Oldal 286 [286]
BELLEVILLE
IORTH RIVER, an arm of Mobyjack Bay, is a lake¬
like sheet of water around whose shores clustered
the seats of “The Mighty” before the War Be¬
311 tween the States. Here were the estates of the
“A\ Taliaferros, the Tabbs, the Roys, the Dabneys, and
others; but, of them all, none had Colonial signif¬
cance except Belleville and Toddsbury—the homes of the Booths
and the Taliaferros—of the Todds and the Tabbs.
Belleville was remodeled by its latest owners, Mr. and
Mrs. Allmand Blow. A pillared portico now replaces the simple
Colonial entrance of the English cottage, said to have been built
in the seventeenth century by Thomas Booth, a member of a family
of great antiquity and distinction in the counties of Chester and
Lancaster, England. (See College Peerage.) In the old Booth
burying-ground, near the end of Ware Neck, in Gloucester County,
may be seen tombs with armorial bearings that date from an early
period of the Virginia Colony. The Booths intermarried with the
Throckmortons, the Cookes, the Carys, the Wythes, the Kendalls,
the Lees, the Pages, and the Armisteads, so were connected by
blood with nearly every family of note in what was called, then as
now, Tidewater Virginia.
Originally there was only a large vegetable garden laid off in
squares defined by box-hedges and flower-borders, like many of the
gardens of Colonial days.
Frances, the daughter of George Wythe Booth, married Warner
- Taliaferro, thus bringing the Belleville property into the possession
of the latter family. After her death, her husband married a
second time and brought to the old home, as a bride of sixteen,
Miss Leah Seddon. The second Mrs. Taliaferro, who became the
chatelaine of Belleville in 1825, was the daughter of Susan Alex¬
[175]