Randall.

Jefferson was criticized by members of the General Assembly for pusillanimous conduct in fleeing the British invasion of Richmond. Hanover County state representatives George Nicholas and Patrick Henry questioned when Jefferson knew the British were coming and why he failed to take swift and decisive action to stop