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BELLEVILLE IORTH RIVER, an arm of Mobyjack Bay, is a lakelike sheet of water around whose shores clustered the seats of “The Mighty” before the War Be311 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 signifcance 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]
