Stranica 279 [279]
OCR
SHERWOOD HEN Virginia was settled men were wont to follow where nature beckoned. Water still supplied society everywhere with its chief highways. Transportation by land was slow, tedious, difficult and expensive. Navigable streams were controlling factors in trade and commerce. A well-watered land was a populous and prosperous land. The many rivers that reach out of the inland sea, of which Virginia and Maryland are the mistresses, made for opulence, industry, and culture. The wealth and prominence of Gloucester County followed as a natural consequence the fact that it is bounded on the south by one river, on the north by another, and has two others wholly within its own borders. Yet the county is a small one in actual area. It is questionable whether there is another county in Virginia, or any other State in America, that has proprietary rights in four such fine rivers as are the York, Severn, Ware and North. And in addition the whole eastern boundary of Gloucester is washed by Mobjack Bay. ‘There is small wonder that the early settlers should have flocked to it in numbers; or that its scores of miles of bay and river front should be dotted with fine colonial residences. Some of these houses date back to the seventeenth century. Some did not attain their prominence till a hundred years later. Homes of striking elaborateness and beauty were still being established when the nineteenth century opened. Among these none is more noteworthy than Sherwood, which for many years has been among the most admired residences in Gloucester. A part of the present Sherwood house is of colonial construction, but it was not till the first three decades of the last century had elapsed that the old house attained its present spacious dimensions. At that time the property, which had known a variety of owners [170]
