Stranica 154 [154]
OCR
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 RichA 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 General 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 admiration 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 hundred 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, 193]
