Stranica 280 [280]
EE ÓKO
THE TIDEWATER TRAIL
after the county was founded, came into the possession of Mr.
Robert Colgate Selden, and for the last eighty-odd years it has been
identified with the Selden name. Mr. Selden was a native of Nor¬
folk; but his wife was Miss Courtenay Brook, whose mother,
Elizabeth Lewis, had inherited Warner Hall, possibly the oldest
and the most celebrated of all the Gloucester homesteads. Warner
Hall, though the original house was burned in the nineteenth cen¬
tury, is still in the possession of a descendant of that original
Warner, who came to America in 1628, and, some years later,
established the estate that still bears his name. It was he who gave
to the State of Virginia and the American nation such distinguished
great-grandsons as George Washington and Robert E. Lee, not to
mention a score of able men and charming women of less historic
significance.
Mrs. Selden’s association with Warner Hall, as well as her close
relationship to most of the leading Gloucester families, probably
was the controlling factor in inducing her husband to buy the Sher¬
wood property, and to develop there the accessories of a famous
Virginia home. Young Selden and his bride were both evidently
endowed with a full measure of love for country life, which has
from the beginning been a characteristic of the people of their
native State. It is in the blood of every true Virginian. Their
forebears brought it with them from England, Scotland and Wales.
Sherwood, in its eighty and more years of present existence, has
known but three owners—the builder, his daughter, Mrs. Eliza¬
beth Lewis Dimmock, and his granddaughter, Mrs. Henry A.
Williams, the present owner who perpetuates in her Christian name
Elizabeth Warner, wife of the first John Lewis and daughter of the
second Augustine Warner, Speaker of the Virginia House of Bur¬
gesses in 1675-6-7 and 8.
Sherwood stands about a mile from the public highway that
runs eastward through the little peninsular made in Gloucester by
the Severn and Ware Rivers. Its back is to the Ware, an arm of
which makes a most attractive western boundary for the park,
[1711