Page 154 [154]
HICKORY HILL
SHE plantation known as Hickory Hill, home of
CF ZC the late Williams Carter Wickham, Brigadier.
eA Kesey] General of Cavalry, C. 8. A., is situated in the
34
py County of Hanover, twenty miles north of Rich¬
A ba as ‘ : .
mond. It came into the possession ot the Carter
family the 2nd of March, 1734, and was long an
appendage to Shirley on the James.
The house was built and the garden begun in 1820, when
William Fanning Wickham, son of John Wickham, of Richmond,
and his wife, Ann Carter, of Shirley, made their home on her share
of the estate inherited from her father, Robert (after whom Gen¬
eral Lee was named), son of Charles, son of John, son of Robert
Carter, of Corotoman, known as the “‘King.’’ ‘[he house was
destroyed by fire in 1875 and the present dwelling then erected.
The grounds surrounding the house were laid out in 1820 on
broad and long lines by Mr. and Mrs. William F. Wickham.
The avenues of cedar trees, cedar hedges and boxwood hedges, as
originally planned, are still standing and have excited the admira¬
tion of many. The feature of the home is the old pleasaunce
with its tall, stately trees—its roses and violets, its arbors, avenues
and terraces—the emerald of its broad stretches of grass and its
matchless boxtrees now more than one hundred years old.
The pleasure garden is a rectangular plot of ground, three hun¬
dred and fifty-five feet by four hundred and forty feet, containing
approximately four acres, to which adjoins the vegetable garden
of approximately two acres. Its central glory is “the box-walk’’—
an avenue of the Sempervirens boxwood—the trees varying from
thirty to forty feet in height, extending a distance of three hundred
and seven feet in double line from the entrance gate and forming
a perfect arch above the fifteen-foot walkway. At every season,
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