Verville

About this property

Verville is a historic plantation house located near Merry Point, Lancaster County, Virginia. It was built about 1742, and is a 1+1⁄2-story, brick Colonial-style dwelling. It has a single-pile, central-passage plan. The gambrel roof and all woodwork was changed to conform with Federal-style tastes in the late-18th or early-19th century. In 1668, Major Edward Dale purchased 500 acres (200 ha) of land including a hill that overlooked the confluence of the east and west branches of the Corrotoman River, and in 1674 gave it and one "negro" as a wedding present to his eldest daughter Katherine and her new husband, Capt. Thomas Carter (d. 1700). Carter may have been related to planter Col. John Carter, who came from the same village and who in 1654 financed and sold land to Thomas Carter, who had paid tithes on 4 servants in 1653 and gained additional land in 1657 and 1661 for paying for the transportation of other persons to the colony. Thomas Carter became a local justice of the peace in 1663 and after his marriage built a house on the property, which he called "Barford" after the parish in his family's ancestral home near Kempson in Hertfordshire, England. Katherine Dale Carter survived her husband by three years and bore seven sons. Her husband's will bequeathed her the negro Dick, and allocated his property mostly to his firstborn son Edward (who would die in 1743, and had two sons who survived him but never paid taxes on more than two tithables), then his next three sons: Thomas (who would die in 1733), John (who vanished from local records in 1703) and Henry (who was England when his father died and would himself die in 1743). Thomas became the most financially successful brother (perhaps in part because of his business relationship with distant kinsman Robert Carter I) and purchased 1,023 acres (414 ha) of land in other Northern Neck counties, and his middle brother James moved to Stafford County. Elizabeth Dale Carter's two daughters (Elizabeth and Katherine) and youngest sons Peter and Joseph had received enslaved children or other property from their grandfather Edward Dale. In 1742 Scots-Irish merchant James Gordon (1714–1768) began purchasing parcels of the Barford plantation, and nearby properties. He also founded the Presbyterian meetinghouse in Lancaster County by 1763, hosted visiting preachers including George Whitefield and Samuel Davies, and kept a diary later published by the College of William & Mary. In 1767, Gordon's daughter Mary married Rev. James Waddel in the mansion and the couple took up residence in the "Honeymoon Cottage" nearby. However, the pioneering Presbyterian Gordon died the following year, leaving a widow, several young children, several stores, 1,500 acres (610 ha) of land, 58 slaves and personal property worth more than 8000 pound sterling.

Location

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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