Oldal 280 [280]
OCR
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 Norfolk; 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 century, 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 Sherwood 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. Elizabeth 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 Burgesses 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
