Surry County (Surry County)
In 1652, Surry County was formed from the portion of James City County south of the James River. For more than 350 years it has depended on an agricultural economy. The county has 19 sites listed on the National Register, including a landmark occupied in 1676 known as Bacon's Castle and Chippokes Plantation (now a state park). The Jamestown Ferry provides easy access to Virginia's Historic Triangle, featuring Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown, linked by the National Park Service's Colonial Parkway.
The county is known for farming, curing Virginia Hams, and harvesting lumber, notably Virginia pine.
During the times of the Virginia Colony, Surry County was formed in 1652 from a portion of James City County (one of the original 8 counties formed in 1634) south of the James River. It was named for the English county of Surrey. Surry County initially consisted of two parishes of the Church of England: Lawne's Creek and Southwark.
Nearby, in 1665, Arthur Allen built a Jacobean brick house. A decade later it became known as Bacon's Castle because it was occupied as a fort or "castle" during Bacon's Rebellion against the Royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley. (Nathaniel Bacon never lived at Bacon's Castle, but rather at Curles Neck Plantation in Henrico County, about 30 miles upriver on the James River's northern bank).
The first town, Cobham, was established in 1691 at the mouth of Gray's Creek, where it flows into the James River. Neighboring Sussex County was formed from the southwestern end of Surry County in 1754. After the American Revolutionary War, during which Tarleton's raiders looted the county, Surry County became part of the new Commonwealth of Virginia, one of the first 13 United States.
During the American Civil War, the Confederate Army included the Surry Light Artillery and the Surry Cavalry.
In 1873, a New Jersey timberman, David Steele, with financing from Baltimore interests, began a lumber business in Surry County but went bankrupt a decade later. Baltimore investors Waters and Company incorporated the Surry Lumber Company in 1885. In 1886 it incorporated the Surry, Sussex, and Southampton Railway, which delivered lumber to Scotland wharf on the James River (now the Jamestown Ferry terminal). The company (headquartered at Sedley, Virginia) and SS&S railroad grew, reaching their heyday around 1920. But the company did not replant after it cut the old-growth pine, and found further logging in the area difficult after 1925.
In 1927, it closed its mills in Dendron, Virginia, causing considerable economic distress in the county. The railway went bankrupt in 1930. Gray Lumber Company of Waverly, Virginia, which replanted its timber cuts, bought 15,000 acres from the Surry Lumber Company in 1941, and other companies soon bought the rest of the company's acreage.
The Temperance, Industrial and Collegiate Institute, a school for African Americans, was located in Surry County from 1892 to 1928. A Virginia State Historic Marker is located at the site of the former campus in Claremont, and a memorial to the school's founded, John Jefferson Smallwood, is located at the Abundant Life Church Cemetery in Spring Grove.
Map - Surry County (Surry County)
Map
Country - United_States
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Indigenous peoples have inhabited the Americas for thousands of years. Beginning in 1607, British colonization led to the establishment of the Thirteen Colonies in what is now the Eastern United States. They quarreled with the British Crown over taxation and political representation, leading to the American Revolution and proceeding Revolutionary War. The United States declared independence on July 4, 1776, becoming the first nation-state founded on Enlightenment principles of unalienable natural rights, consent of the governed, and liberal democracy. The country began expanding across North America, spanning the continent by 1848. Sectional division surrounding slavery in the Southern United States led to the secession of the Confederate States of America, which fought the remaining states of the Union during the American Civil War (1861–1865). With the Union's victory and preservation, slavery was abolished nationally by the Thirteenth Amendment.
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